Student gets into debt and doesn’t have the job prospects to pay it off. This is a very common sentence and appears to be a more common story with every passing day. If Kelli Space gets her way, this will become a thing of the past. Space doesn’t want students to rely solely on their income to pay off student loans but offers a crowdfunding platform to let recent grads trade community service in for dollars on their loans. This video from the Zero Bound website sums it up nicely.
One thing I like about this idea is that the money doesn’t appear to go directly to the student but to the loan company, removing the incentive to (directly) spend loan money on something else. However, I’m not sure this helps anyone pay down their student loans faster if they just make smaller payments than they would have without the program. Maybe the end benefit will be higher repayment rates from those whose budget wouldn’t let them repay or at least shifting repayment to now rather than deferred payments. Whatever the benefit, I love the thought process and the use of crowdfunding in this unconventional way.
Forbes has an interesting take on the project as well that quickly transitions into “traditional” crowdfunding.