In our efforts to retain young people in Alaska, I keep wondering why we haven’t gone back to something that worked in the 1980s and ‘90s: encourage people to stay with student loan forgiveness.
As I remember it, student loan repayment rates were reduced by a percentage every year the person stayed in Alaska and worked after graduation.
I went away to school, came back and got a job in Alaska to repay my loan. What a great incentive for me and for the state to stay here. No regrets!
Thirty-six years later I’m still here. Things have changed in Alaska substantially; I still I love this state and I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
I would like to see some percentages and success rates — or not — of that program. How successful was it? What was the default rate? How many people in the program stayed in state, and for how long?
We need to work together on Alaska’s mass-exodus problem. Whether you visit restaurants that close more often because they don’t have enough workers or visit other services with clearly marginal workers that haven’t been removed because it’s so hard to find a replacement, mass exodus in Alaska impacts all of us.
— Janus Nauman Reyes
Anchorage
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