The sisters of Sigma Lambda Upsilon (SLU) hosted their “I Am Not a Loan event,” where they discussed the financial loans college students borrow and the rules and regulations that come with them, last Wednesday in Kessel’s Butcher Suite.

SLU sisters Madeline Barrios and Amber Borrero presented an informative PowerPoint which included statistics about the amount of students who borrow loans and the amount of students who are still paying their debts back. American students are over $1.3 trillion in debt from loans.

To help students understand real-life scenarios of how people deal with loans, SLU members had exercises for the attendees. Students were handed a card with a given economic class: lower class, middle class, and upper-middle class. With this, was their income and monthly dues including mortgage, car payments, food expenditures, and miscellaneous bills.

Participants were then given three colleges their “children” were accepted to. The groups had to make their best financial decision based off of the hypothetical lifestyles they were given.

Some students had a different perspective on loans. They claimed that loans just accumulate with other bills that adults would normally have to pay for; like mortgage, car, and electric bills. They made the point that loans may seem like a lot to pay off at once, but students will never have to pay them in that way. They will be given the opportunity to pay them throughout time in small portions.

Often, students do not understand the terminology behind loans and just accept them when offered from financial aid, which can lead to loan debt. To avoid this, SLU informed the students who attended about common loan terms they might have been familiar with such as subsidized and unsubsidized loans.

Many attendees did not know that subsidized loan mean that the loan’s interest does not apply while in school, whereas, an unsubsidized loan does have interest while the student is in school.

“We believe that students don’t really know much about student loans or debt so we wanted to educate our peers about this topic. Iamnotaloan.org is an organization that pledges to take action to reduce student debt. We want students to know there is something you can do about this,” Borrero said.

SLU then encouraged the attendees to go out and vote in the upcoming presidential election. They stated how Donald Trump wants to fix the student debt problem in the country but has not yet stated a plan on how to do so. On the other hand, Hilary Clinton wants to implement a student loan forgiveness plan which allows students to lower their payments and refinance loans to current interest rates.