Five years ago, Carlos Fearn graduated from Washington University with a diploma and a large debt accrued from student loans. Memories of this financial hardship prompted him to create Student Loan Eliminators, a nonprofit organization that plans to help students across the country decrease or terminate their debt before they even graduate.
By volunteering for local charities and non-profit groups, students enrolled in Fearn’s program can repay their debts by doing projects like volunteering at soup kitchens and spending time with the elderly.
“People want to get something [more] out of their volunteer efforts,” Fearn said. “This way nonprofits and charities can benefit too.”
Students interested in the program must visit Fearn’s Web site, www.nostudentdebt.org, fill out an application and pay a $10 fee. Fearn says admission to the program will be selective and not all applicants will get in on their first application.
“We will score the applications accordingly,” Fearn said, “[but] the determinate will be the essay questions.”
Student Loan Eliminators will re-assess each application monthly for a year so that students will not have to apply more than once.
Once chosen, the program will match the participant with a nonprofit that best fits the volunteer’s abilities and interests.
“The time frame [for volunteering] will be determinant on the actual amount of your grant. Each individual will be done differently.” Fearn said.
Students can earn up to $5,000 toward eliminating their debt. After volunteering the hours they agreed upon, the students, with confirmation from their charity, will contact Student Loan Eliminators to receive their grants.
Fearn hopes to support close to 30,000 participants and contribute at least $50 million every year.
“It will be set up on a first come first serve basis,” he said, “It’s a national program. One of the things that we definitely want to do is make sure that each campus will get a minimum of one person.”
The program is largely financed by other nonprofits, donations and the registration fee. In the process, Fearn hopes to assist other non-profits and charities.
“We want to work with a lot of the smaller [places], not large ones like the Red Cross,” he said.
Fearn himself is no stranger to entrepreneurship. Before he graduated in 2000 with majors in economics and marketing, Fearn had already started his own eBay-like Web site through which he matched vendors with small businesses and created “Storage for Less,” a storage company for students’ belongings over the summer months.
“I’ve been doing my own business even before I left Washington University,” Fearn said. Of his new venture, Fearn noted, “A lot of people volunteer already and a lot of them know they have student loans.”
Although Fearn sees Student Loan Eliminators as a chance for students to volunteer their debt away, junior Hiroki Motokubota is worried that students would be volunteering for the wrong reasons. Motokubota currently spends four hours each week as a volunteer with the Pediatrics Emergency Medicine Research Associate Program, or PEMRAP, at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
“It’s good that they [Student Loan Eliminators] evaluate the debt first, but it still kind of sounds like a job,” Motokubota said. “It’s like a scholarship for volunteering. That’s cool because it increases volunteering, but the motivation is different.”
Sophomore Mark Bartholomew disagreed and said the program sounded like a good solution to student debt.
“If it’s something like once a week, I would have time for it,” he said. “It would be nice if students would still be involved with volunteering [even] after the program is done.”