WASHINGTON — While income-based repayment systems for student loans have evidently worked in other countries, implementing such a system on a broad basis here in the United States could prove problematic because of the complex nature of the higher education landscape.
Those were some of the takeaways from a Capitol Hill briefing on Monday titled “Restructuring Student Loans: Lessons from Abroad.”
“I think it’s possible for us to modify our mortgage-based system in a way that works,” said Susan Dynarski, a professor of public policy, education and economics at the University of Michigan. 
When Jason Delisle, an education policy analyst who is soon to join the American Enterprise Institute, said that the United States already has an income-based repayment system through which one of every three dollars is being paid, Dynarski objected.
“I think it’s a copyright violation that we use what others do based on how we do it,” Dynarski said. “You have to call it something else,” she said, citing the fact that student loan borrowers have to apply for income-based repayment here in the United States, whereas in other countries featured on Monday’s panel it’s “automatic” and built into the system.
Delisle said that, during his time at the New America Foundation, “we looked at this pretty hard, and there are some serious hurdles” to switching to an income-based system. Those hurdles include the diverse sectors within higher education—from for-profits and publics and from two-year colleges to graduate school—as well as the complexity of the current tax system, Delisle and other speakers said.
“I don’t need software to pay my student loan,” Delisle said. “You need software to pay your taxes.”
