MARCH 25 — Many Malaysian student have benefited from PTPTN loans, but in recent years, we have read of more and more cases of loan defaults among fresh graduates.
Thanks to a series of largely negative news, PTPTN no longer impresses on the public as an institution that benefits many a deserving student but a pool of bad debts.
The severity with which fresh graduates have defaulted on the repayment of their PTPTN loans has affected its normal functioning.
As of last year, some 611,956 borrowers have never made an attempt to repay their dues totaling RM5 billion.
PTPTN’s priority now is not to step up its effort to assist the deserving students but to go after defaulters for payment.
To achieve this end, PTPTN has come up with a number of measures such as barring the loan defaulters from traveling out of the country and downgrading their credit ratings to make them harder to secure bank loans in the future, among others.
With these measures in place, it is hoped that the issue of loan defaults will soon be effectively resolved.
Perhaps we should now take a look into how this problem has come about and what makes a young graduate a PTPTN defaulter.
Why many fresh graduates have chosen to default on their PTPTN repayment? The question of morality is not the key issue here but mismanagement is.
Humans are rational animals that have learned to adjust their actions in accordance with external stimulants and influences.
Because the authorities were not very proactive during the early years to chase the borrowers for payment, such a conduct has been indirectly condoned, creating a public impression that it doesn’t really matter whether to pay or not to pay.
And this has slowly influenced graduates who have had the intention of paying up, making the problem epidemic now.
While some might accuse the students of moral depravation and lack of gratitude, we have all learned that moral standards will not fix the problem but strictly enforced regulations and laws will.
PTPTN itself has to take the blame for the chronic problem of loan defaults because of poor management, creating a large batch of students who are reluctant to pay their dues.
Government departments should draw some valuable lessons from the PTPTN experience to tackle their respective problems from the root instead of allowing their lag management to spawn bigger problems before they decide to look into them seriously.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.
