CHAIR of Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) Peter Bunting has urged the Students’ Loan Bureau (SLB) to use its loan repayment data to better guide students away from degree programmes that consistently leave graduates unable to service their loans.

He argued that the agency has a responsibility to steer prospective borrowers away from what he described as “obsolete degrees”.

The proposal emerged during the PAAC’s examination of the SLB, where lawmakers broadened their scrutiny of student financing to include whether some tertiary programmes are adequately preparing graduates for today’s labour market.

Bunting argued that the bureau is uniquely positioned to identify courses that repeatedly produce graduates who struggle to earn enough to repay their loans, and said it should use that information to better inform prospective borrowers before they commit to years of debt.

To illustrate his point, he referred to a recent Guardian article examining how universities in China are rapidly overhauling their curricula in response to changing labour market demands and growing concerns that some degree programmes no longer lead to sustainable employment.

Reading from the article, Bunting told the committee: “A growing number of China’s graduates holding freshly minted humanities, arts, and languages degrees find there is little demand for their skills. Meanwhile, the country’s universities, rapidly overhauling their curriculums in response to China’s race to become a global leader in a slew of high-tech industries, are culling obsolete degrees en masse,” he said.

Bunting said similar conversations are already taking place in Jamaica.

“I contacted the principal of The University of the West Indies, Mona, and he says they’re also overhauling their curriculums because there’s a lot of obsolete degrees,” he told the committee.

Drawing on his experience as Member of Parliament for Manchester Southern, Bunting said many graduates who visit his constituency office for assistance share a common characteristic — they pursued programmes that ultimately did not provide the earnings needed to comfortably service their student loans.

“When you look at the delinquencies or the student borrowers who approach me, and when you look at what they got their degree in, very often it is international relations, mass communications. There’s a consistent set of university degrees where the graduates end up in call centres which only need a secondary education, for example,” he said.

He argued that the issue disproportionately affects first-generation university students, particularly those from rural and low-income families, who often lack access to informed career guidance before selecting a programme of study.

He maintained that the bureau’s extensive repayment records should be viewed not merely as collection data, but as a valuable planning tool capable of helping future borrowers avoid programmes with consistently poor repayment outcomes.

Executive director of the Students’ Loan Bureau Nickeisha Walsh confirmed that the bureau already analyses repayment performance by institution and programme and has begun sharing those findings with tertiary institutions.

“At this moment, because of the availability, we do not discourage persons from pursuing their education. However, it is something that we are taking into consideration because we do have programmes with 97, 98, 80 per cent delinquency rate, and we are sharing those with the universities to show them the data,” Walsh explained.

She stressed that while those statistics are monitored internally, the bureau has not adopted a policy of discouraging students from pursuing particular programmes solely because of their repayment history.

Bunting, however, insisted that warning students is not the same as denying them access to financing.

“If you have a programme with a 97 [per cent] delinquency rate, you are doing that student a disservice by lending them. I mean, I think you have a duty to say this, if you know, at least warn them, you know, to say, look, you may want to reconsider or get some career counselling around this because we have found that 97 per cent of students who pursue this programme can’t make the repayment,” he suggested.

Walsh accepted the committee’s recommendation and indicated that the bureau would consider whether its data could play a greater role in counselling prospective borrowers.