In an effort to have more students accessing the Students' Loan Bureau (SLB), the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, is negotiating with the Government to restructure the bureau.

Professor Gordon Shirley, principal of the UWI, made the disclosure on Monday while addressing the Third Biennial Jamaican Diaspora Conference, held at the Jamaica Conference Centre, downtown Kingston.

Shirley said some of the areas which were being examined were longer repayment periods with increased moratoriums and loans for non-tuition expenses.

10 years to repay

Currently, students are given 10 years to repay their loans, including the three or four years that they study. The moratorium period is six months.

Shirley told members of the diaspora that there has been an increased enrolment at UWI over the past years.

He noted the population has increased from 12,000 in 2002 to more than 15,000 currently. Some 2,600 students graduated from the institution in 2007.

He also revealed that there was an increasing percentage of students from the poorer and lower middle-class strata, noting that there has been a decline in persons from the upper middle class.

"That's a good thing because education is all about development. But that places certain important challenges on the education system," Shirley said.

In his remarks, Andrew Holness, minister of education, confirmed there would be a reorganisation of the SLB "to treat education as a lifetime asset".

A lifelong investment

He noted that education was a lifelong investment and, therefore, it should be amortised over a longer period of time and treated as an income contingent collateral instead of asking students to depend on the collateral of their parents to access the loan.

"All of those will make the student loan more accessible and more favourable for the students going in to university," Holness said. He added that the pool of funds available to the bureau would have to be increased. A timeline was, however, not given for the restructuring of the SLB.

The Jamaica Labour Party, in its manifesto published last year, said it would extend the loan repayment period of the SLB to 15 years and increase the moratorium to one year after students graduate if it were to form the government.