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Job Seekers More Interested in Student Loan Benefits, Survey Says

By Allie Bidwell, Communications Staff

You can keep your paid vacation days, employers. Today's job seekers are more interested in student loan reimbursement benefits, according to a recent survey from Beyond, a job-searching website.

According to the survey of more than 5,000 job seekers, 89 percent said companies should offer student loan reimbursement as a part of their benefits packages. Additionally, 10 percent said student loan repayment was a more important benefit than paid vacation days. Health care and retirement programs remain ranked as the most important benefits, but student loan benefits are high on job seekers’ lists as national student loan debt continues to climb.

"401(k) matching doesn’t mean much if you are spending all of your money paying off student loan debt," said Joe Weinlick, senior vice president of marketing at Beyond, in a statement. "The hiring landscape is not as bleak as it was, and in a highly-competitive market, companies offering innovative benefits such as student loan reimbursement may have a leg up on the competition."

Of the thousands of job seekers who responded to Beyond’s survey, nearly one-third (29 percent) owe more than $35,000 in student loans, and 20 percent said having student loan debt impacts their ability to pay for other things.

Overall, about two-thirds of respondents (67 percent), said they would “absolutely” be more likely to accept a job offer that included student loan benefits. However, respondents varied in their answers depending on how the student loan benefit would be structured.

While more than half (58 percent) said receiving small increments in each paycheck for student loan repayment would be most enticing, just 29 percent would prefer having a negotiated annual amount, and 13 percent would prefer a lump sum payment “after a certain work anniversary,” the survey found.

Providing this type of benefit, Weinlick said, "could help retain Millennials, who have been famously less loyal and more likely to switch jobs than previous generations."

 

Publication Date: 2/8/2016


David S | 2/8/2016 11:45:35 AM

In defense of Millennials, they're not "famously less loyal"...they've seen their parents be dedicated, productive employees, only to be downsized so that the CEO could add a few million to his/her bonus or ship jobs overseas so they could pay pennies on the dollar. They're probably smarter than Boomers and Gen-X'ers in that regard.

I hope student loan benefits become a trend. 401k contributions from employers will probably become a distant memory in the relatively near future, the least they could do is keep their employees from having to work 3 jobs in order to pay down student loans.

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