You may be surprised to hear what one in five college students are spending their left over loan money on. Its intended purpose is to be used towards housing and living expenses. A good guess may be alcohol, textbooks or a student ticket package….but who knew that college students are heavily using cryptocurrencies?
A recent survey by The Student Loan Report found that one in five (around 21%) college students are using some of their leftover loan money to dip their toes into virtual currencies like Bitcoin. Yes, that means students are using their student loan money to invest in cryptocurrency instead of putting it towards living expenses. How safe or smart is this tactic? JP Krahel, Asst. Professor of Accounting at Loyola University in Maryland, thinks this tactic is not necessarily a smart one.
“Given the unregulated market of cryptocurrency, given…what we’ve already seen, the volatility, and given that student loan debt is something you can’t get rid of in bankruptcy, I personally, without getting too hyperbolic here, I would not do that,” Krahel says.
