Students already are battling with ways to save their money to pay off college debts.

This has become a vicious cycle. If you want a career, you must go to college, but in order to go to college, most people must take out a loan. You have to pay off this loan, which you continue to do throughout the career you went to school for.

In some cases, people endure the struggle of paying off student loans until they are senior citizens — finally able to pay back their loans just in time to start worrying about their children’s education.

A college education used to be the payoff for career opportunities, or so every teacher stressed to students during their junior and senior years of high school.

But as the price of college becomes an even larger strain on our pocketbooks, should teachers re-evaluate their advice?

People should not have to choose between going to school to get an education or settling for a job that doesn’t require a degree.

But one also has to wonder where exactly the money that will be made from this doubling interest is headed.

A February report from the Congressional Budget Office, said the federal government makes 36 cents in profit on every student-loan dollar. This report estimates student loans will bring in $34 billion next year.

According to Terry Hartle, the senior vice president of the American Council on Education, with this new interest rate, the government will rake in more money from student loans than Ford Motor Co. makes on automobiles.

Students should be fully aware of where their money is going, but the government does not disclose this information often. If government profit from student loans really does amount to billions of dollars per year, the revenue should be used to ensure future students can afford an education.

Particularly now, with the economy as bad as it is, Congress must either find a way to justify raising interest rates on already-sky high tuition costs, or find a way to keep them down.

If not, current underclassmen will have to make sure they can afford to continue their schooling as planned, and incoming freshman might have to look at smaller, inexpensive colleges so they can afford to receive an education.

Larger schools, potentially even those in the Big Ten, might lose their students to smaller community colleges because of this cost increase — which ultimately might lower the larger schools’ funding as well.

Any way you look at this soon-to-be student loan interest rate increase, unless Congress acts, the only things that seem likely to come from it are a stronger hate for the government, reduced education rates and empty wallets.