With an increasing need for truck drivers in the U.S., one student lender sees an opportunity in helping students get commercial driving training.
Climb Credit, a student lending company that evaluates the return-on-investment of education programs before funding them, has a new focus on partnerships with commercial driver license (CDL) and heavy equipment training programs.
Climb’s focus on education value makes “job outlook” an important factor in their decision to pursue these partnerships, and once Climb became a member of the Commercial Vehicles Training Association (CVTA), they learned how strong the need is for new drivers in the workforce.
“Commercial drivers are in high demand as a result of a strong economy, increase in delivery services and US manufacturing, and a demographic shift resulting from commercial driver retirements,” said Don Lefeve, president of CVTA. “This demand presents a great opportunity for our members to meet our nation’s workforce needs and enable students to receive the quality training they need to become a commercial driver.”
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics support his assertions: truck driving jobs in the U.S. are projected to increase by 6% over the next 10 years. In addition to the positive job outlooks for these career paths, the training programs also have reasonable tuition prices for students — often under $10,000 — and can be completed in a relatively short time frame. This price tag compared to the median annual wage for truck drivers in 2017 — $42,4801 — leads Climb Credit to believe that its partner programs will enable them to offer manageable payments and short loan terms for students.
“From the beginning, our mission has been to expand access to quality education programs that deliver results to students. Through our research we continue to find career-focused programs that deliver great results at a reasonable price and need our funding to offer their education to more students,” said Zander Rafael, CEO of Climb. “If every education program provided a valuable return-on-investment like these, I doubt we’d be in such a deep student loan crisis.”
Because truck driving and heavy equipment programs often do not qualify for federal financial aid, these partnerships are positioned to help everyone involved. Schools will be able to offer better payment options to their students, and students will get the training they need to set out on a growing career path, in turn, be better able to pay back their loan.
