Canadian company allows students to use frequent flyer miles to pay tuition

If you are a college student or graduate in Canada, your frequent flyer miles can help you cut down on your student debt.

Partnering with Air Canada’s loyalty program Aeroplan, HigherEdPoints is allowing students to use their miles, as well as miles from their friends and families, to help offset their student loans and cover parts of their tuition.

The exchange rate is 35,000 Aeroplan miles for C$250 HigherEdPoints credit, which can then be applied to loans held by the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). OSAP joined as the participating partner in June.

The HigherEdPoints program is available to students at 70 colleges and universities. According to Bloomberg, some graduates have already successfully crowdsourced miles to cut down their debt.

According to HigherEdPoints founder Suzanne Tyson, since the company launched in late 2013 about C$125,000 worth of certificated miles have been redeemed.

Jeremy Murray, 22, was able to pay for a wheelchair-accessible dorm thanks to an anonymous gift of miles to the University of New Brunswick, where he is a junior. Charles Bernatchez, 26, was able to scrape together 210,000 miles, equivalent to C$1,500 in student loan payments. But Bernatchez, who graduated from the University of Alberta and works full time at a pension firm, told Bloomberg that he still owes more than C$40,000 in loans.

“I have a crap-ton of debt that I have to pay off,” he said.

Bernatchez accrues about 150,000 miles a year by using a Platinum American Express card.

Roughly 425,000 Canadian students a year are forced to borrow money in order to finance their education, according to the Canadian Federation of Students. Their average debt is now about C$28,000.

Tyson told Bloomberg that she hopes to expand HigherEdPoints to the US.

Such a program could work at US universities and colleges, where many students can pay their tuition via credit card. According to a survey of 300 US colleges and universities, 87% of them accept credit cards for some payments, especially those made online. The downside? Students are then charged a 2.62% convenience fee on top of their payments.

About 71% of households in debt who paid college tuition and other college-related costs like housing, food and transportation for themselves or their partner between February 2009 and February 2012 said those expenses contributed to their credit card debt, according to Demos.

With this program, credit card debt would have at least one upside.