Students provided with loans from the government's new programme, Income Contingent Loan (ICL), will have to shoulder interest rates based on standard inflation rates.

The student-loan fund manager Prempracha Supasamout yesterday emphasised that the ICL would not be interest-free after receiving an overwhelming response from students and parents interested in the new programme.

"We want to make things clear because we are afraid that some parents might have misunderstood the ICL conditions," he said.

Prempracha explained that ICL's accrued interest was rate based on standard inflation rates. And although ICL recipients are only required to repay the loans once they are earning more than Bt16,000 a month, interest on the loans will be calculated from the date the loans are taken out.

Prempracha said he hoped that parents who could afford their children's higher education would not encourage their children to take out an ICL, because it meant passing the burden on to their children.

"Only students who truly can't afford to pay for their education should apply for an ICL," he said.

The ICL is open to all students who are enrolling in higher education programmes, regardless of their family's financial status.

Prempracha estimated that there would be up to 700,000 higher education students enrolling in the upcoming academic year, and said that his office expected about 80 per cent of those students to apply for an ICL.

He said that ICL's have a ceiling rate of Bt60,000 a year for applicants studying social-sciences, Bt70,000 a year for applicants studying sciences, and Bt150,000 a year for applicants studying health-related sciences.

Prempracha called on private universities not to make financial demands on students who have yet to make final decisions about where they will continue their education, pending the results from the central-admissions system.

The results will be announced later this month due to delays in the admission process caused by the problems with the O-Net (Ordinary National Educational Test) and A-Net (Advanced National Educational Test) scores.

All three rounds of O-Net and A-Net score announcements have been mired by errors. This year marks the first time that the O-Net and A-Net scores are being used as main university-admissions criteria.

Bangkok University's president Thanu Kulachol said most private universities had already extended their application submissions deadlines to ease the pressure on students who want to wait and see whether they had achieved the results they needed to get into state universities.

"They can wait. So far, the students who have already applied to private universities must understand that the private universities must have to shoulder costs when processing their applications," Thanu said.

He also suggested that students carefully study the private universities' payment conditions before making the payment, to avoid problems.