WELLINGTON, New Zealand: Students of Medicine and Dentistry are not the ones to blame for the hundreds of millions of loans overdue under the Student Loan Scheme, New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce said on Monday. In its 2011 report, released in October, the Ministry of Education in Wellington found that there are over 2,600 students with piling debts of more than NZ$100,000 (US$81,300) each, with pilots and serial students being the worst payers.

Although in the group with the highest loans, medical and dental graduates are usually the ones who are able to pay back their loans quickly, Joyce commented.

He said that almost one million students have received money from the government since the implementation of the scheme in 1992. The total amount of debt currently exceeds NZ$600 million (US$488 million), almost 0.5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Joyce has announced initiatives to amend the scheme in order to reduce the amount of debt of groups who owe the ministry the most, especially those living overseas. The loan amount of borrowers there has increased by 27 per cent within the last 12 months . Legal action will be also taken against some borrowers living in Australia and the UK who have not made any effort to pay back their dues, he said.

With NZ$80,000 (US$65,000), dentistry tops the list of occupations with the highest average starting salaries, according to latest figures from Careers New Zealand, a government agency based in Wellington. This amount can almost double within five years of practice to NZ$150,000 (US$121,900).