Student loan debt has become a pressing national issue. Due to lack of competition in the student loan industry, interest rates are extremely high, so those wishing to seek higher education struggle to pay back students loans that they’ve been forced to take to pay for rising tuition costs.

Alternative methods of paying for college are a hot-button issue. One idea that’s being floated in roughly a dozen states is a system whereby students retroactively pay back their tuition costs without having to first accrue debt.

The “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back” scheme is a loan by another name. Students incur debt, without initially borrowing it, and then endeavor, through a ambiguously defined interest scheme tied to their income, to pay it back to the state.

Several problems quickly arise. For instance, who will front the initial bill for the first students participating in this program? Since this is a state-implemented program, presumably, taxpayers will be responsible for the value of a bond that will fund this.

Next, exactly how would the fiscal details of this work? There are two possible ways the principal debt could be repaid. First, the student would agree to pay back a percentage of his or her income over a set period of time, say 20 years. This model would not take into account at what point the principal was repaid, if at all. Or, students would pay back a percentage of their income for an indefinite amount of time, determined by how soon they could pay back the principal they borrowed.

In the case of the former, higher wage earners would be penalized for their success. For instance, an individual who made $30,000 a year, assuming they paid a 3 percent per year interest, would pay back $18,000 over 20 years. This amount is significantly lower than the average cost of four years of tuition.

Say a person makes a significantly higher salary — $200,000 annually. A 3 percent tax over 20 years would end in the individual paying $120,000 back. This is not only significantly more than a person making a lower wage, but also just barely meets the initial cost of four years of college.

Despite the fact that two people who attended the same college will have paid roughly the same amount in tuition, they will most likely end up repaying a disparate amount for the same education. This is hardly fair.

And, in both cases, the principal is barely repaid. So, who ends up paying the difference? Presumably, the taxpayers who had to foot the bill for the initial bond will also be responsible for this.

This system is ambitious, but rubbish. On a fundamental level, the fiscal policies that underlie it are flawed. It is hardly innovative. Essentially, it’s reverse Social Security. A pool, from which participants draw, exists. Later, they pay back into it. And we’ve seen how well Social Security has worked. This, which does not even have the initial funding of Social Security, cannot hope to be successful.

All this does is shift the primary debt-holders. In the current system, individuals are on the hook for money they chose to borrow. Under this system, taxpayers would be forced to foot the bill for state universities.