Students, save all your pennies. Thanks to the U.S. House of Representatives, you may need them sooner than you previously thought.

A recent proposal in the House would eliminate the current six-month grace period on federal loans. In its wake, if instituted, the plan would force students to begin paying off their debts immediately following graduation.

In other words, education would only get more difficult to pay for.

Proponents, however, deny that won’t be the case. They claim that the change in rules would be no big deal. After all, they say, even though interest rates will rise 1 percent, interest dues would be no more than $9 per month.

What isn’t made strikingly clear, however, is the fact that these interest rates will be in addition to the minimum payment schedule. The average college graduate has approximately $7,000 in federal loans that are paid off in monthly increments.

But straight out of college, often without a job, how is a student expected to pay hundreds of dollars per month? As it is, many current students have great difficulty paying for their next meal. Should that hunger have to extend into immediate post-college life too?

To make matters worse, subsidies for graduate students would also be severely slashed. Further insisting on the fast-track McEducation, post-baccalaureate studies would become much harder to maintain. In essence, the monies needed to pay off undergraduate education could never be earned by the benefit of having a graduate degree – that very degree would be increasingly difficult, if not impossible to attain.

Far from the ideal that the new plan is “making education more efficient” and does “more for students with less,” education may be entering a new age of serious peril.

With the grace period in jeopardy, stick to buying generic, and find yourself yet another job. Soon enough, you may not have a choice.