The Biden administration announced Friday it would be automatically forgiving student debt for 804,000 federal borrowers as a result of fixes to income-driven repayment plans.
The borrowers — who will be notified of their relief in the coming days, the administration said — will have a total of $39 billion in debt forgiven just weeks before they were set to begin making payments again.
“For far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.
The new wave of relief brings the Biden administration’s amount of total student debt forgiven — which has included Public Service Loan Forgiveness, disability discharges and relief for defrauded students — up to more than $116.6 billion dollars.
Student debt relief advocates celebrated the administration’s announcement, and now call on officials to keep the momentum going, especially given last month’s defeat of Biden’s broader student debt forgiveness program in the Supreme Court.
“It is a huge victory that nearly a million borrowers who have been trapped in decades of never-ending payments will finally get the relief Congress intended,” Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center said in a statement.
“Our student loan system is riddled with structural incompetence, and vulnerable, low-income, and Black and Bbrown borrowers face the harshest effects. Now, our leaders need to finish the job.”
Here’s who should expect to see relief.
Borrowers with older loans finally see forgiveness
Under IDR plans, borrowers become eligible to have any remaining balances forgiven after 20 or 25 years of repayment, depending on the loan type and when it was taken out.
The regulation stipulates that borrowers make 240 or 300 monthly payments to qualify for forgiveness. But those payments were notoriously tracked inaccurately, the Department of…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply