Oh No, Betsy DeVos Forgot To Murder The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program :(
From only *mostly* dead, it's now forgiven loans for ONE MILLION students.
Even after a whole bunch of stupid lawsuits from Republican-run states that have blocked, for now at least, a number of Joe Biden’s efforts to reduce student debt, one debt forgiveness program, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness, is still going strong, and reached a huge milestone this week.
In a White House announcement, President Biden said that the Education Department has approved another $4.5 billion tranche of student debt forgiveness, wiping out loan balances for more than 60,000 public service workers. That brings the total number of people who’ve had their debt cancelled by PSLF to over a million. Here, have a good cry at this video of Biden “surprising” Rhode Island kindergarten teacher Kelly Beckford with the news that her balance of $46,000 has been forgiven. (We bet she at least suspected that was why she was invited to the White House.)
Not bad for a program that was passed by Congress in 2007, under George W. Bush, but which up until Biden took office had only erased the debt of 7,000 borrowers. Yes, in 13-some years. That was due to a number of problems that Biden directed Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to fix. (The easiest fix was “don’t be Betsy DeVos.”) From 7,000 to a million loans forgiven in less than four years is pretty good performance, we’d say!
The idea behind PSLF is simple enough: People who choose to go into teaching and a whole bunch of other public service jobs could, for the most part, be making more money in the private sector. So to attract and retain public servants, the program will forgive their remaining student loan balance after they’ve made 10 years of loan payments.
At least that’s how it was supposed to work. In reality, the program was plagued with “administrative problems,” some of them (under Betsy DeVos) completely intentional. The problems ranged from for-profit loan servicers losing track of borrowers’ payments or not getting the records to the Department of Education, to similar snafus in the Department itself under Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump.
To make matters worse, the first groups of borrowers in PSLF reached the 10-year threshold in 2017 under — you guessed it! — Trump Education Secretary DeVos. Her mismanagement made the department a chaos machine on the best days. Under DeVos, the department went out of its way to deny applications and to not count payments that people had made toward the forgiveness threshold. It was such a fucking mess that out of the first 28,000 applications for PSLF debt forgiveness, the department only approved 96 borrowers.
We’re going to repeat that: Under DeVos, out of the first 28,000 applications, they approved 96.
In 2019, the American Federation of Teachers sued DeVos and the Ed Department to make them honor the commitments under PSLF; that suit was only settled after Biden took office.
And while current Secretary Cardona was fixing the many glitches in the PSLF, the Education Department also fixed a bunch of other Income Driven Repayment programs that were designed to ease debt, but which had been so badly run that a 2021 report found that although 4.4 million Americans qualified for loan forgiveness in those programs, only 32 had actually seen their balances forgiven. That was separate from the PSLF mess.
Thanks to pissy lawsuits from red states claiming they’ll be harmed by fewer people being deep in debt, most of the administration’s debt forgiveness efforts, including the potentially revolutionary SAVE repayment plan, are now on hold while the lawsuits chug forward. But PSLF is the Little Loan Forgiveness Program That Could, and it will keep chugging right along unless Congress someday repeals it.
Hey, let’s not elect that Congress, or a president who might try to undermine debt relief, either deliberately or through DeVossian incompetence and neglect. We’re not, as they say, going back.
[White House / CNBC / WPRI / NPR]
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Said this before and I'll say this again.
I graduated college debt free, because I attended college under the GI Bill. This also meant I was older than the typical college student. I enrolled at age 24.
I paid for college with 4 years of my life.
Even though I'm not going to benefit from them, I support these debt forgiveness programs because it makes this country better.
Hey Donald, guess what? Vice President Harris got a 7.1 million viewers on Fox Newz yesterday. More than you ever got.
Sad.