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The Biden administration announced Thursday it would forgive an additional $4.5 billion in funding. student debt Serving more than 60,000 borrowers.
The latest round of relief comes as a result of the U.S. Department of Education repair The popular but once-troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
President Joe Biden, who has forgiven more education debt than any other president in U.S. history, said the number of borrowers benefiting from the program under his administration has now surpassed 1 million.
“Public service workers — teachers, nurses, firefighters and more — are the bedrock of our communities and our country,” Biden said in a statement. “But for too long, the administration has failed to deliver on its promises.”
The PSLF program, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, allows certain nonprofits and government employees to have their federal student loans canceled after 10 years. In 2013, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimated that one in four U.S. workers may be eligible.
However, the plan ran into problems. Often, borrowers think they are about to cancel their loan but discover at some point that they don’t meet technical requirements, such as loan type or repayment plan.
The U.S. Department of Education said that before Biden took office, only 7,000 people had received debt relief under PSLF. The rejection rate for the program is said to be as high as 98% in some years.
Under Biden, the U.S. Department of Education has loosened the program’s requirements and overhauled how it is administered.
Borrowers who qualify for this round of relief should hear about their canceled debt in the coming weeks. According to a rough estimate from higher education expert Mark Kantowitz, the average student loan balance forgiven under PSLF is about $70,000.
Thursday’s announcement comes in the final weeks of an extremely tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
In addition to working on the Biden administration’s student loan relief efforts, Harris has pledged to strengthen the PSLF program if she wins in November, with a focus on helping more black people become public school teachers.
Trump, by contrast, has called for the elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Initiative and expressed opposition to other Biden administration efforts to cancel education debt.
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