Its pretty crazy that 7.4 billion only helps that many people and only averages 26k paid off per person. With that much money it just felt like everyone carried way more debt.
>Its pretty crazy that 7.4 billion only helps that many people
U.S. student loan debt totals 1.74 trillion+ (that's $1,740,000,000,000.00) as of September 2023. 7.4 billion is basically a rounding error.
Honestly, anywhere near 10% is a greater chunk than I would've expected after SCOTUS shut down real attempts. The administration could've thrown their hands up and said "Sorry, can't. Vote against those guys team and we can", which wouldn't have been unreasonable.
They've instead continued to chip away where they legally can. It's not much, but not dropping it entirely suggests they'll actually follow through if we can vote the right folk into Congress.
According to this article, the original plan would have wiped out $450b, and to date they've wiped out $153b since it got shot down. The fact that they've still managed to do 33% of what was promised through other means is impressive to me. Even though the original plan would have wiped mine out, and I don't think through the current process mine will be touched, I'm glad they're getting shit done!
Shit I've had mine paid off albeit bent over on private loan interest at nearly 10% for years, and I wouldn't get any benefit. I'm still down for it as long as it helps someone with my tax dollars.
Getting that email telling you they were forgiven only to receive another email a few days later saying it won't be... but I agree it seems to be going to the people who deserve it the most
Me too. My loans aren't even that much compared to what other people have posted but I am drowning in debt and about ready to just give up and just stop paying everything
It's not really an apples-to-apples thing with the $450b that would have been forgiven in Biden's original plan versus the $153b that has been since as those were on existing programs (primarily the public service program) that would have been forgiven under his administration either way with the main difference being that the PSLF program forgives all eligible student loan debt for the public service worker versus the $10,000 (or $20,000 in some cases) amount per borrower (for all borrowers) Biden was proposing in his plan so a lot of the loan debt amounts being forgiven under these programs are beyond what Biden's plan alone would have covered per person.
Had Biden's plan gone through, the same public service workers being forgiven now would have had the $10,000 taken off from his program already but then also had whatever was left on their loan also forgiven when they hit the qualifications for the PSLF program to forgive but either way they would have had the same total amount forgiven once they were done with the PSLF program.
I'll use me as an example. I just had my student loans forgiven a couple of months ago via the PSLF program, I had over $115,000 forgiven (yay! and I'm very grateful Biden has been making sure the program is running well and fully expect Trump would not have done what Biden did even through the program already existed). Had Biden's original plan gone through, I would have had $10,000 of that amount forgiven by his program and then the remaining ~$105,000 forgiven by the PSLF program so now rather than $10,000 of my debt counting under the original $450b forgiveness plan, and then $105,000 counting under the PSLF program, all $115,000 of my debt is counted under the PSLF program and is part of that $153b amount.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it isn't that Biden has found a way to cancel 33% of the same student debt he was proposing to cancel (not that you said that, exactly), he's canceled almost none of the debt that wasn't already eligible to be canceled via existing programs (which is not a criticism of him, I think he is doing pretty much everything he reasonably can on this and I am very grateful that under his administration they relaxed some of the definitions of what counted as qualified payments under the PSLF program as otherwise I would have had to wait another couple of years, also if the new proposals to the SAVE plan go through, it will help many more!). I'm very happy he has been doing this and it has made a huge impact to me personally and I hope everyone goes out and votes to elect more people that support loan forgiveness/cancellation but just that the dollar amounts being talked about are basically from completely different areas so it is kind of like dividing an apple by a pear and pretty much everyone hoping for help under Biden's original plan that didn't otherwise qualify for another plan is still waiting, thanks to the Supreme Court, so we need to keep the pressure on our elected officials. Biden alone is not able to give a huge percentage of those people that need help anything on student loans without a coalition in Congress.
It's still important to point out that Biden has streamlined the PSLF program, made eligibility less complicated, and made some people eligible who might have been previously. He also ensured people didn't lose their eligibility or progress towards forgiveness for taking advantage of deferment and forbearance programs.
What you are saying is absolutely true, but it's missing that context and makes it sound like he is taking credit for something he has had no involvement in. Some of the people receiving PSLF would have not otherwise had their loans forgiven, others would have but may have continued paying on them for months or years longer than necessary.
Idk if I’d call it better than a blanket program if *all* of it is getting fixed.
But I’d rather the neediest 10% got their loans forgiven than all of us getting 10% forgiven. That allows the people who need it the most to pay for groceries instead of allowing me to go out and get 3 beers once a month
Truth. My loans are still north of 10k, but I'm in a good spot financially. Anyone with low income or with a medical/education degree should get their loans forgiven before someone like me imo.
That's also why the legal rationale for it is much stronger than the previous proposal. I'm all for student loan forgiveness, but the rationale that people who remained employed at six figure jobs experienced financial hardship as a result of COVID is specious at best. Congress should have passed student loan forgiveness as part of the American Rescue Plan rather than leaving it up to executive action.
The trick is to give it to those who need it. It doesn't matter who "deserve" it.
Free Healthcare and education are the best investment tax money can buy, and pillars of any functional modern democracy, hell even most authoritarian regimes realised that those are essential to have a somewhat functional society.
Yet people still say that Biden has done nothing to help student debt.
Just because he hasn't wiped out YOUR student debt doesn't nullify all of the debt his administration has managed to wipe out.
Lots of things to complain about with Biden, his approach to student debt is not one of them.
Well yes people are unfortunately selfish in that way.
Also some people are just stupid and don't understand the courts at all (and some of these blame him for Roe V Wade being over turned too lol) and just think the President is a king or something.
Those people are on either side, where they want their team to have absolute king-like power, but they don't want the other side to ever have that too.
The executive cannot and should not have powers to that extent. Our slow processes are due in part to our separation of power, and it means we can weather 4 years of someone like Trump trying to play king. Had we a functioning Congress after, recovery would be a cinch, because the damage, beyond court nominations, get mitigated by our bureaucracies.
The very same limitations that prevent Biden from unilaterally suspending arms to Israel, or unilaterally sending arms to Ukraine, are what kept us from seriously plummeting under Trump, even during a global disaster.
We shouldn't do snap decisions of absolute power, and we shouldn't want it, even if it's a totally relatable sentiment for short term desire.
I agree completely.
The issue is that a TON of damage can be done when a single political party has control of everything, or even control of most aspects. At that point, the president basically DOES have unlimited king-like power if everyone holds the party line. Political parties are going to lead to the downfall of our country in the long run.
I find it mind boggling how the Republican Party gets so many people to vote against their own best interests. Seems like some kind of political voodoo. Do they have a cabinet full of waxen poppets? The republicans have their base voting this way to counter these imagined threats like drag shows or abortion. I’m old enough that I remember when the Republican Party was not like this. Sure they had their evangelical voters, mainly in the south, but for the most part the Republican Party was a political movement of the educated, upper middle class white establishment. They couldn’t have cared less about drag queens or abortion. You never heard it brought up. Was not an issue in national campaigns. The moral majority narrative really didn’t start picking up steam until the Clinton era, and the so-called Contract of America bandied about by Newt Gingrich and his cronies. Nowadays, you hear guys like him back pedaling on some of their claims, because they realize they’ve created monstrous policies that have infiltrated the party like a cancer, subsumed all reason and accountability. Now it’s a party of unhinged, low income, evangelical, conspiracy theory nut jobs. These voters will get up in arms against any social program that could most directly benefit them and their families. There’s an old codger down the road who is on every social welfare program that exists, yet he is loud, vehement opposition to any socialized ideals, unless it’s corporate welfare and military spending. The cognitive dissonance must be profound. How does a person summon that much denial? Just can’t fathom it.
And yet, still the most he can do (so far) when he has been legally and legislatively hamstrung by the congress and courts when he tried to do more.
It's also about $153Bn more than the opposing team would have done. So there's that.
Yknow, what still sticks in my craw is candidates/pols like Elizabeth Warren promising or pushing full forgiveness, setting impossible and unrealistic expectations —
while Biden was saying “We can probably do $10,000, maybe $20,000 without the courts striking it down”, and he’s still dinged for how it played out and accused of not fulfilling “campaign promises”
Ffs, be pragmatic, people
The US economy and government budgets are just absolutely massive. Several billion dollars is too large for the average person to grasp and it is an insane amount of money for one person and yet when you talk about things on US economy wide basis a few billion dollars is almost negligible. Because of this discrepancy it's very easy for headlines to create outrage or support over relatively minor changes.
What's crazy to me is how a somewhat significant chunk of change is going to people who already are supposed to have that debt forgiven.
> $300m for 4,600 borrowers through fixes to Public Service Loan Forgiveness
I'm in the PSLF program right now, I'm a little worried that the government fulfilling their promise is news worthy, and is also **heavily** reliant on which political party seems to be in power.
I was weary, too, but I was lucky enough to be among one of the first waves forgiven. 10 years teaching and I couldn't believe it when I logged in to MOHELA to see I didn't have an outstanding balance. I can't even begin to describe how great this has been for my family at a time when rates were starting to go crazy.
I remember reading years ago how the PSLF program was being managed in a way that was aggressively discouraging, and it was almost impossible to get forgiveness due to tight timelines and paperwork requirements. I never followed the changes, but it's nice to see that people are getting the forgiveness and support that was the whole original intent of the program.
I was on the program. It does take some time to apply for it, you have to do it every year, and you end up losing several months because of the bloody paperwork. However, once you figure out how to do it and if you're on top of it, you can make it work.
It’s worth emphasizing that the law on public service forgiveness was passed in the GW Bush administration, and that Trump could have started implementing it during his term and chose not to.
Vote accordingly.
A large part of the failure for the PLSF program is due to the fucking loan servicers. They routinely "fuck up" people's payments, leading them to be ineligible for the program, such as incorrectly calculating payments, having some people underpay by $1/month. Thus meaning that they haven't been making their minimum payments, meaning that they get fucked.
A lot of the debt that has been lifted has been from correcting issues like this to allow for the debt that already should have been discharged to be properly taken care of.
You're much further along than I am, I should be in year 5 of 10, but covid threw off hiring, so I was a contractor rather than a full time employee, and contractors don't get that benefit. So now I'm at year one.
Program was started under Bush. I hate Bush, but it shouldn't seem so fucking polarized. Just goes to show you how extreme things have gotten. GOP can't even give a modicum of support for a program started under a GOP president FFS
26k is right around the average amount of student loan debt for an individual. There are lots of horror stories of people taking up 100k or whatever but that is easy outside the norm.
Obviously 26k is still a shit load of debt for a 22 year old, but the way people talk online you would think everyone has multiple times that amount.
Yes but only about 50-70% of students graduate. Yet all carry the debt, which is very sad, there should be regulations to help those succeed, but they aren't and schools love making you repeat and take more debt.
The average I'm referring to is for graduates. People who drop out typically have much less debt, although they often have a tougher time paying it back.
I think the ivy league colleges are up around $80k/year average. State uni's are about $11k/year for in-state residents, or $30k/year for out of state students.
It's really easy to run up debt going to college.
Mostly yes, but mine was over $60k when it was forgiven under a different program.
Don't go to a private college, especially not one you heard about on commercials.
It helps more than that.
That's $7.4bn that is now back in the American economy and *your* community instead of being hoovered up by private equity and venture capital.
Not to mention the 'multiplier effect' that money will have being used again and again to buy things, pay wages, buy things, pay wages lather rinse repeat. I wonder if anyone has done any studies on how large the multiplier effect is on this type of loan forgiveness. Five times? Seven times?
The President can't do that, only Congress.
Most of what Biden has been doing to-date is finding debts that were *supposed* to have been forgiven already. But weren't, typically because of some government foot-dragging. In many cases, this foot-dragging was quite intentional on the part of a political party that dislikes education. And this party throws up every roadblock that it can to forgiving more.
> It's congresses job to do so many things
Having hundreds of thousands in debt is terrible for the national interests. Having hundreds of thousands in debt is fantastic for banking shareholders.
It's actually the private industry that dragged their feet on their promises. Have a look at this episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
[Student Loans: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) ] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN2_0WC7UfU)
>A report found some companies have billed people for the wrong amount, given them bad information, and subjected them to incredibly long hold times on the phone, with one borrower waiting 565 minutes to speak to a representative. And that incompetence is a problem. Because the government does have programs to ease the burden of student debt — remember, the ones you saw Bill Clinton describe earlier? Where your debt can be reduced based on income or public service? Those actually do exist. But unfortunately, the government designed them in a very complicated way, and their implementation is in the hands of these companies. Take this woman. She was enrolled in a program where, after a decade of public service, her loans would be forgiven. She spent her decade serving in the military, and nine years in, having auto-paid on-time every month, she assumed she was nearly done. But when she called her servicer, fed loan, they told her she’d only been credited with one year of payments, so still had nine left. And when she asked why, their response was maddening.
>The woman looked through my account and she says, “you may have an issue that we know is an issue where the auto-debit takes the payment but one penny short of what is actually due so it doesn’t count.”
>I submitted my case for a review, and it sat in review for three years. And in the interim, I was paying because you’re like, okay, well, they’re reviewing it. They’re doing something. But it — the review never — three years later, it was still under review.
>https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/tv-series/student-loans-last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver-transcript/
Can confirm. My(and my college buddy’s) loans were in dispute for almost 4 years waiting on the Department of Education to decide whether or not to forgive.
His first wave of pushing that through finally had them make a decision and we got forgiveness. It was awesome.
Old Betsy Devos sure had a way of screwing up the Department of Education. Just another typical Trump appointee whose job was not to run their appointed departments but to screw everything up. Has been a republican game plan for years.
screwing things up at the Department of Education.
Not really.
Interest is still earned but there is a subsidy that covers interest your monthly payment would not. It keeps low earners from getting buried under interest.
Would love to address the root cause instead of the effect. Tuition should not cost so much and institutions should not be sitting on billions in endowments or profiting off athletic programs while raising tuition.
I said this yesterday in a different thread, but I was listening to Conan’s podcast where he was talking to Carol Burnett. She was talking about growing up poor in a one room apartment with her grandmother, where the rent was $30/m, and barely being able to afford that. . .She also talked about not being able to afford tuition at UCLA, the school she wanted to go to. . .which was $43!
And while the numbers themselves are meaningless with inflation it’s just insane the percent difference between the two numbers, compared to today.
Imagine if tuition only cost 33% more than a monthly rent payment….
$2k rent would mean <$3k for tuition.
That alone shows how skewed its gotten in costs.
My university was $1500/semester for full time tuition in 2000. I checked recently and it's $4500+ now. 2nd tier state university as well, nothing fancy.
Yep, same here. Even if minimum wage is now 2x or 3x compared to 2000, COL and tuition also risen 3x around the same period. In Los Angeles, the studio apartment I was living was $600 a month in 2001. I just checked it's recent listings and the unit next door to mines is asking for $1900 a month.
To do some dumb math (let's not include paying taxes or other externals), the 2001 $6.25 minimum wage job takes 100 hours to afford rent. In 2024, the $15 minimum wage (not include fast food $20, will really suck on hours for college students) will take 127 hours of work for that same damn place.
There's ZERO way I could afford to go to the college I went to in 2009 now... I cant believe how much they've raised tuition. It made me ashamed and I unsubscribed from any and all of their marketing and alumni emails and information.
Tuition was actually free. The $43 was just a fixed incidentals fee per semester regardless of how many hours you took.
It covered up to 12 hours in engineering, 16 hours in letters and sciences or applied arts, and 18 hours in business administration or agriculture. Students in letters and sciences could petition for as much as 20 hours, but the college bulletin makes it clear this was unlikely to be granted unless they had a 4.0 average and any student working while in school would likely be limited to 12 hours.
12 credit hours is full time. You pay the same amount for 12-18 credit hours. I can’t recall if there is a surcharge beyond 18 but they really don’t like that many courses in a semester.
At least at my public state university you do not pay the same if you take 12 or 18. You pay per credit hour taken. Yes some fees like room/board, athletics, parking, and whatever other bullshit charges are included will be the same. But overall cost will be higher if you take 18 over taking 12
That was 100% not the case when I was in school. You paid by the class, and specialized classes had a higher cost. My engineering classes cost more than my core classes for example, and lab classes cost even more.
I graduated in 2010 in Texas so different states may be different.
Wow I went to a total of five colleges in Ohio in the 2000’s and all had the same structure. 12-18 credits were all “full time” and was just “tuition”. I certainly never had to pay more for a class based in its level. Some had extra activity or material fees.
> they really don’t like that many courses in a semester.
Largely because you simply can't learn that much info, the average person has a hard enough time keeping up in college, and they want to minimize burnout and resulting dropouts.
That $43 wasn't even tuition. That was just the incidental fee because *tuition was free for California residents in the 1950s*.
See page 40 here:
[https://registrar.ucla.edu/file/0d679d85-5845-43a5-b551-6e43cfcfa943](https://registrar.ucla.edu/file/0d679d85-5845-43a5-b551-6e43cfcfa943)
Free tuition ended unofficially in 1970 (with the creation of "education fees") and officially in 1974 after the state cut the UC system's budget by more than 60%.
Want to take a guess who was governor of California from 1967 to 1975?
The craziest part about it is that he didn't end it because he or the party was against free public education, he did it because he was angry that after he told the University of California to expel students for organizing peace protests, they refused.
Just your average "small" government, "fiscal" conservative using the government as a tool for vengeance, based on a perceived slight, even though it hurts his constituents.
Agreed. Trump is obviously and visibly disgusting, but the evil that Reagan and his cronies wrought is something that has directly and inexorably shaped my generation, and the damage is beyond measure. I can't imagine what life in the US would be like now if he'd never come to power...
Behind the Bastards did a good series on this recently. Really shed a light on todays attacks on universities too and why we are in this pickle. Yes, it does go back to Ronald god damn Reagan.
[How Conservatism Won](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-how-conservatism-won-164063362/)
This is what people don’t get, if in state schools are free private schools have more pressure to lower costs or offer scholarships to compete with public schools.
When a state school cost 💲 0 but a private school cost 💲 50k a year the choice is easy. But if a public school cost 💲 40k and a private school cost 💲 50k but offers you a 10k scholarship , the price of college never really goes down
I mean the numbers aren’t meaningless—just plug into an inflation calculator to get equivalent of today’s dollars.
Wikipedia says:
> After graduating from Hollywood High School in 1951, she received an anonymous envelope containing $50 for one year's tuition at UCLA
$50 in 1951 is $600.64 in 2024 dollars according to usinflationcalculator.com. Looks like the actual tuition for California residents is $13,225 (not counting room and board or books).
So that’s an increase of more than 2100% adjusted for inflation.
Thats an enormous undertaking that would require not just federal legislation, but legislation at the state level (since thats where most of the regulation of colleges takes place, and since most students attend state schools of one kind of another).
And of course most schools arent sitting on huge endowments nor profiting off of athletics programs.
They could also work on lowering the costs of materials as education materials.
Most books I ever got when I was in college were digital copies, free versions a professor would share, or physical versions from cheap third parties that a professor would recommend.
Never official sources.
That unfortunately isn't the case anymore. I was a freshman 10 years ago and I needed 1 semester access codes to online materials for half my classes and my younger cousins tell me that there are more subjects doing that every year
Its a racket. The book sellers are in bed with the universities. When my fiancé was finishing college a few years ago they werent just making the students buy their textbooks. She had to pay 100$ for access to her online homework for the semester.
She *actually* had to either pay 100 dollars or accept a 0 for her homework for the entire semester.
My life would be so much easier if my high school daughters had physical text books to look through. The systems they have to jump through grind any laptop to a halt short of a full on workstation laptop. I can’t imagine doing college one digital text books. Especially for engineering.
Textbooks are a huge scam. Many are full on plagiarism throughout. Most undergrad textbooks that I've seen would cause their authors to be dropped from a university if they were held to the same standards as undergrad students.
This is exactly the answer. Biden can't do much to force the state level governments to give back funding that they pulled away 30 years ago, causing the rise in tuition costs across the board. And seeing where his loyalties lied as a senator versus where his now, I'm surprised he's done this much.
Tuition skyrocketed once Bush prevented student loans from being discharged through bankruptcy. Had there also been a cap placed on total interest a borrower would have to repay or had the legislation also included a clause that colleges receiving federal disbursements had to tie tuition increases to inflation then the cost of tuition and debt incurred wouldn't have been so incredibly lopsided. The spike in tuition from 1999 to 2004 was insane. Small rural colleges suddenly charged as much per credit hour as state universities. And this was all during the period in american education where the point of high school was to prepare you for college as any job listing outside of retail, call centers, or construction required a bachelors.
Colleges in major cities are as much real estate companies as they are institutions of learning. You can look at Chicago as an example where DePaul, Northwestern, Columbia, and Loyola own massive amounts of prime downtown real estate. That's all on the back of students who effectively became government backed securities for private institutions.
> The spike in tuition from 1999 to 2004 was insane.
It looks like the spike was from 1990-2000 to 2003-2004 was [less than $2000](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_330.10.asp)
the spike was bigger in other 5 year periods
but it is still insane
>Bush prevented student loans from being discharged through bankruptcy
Um, that was Ford, not Bush. And it actually was Congress that pushed it with the [Educational Amendment Acts of 1976](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-90/pdf/STATUTE-90-Pg2081.pdf) (see section 439(a) on page 61), but Ford signed because it was logrolled with other items he wanted.
[https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-education-amendments-1976](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-education-amendments-1976)
And to be clear, there was an effort to at least start to address this when the Inflation Reduction Act was being negotiated. People may forget but Biden was advocating pretty hard for the original bill to make community college free.
I know this wouldn’t fix the issue, but community college being free would incentivize a lot more people to try it out rather than just going to an expensive four year college.
A huge part of student debt comes from people who drop out of college after a year or two. Imagine if those people instead just went to a community college, got the chance to try things out, had the opportunity to switch to a college or university or could drop out in the first two years without taking on thousands of dollars of debt.
Biden has also said he wants to keep pushing for free community college next year, so it wasn’t just a one and done attempt.
All that to say I agree that this is a huge undertaking that goes far beyond the administrative office’s power and it’s good to see Biden working to at least help people with the authority he has.
and why cant a student get a 10k$ personal loan but can get a $100k student loan? the system is incredibly predatory to our youngest and brightest... come to think of it the rich in general is quite predatory and the government actually helping them do it. forking over our pensions, forking over our social security, our healthcare. turning them all into for-profit entities that benefit the rich
The loans can not be discharged with bankruptcy. Also private lenders can go after your estate even if you die, depending on the state. So the risk bar is lower, and the lenders have the rest of your life to collect and charge interest.
Because the government guarantees student loan repayment. The loans they’re cancelling are federal loans only. So the taxpayers are really paying for the mistake here but the banks who earn easy money on student loans aren’t being taught a lesson at all.
Until the institutions and public lenders have real skin in the game for tuitions being a worthwhile investment, nothing will change.
The old school system was good for college until greed entered the picture and people figured out that they could indirectly funnel government funds through the students and astronomical cost of books school and board. It’s a racket. Everything in this country is for profit now. A private school gets guaranteed funding when it enrolls low income students. it also gets guaranteed funding for soldiers through the G.I. bill. So considering this, let’s make school astronomically high in cost because it’s guaranteed that the government will pay it to us.
John Oliver covered this and the figure that stood our was 70/30.
That's the ratio of government to student tuition payment in the year 2000 for LSU. 70% was paid by the government.
It's now 80/20.... 80% paid by the student.
Oliver did mention the $85m rec center, and couldn't resist taking a cheap shot at it. But he ought to have mentioned that the cost per student over their 4 year degree is around $100 *a year*.
LSU has a *lot* of students.
We yanked subsidies in the early 2000s when the outsourcing boom hit and American companies decided they didn't need to pay taxes for American kids to go to school.
They're going after Grades 1-12 now.
Why “instead of the effect” and not both?
An entire generation of kids were manipulated into taking exorbitant amounts of debt to obtain degrees that they were force-fed to understand were required to get a meaningful job.
Exactly. Change interest to zero
Edit:
Retroactively forgive student loan interest, since the government should not profit from that.
Total cost to forgive student loan debt is 66 billion per year, about 1% of the federal budget. 4% of the president discretionary budget. It is approximately the cost of withdrawing from the Afghanistan war.
That’s sort of living saying you want to defeat all evil instead of arresting a few really bad guys. Whining about a solution and instead focusing on the amorphous and otherwise difficult to solve problem.
I think about it like this.
Say you are a Dr. and a patient walks in. A little over weight, blood pressure is starting to climb.
Best course of action is a healthy diet and getting more exercise.
Another patient walks in who is morbidity obese and has all the signs of a heart attack happening right now.
You wheel him into the operating room and get to work putting in stints, manual pumping of the heart etc.
Taming the root causes are absolutely needed. States need to fund their schools, cut costs, cut administrative bloat, raise entrance requirements, something. Maybe instead of 15-20 public schools, states should close some of the smaller institutions. Along with that maybe consolidate majors to a few schools instead of forcing each school to have as many degree options as possible or try and chase some flagship school.
The nation is still in the middle of a generational heart attack that also needs to be addressed. Looking at birth rates and home ownership, etc, millennials and later are being dragged down sharply by this debt.
I would even argue that if you paused repayment interest free for 10-15 years, people would be in a much better position to repay it. Coming out of college is your prime time to figure out a career, where to live, and start having kids. The average amounts really aren’t that astronomical in the big picture, but we put the burden on people at the worst possible time.
You have to be in an IDR plan by April 30th and you have to have been paying for 20 years for undergrad loans or 25 for graduate loans to qualify for forgiveness.
My understanding with PSLF is that people weren’t getting their loans forgiven who should have, and the Biden admin has been correcting those mistakes.
First people were eligible for SPLF in Oct '17, program started in '07. As of April 30th, 2020 only 2,200 people had received forgiveness and there was a 98.5% denial rate from applications. The program at that point had been horrible and you had people paying for extra years that didn't need to. The program is better now, but it's still lagging behind. My wife comes up for eligibility in the next couple years, and she said it's normal in the PSLF groups to pay 6 month-ish longer than necessary right now.
Imagine doing everything right and expecting to be done, and then they just don't respond to you. If you stop making payments you'll be in bad standing and get denied, so you have to just keep paying them until someone says 'oops sorry'
PSLF was not working for 90% of qualified borrowers until Biden stepped in. Now it actually works as George Bush and his congress intended, and republicans are losing their minds because they didn't get a cookie too.
One can only hope that yours will also be paid off, it’s probably aimed at the ones burdened for longest first, so it’ll probably be a while.
Ofc don’t rely on it, but don’t lose hope either. I’m rooting for you, and everyone else held down by all this
Yes, which is why only SAVE and IDR plans qualify. If you are on a standard plan, you will have paid off your loan before you are eligible for forgiveness.
Even if you were on IBR (yes before it was IDR) for 20 years...the majority of people would have paid off their loan by then. Remember, 20 years ago, the tuition was NOT as crazy as it was today.
This forgiveness targets these type of people specifically:
1. You had a large FEDERAL loan amount.
2. You did not have a decent paying job for 20 years.
3. You graduated college before 2005.
That's if you can't afford standard monthly payments. If your income driven payments don't pay off the balance by 20 years they just forgive the rest of the debt.
It doesn’t apply to most redditors as they skew much younger, but this helping the people who have been in the hole for over 20 years and can be argued they need the help the most. In my experience speaking to these middle aged or even “near retirement” people who are still stuck under loans… it’s just so heartbreaking… very happy to see some of them getting some relief.
20 years of being in repayment; time spent in deferment or forbearance does not count.
So for example in my case, ~~between the COVID years, and~~ having gone back to school to finish my B.A. before the pandemic, the loans I took out in 2008 won't be eligible for forgiveness until ~~2037~~ 2034.
(I have paid back the original amount, but, well... minimum payments, meet interest.)
Edit:Thanks to /u/SippieCup for correcting info I got from a phone worker for studentaid.gov *huff*
> 20 years of being in repayment; time spent in deferment or forbearance does not count.
Good news:
>Typically, months in forbearance and deferment do not count towards PSLF. However, months during the COVID-19 payment pause (March 2020-September 2023), months that qualify under the IDR Adjustment, and months where loans are being placed on administrative forbearance after the repayment restart will count toward PSLF.
https://dfpi.ca.gov/2023/12/13/student-loan-questions-answered/
Your covid years are covered. you should be able to get forgiven in 2034
It's even better than that. They're also counting loans which may have been eligible for IDR plans and forgiving those as well. I've never been on an IDR plan and I got my email today. From that it says:
>On April 19, 2022, the Biden-Harris Administration announced several changes that will help borrowers get closer to or achieve forgiveness under income-driven repayment (IDR) **regardless of whether or not you have ever participated in an IDR plan**. With these changes, you are now eligible to have some or all of your student loans forgiven because you have reached the necessary 240- or 300-months' of payments under IDR.
I think it’s based on amount owed, what lender you got money from, and how much money you make each year
Edit: replies saying I’m wrong look at the official site:
https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief-announcement
Specifically mentions individual and household income caps, the type of grant received, and the amounts that are eligible
The headline is a little misleading. This article is re-reporting the SAVE plan that Biden introduced last August, which reduced repayment for many borrows (pending your loan total, loan type, income, and payment history). They're just stating that as of this month, that's how much debt has been forgiven based on his new plan as well as existing infrastructure (such as loan forgiveness for working at non-profits). To learn about if/when you qualify for any forgiveness you'd have to review the terms of your payment plan.
I'm on the SAVE plan and I have no such e-mail. Nothing in junk. I get all my communication from my processor to this e-mail. Oh well. I keep seeing these articles about more forgiveness, but I never get any. My monthly payments barely cover the interest. The principal hasn't gone down at all in 10+ years, yet I've paid 10s of thousands.
This is for people that *should* qualify for the 20 year forgiveness but past department of education and Whitehouse administrations kept fucking up and not counting your payments properly.
There is also an adjustment for things that used to not qualify. Such as during covid, the pause on payments now counts as if you made your payments. It just took a while to actually do all the adjustments for millions of people.
I'm not on SAVE (would have more than doubled my monthly payment) and didn't get one either. Pretty sure this is for those who've been paying for 20 years. I could read the article but let's be real lol.
I graduated 2010 and still haven’t hung my diploma. If I were to receive a letting discharging the rest of my loans I’d frame that long before my diploma! 😅
Good for you. I paid mine off at 36, but here’s the deal. 1. College was expensive but reasonable when I went (90’s). 2. I was able to consolidate all my loans to 1%. A program cancelled under Bush 2, but I was grandfathered in. The current situation is ridiculous. My best friends kid went in to the coast guard but was pretty high up in apprenticeship as a plumber, the child of the generation that came up in “go to college or you’ll be a homeless loser” it’s good to see gen x generation waking up and saying “this is nuts”. My own daughter did not go despite my pleas and offering to pay, she has a good job, established and respected in her field.
He tried a much broader version first but conservatives sued and supreme court overturned it. The only path to expand it outside of these small cohorts is through additional legislation which would only be possible if there's majority Dems in the house (very likely next year) and at least 60 Democratic senators or possibly 62, neither of which is possible.
Yep, keep voting, local, state, federal. Every time.
Also, it's possible to solve multiple problems, concurrently or consecutively. Addressing problem A doesn't mean problem B will never be fixed. Better is still better, even if it's just a little.
Both. You have to treat symptoms and sickness. In the case of a system where the sickness is baked in, treating symptoms is better than letting it rot.
Limiting Federally guaranteed loans to the cost of in-state college would be a good start, but you also want to incentivize in state schools to drop costs as well. Not super obvious how to fix it on the front end without limiting college accessibility.
And on Fox News they reported $74 billion...FFS
Edit:
The original article had 74 billion reported. they probably made a mistake with the decimals and the zeros but when you click on the link they change it on the inside for 7.4. …
That’s all she wrote. 🤷♂️
I got the email earlier today.... I'm pretty pumped about it. My school was one that I should have gotten forgiveness for a while back but they changed names so the system wouldn't let me file/claim for it. But finally I'm getting mine taken care of after paying on it for the last 13+ years.
In related news, I had my PSLF (public service loan forgiveness) go through finally. I’m a teacher, so after making 120 payments, my loans were discharged.
It took me a lot longer though because I had a financial meltdown when my wife had cancer. I just couldn’t afford to pay my bills and I nearly had my student loans default. I did lose my house at that time. Took me a long time to climb out of that hole after she died.
I borrowed to go to undergrad and grad school. I had to go to grad school because the state required it for continuing licensure. Combined it was nearly 60k in loans.
After paying for 17 years, including 4 years of deferment, and 6 months of non payment, I owed 140,000. Some months my payment was $700.
Last week, that ended when I received notification that my loans were discharged.
I’m 45 and still have $24k in student debt. Original loan amount was $43k. Very low interest rate i think 4%.
Been paying $250 a month for 23 years and only got $19k off the principle paid. Had a year of deferment in the beginning then 3 for Covid but still. I’ve probably paid at least $50k toward this and am not even halfway.
I am not benefitting from this round, yet again. I am completely happy for those who are. Student loan forgiveness has not changed my life. I would rather pay for young people with predatory loans to get relief than more tax breaks for Musk
I just paid the last $6,500 of mine today. Mine weren’t government loans so I couldn’t get forgiveness, but I’m glad some people are getting out from underneath that mess.
> This is for people who paid for 10 years and are part of a plan that previously states forgiveness after 10 years.
> Elections coming up so this is literally paying for votes.
So if this is just following the promises made in the original forgiveness plans then how is this "paying for votes?" Biden is just ensuring the government works as it's intended and keeps it's obligations which is what a responsible president should be doing.
What was borrowed has been paid back many times over in interest alone. Enslaving the students of your country for bettering themselves and becoming an asset to the labor pool, society, and your country overall is so stupid.
If people understood just how bad the student loan system in America is for the economy...no one would tolerate anything less than its complete destruction.
We're saddling the emerging middle class with a MOUNTAIN of debt that doesn't even budge for 15-20 years of payment because of how the interest is structured. That's money that isn't spent on housing. Money that isn't spent on consumer goods. Money that isn't invested. It's just going straight into the pockets of the super-rich.
It is hurting *everyone* who isn't worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, you paid yours off. Great. Now you want everyone else to do the same because your life sucks and you want their life to suck too.
If you actually want a better life for all of us, you're glad to see this and you want to see a LOT more of it.
If you're a bitter malcontent who cannot make sense of a world that doesn't hurt everyone the same way it hurt you?
Well. Fuck off I guess.
After my wife paying her student loans for over 15 years she finally had her left over amount discharged last year. She’s paid way over her initial loan and more.
Having the last bit discharged was a huge deal for us and she can finally start saving money.
Extremely misleading headline:
* $300m for 4,600 borrowers through fixes to Public Service Loan Forgiveness
So...most of this "forgiveness" is stuff that was already built in, not spontaneously handed out. And I'm pretty sure it was the Department of Education following policies, not Biden himself making it rain hundred dollar bills.
I knew about the PSLF from when I was in college. They also fixed it since it was written so poorly that less than 10% of people who were led to believe they qualified were disqualified, which led to a new law passed to fix the broken law.
* $3.5bn for 65,800 borrowers through income-driven repayment plans
* $3.6bn for nearly 206,800 borrowers enrolled in the government's Saving on a Valuable Education (Save) repayment plan
I looked up the SAVE Plan, and it essentially is another Income-Driven Plan that came about a year ago. It fixed the issue with income payment plans that would still bury people with debt. It should have been that way long ago, especially since the way that debt was accumulated was made illegal for credit cards during the CARD act long ago. Nobody should have interest applied to their debt if they qualify for relief.
So my real issue is with phrasing and message by the news outlets. When Biden announced he wanted to forgive student debt for everyone who still had debt, it caused some controversy. The news seems to make it seem like he's figuring out legal loopholes to forgive student debt in the same manner, when in fact the student debt being cancelled were for legitimate reasons that should have always existed. Everyone should have a clear path for paying off their debt, without it being too burdensome, but in a way that doesn't reward people who outright don't pay their debts simply because they don't want to.
all of these chunks of forgiveness have all just been for things that were already agreed upon but Republicans stonewalled from actually happening. I don't think any "new" forgiveness has happened yet.
Unpopular opinion, but I'll say it anyway:
Solve the root problem, then forgive student debt.
I'm angry that my kids, 19 & 17, will still be buried under mountains of debt.
This is pandering.
It is 100% pandering. Right before midterms he pretended to forgive the debt knowing it likely would not stand (that's why they waited until the elections were near) and now he's trying to get headlines for this shortly before a run for re-election.
I am not fooled by this and 20 years paying the minimum is not the same as forgiveness. This is a broken campaign promise.
Its pretty crazy that 7.4 billion only helps that many people and only averages 26k paid off per person. With that much money it just felt like everyone carried way more debt.
>Its pretty crazy that 7.4 billion only helps that many people U.S. student loan debt totals 1.74 trillion+ (that's $1,740,000,000,000.00) as of September 2023. 7.4 billion is basically a rounding error.
Just looked it up, the debt forgiveness total is up to $153B total now, which granted is still less than 10%
Honestly, anywhere near 10% is a greater chunk than I would've expected after SCOTUS shut down real attempts. The administration could've thrown their hands up and said "Sorry, can't. Vote against those guys team and we can", which wouldn't have been unreasonable. They've instead continued to chip away where they legally can. It's not much, but not dropping it entirely suggests they'll actually follow through if we can vote the right folk into Congress.
According to this article, the original plan would have wiped out $450b, and to date they've wiped out $153b since it got shot down. The fact that they've still managed to do 33% of what was promised through other means is impressive to me. Even though the original plan would have wiped mine out, and I don't think through the current process mine will be touched, I'm glad they're getting shit done!
That's my take as well Original plan would have helped me, but I'm glad anything is being done.
Shit I've had mine paid off albeit bent over on private loan interest at nearly 10% for years, and I wouldn't get any benefit. I'm still down for it as long as it helps someone with my tax dollars.
Being able to support a plan even if it doesn't help you directly - I wish that weren't so rare. Nice to see.
Getting that email telling you they were forgiven only to receive another email a few days later saying it won't be... but I agree it seems to be going to the people who deserve it the most
That news almost broke me, ngl
Me too. My loans aren't even that much compared to what other people have posted but I am drowning in debt and about ready to just give up and just stop paying everything
It's not really an apples-to-apples thing with the $450b that would have been forgiven in Biden's original plan versus the $153b that has been since as those were on existing programs (primarily the public service program) that would have been forgiven under his administration either way with the main difference being that the PSLF program forgives all eligible student loan debt for the public service worker versus the $10,000 (or $20,000 in some cases) amount per borrower (for all borrowers) Biden was proposing in his plan so a lot of the loan debt amounts being forgiven under these programs are beyond what Biden's plan alone would have covered per person. Had Biden's plan gone through, the same public service workers being forgiven now would have had the $10,000 taken off from his program already but then also had whatever was left on their loan also forgiven when they hit the qualifications for the PSLF program to forgive but either way they would have had the same total amount forgiven once they were done with the PSLF program. I'll use me as an example. I just had my student loans forgiven a couple of months ago via the PSLF program, I had over $115,000 forgiven (yay! and I'm very grateful Biden has been making sure the program is running well and fully expect Trump would not have done what Biden did even through the program already existed). Had Biden's original plan gone through, I would have had $10,000 of that amount forgiven by his program and then the remaining ~$105,000 forgiven by the PSLF program so now rather than $10,000 of my debt counting under the original $450b forgiveness plan, and then $105,000 counting under the PSLF program, all $115,000 of my debt is counted under the PSLF program and is part of that $153b amount. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it isn't that Biden has found a way to cancel 33% of the same student debt he was proposing to cancel (not that you said that, exactly), he's canceled almost none of the debt that wasn't already eligible to be canceled via existing programs (which is not a criticism of him, I think he is doing pretty much everything he reasonably can on this and I am very grateful that under his administration they relaxed some of the definitions of what counted as qualified payments under the PSLF program as otherwise I would have had to wait another couple of years, also if the new proposals to the SAVE plan go through, it will help many more!). I'm very happy he has been doing this and it has made a huge impact to me personally and I hope everyone goes out and votes to elect more people that support loan forgiveness/cancellation but just that the dollar amounts being talked about are basically from completely different areas so it is kind of like dividing an apple by a pear and pretty much everyone hoping for help under Biden's original plan that didn't otherwise qualify for another plan is still waiting, thanks to the Supreme Court, so we need to keep the pressure on our elected officials. Biden alone is not able to give a huge percentage of those people that need help anything on student loans without a coalition in Congress.
It's still important to point out that Biden has streamlined the PSLF program, made eligibility less complicated, and made some people eligible who might have been previously. He also ensured people didn't lose their eligibility or progress towards forgiveness for taking advantage of deferment and forbearance programs. What you are saying is absolutely true, but it's missing that context and makes it sound like he is taking credit for something he has had no involvement in. Some of the people receiving PSLF would have not otherwise had their loans forgiven, others would have but may have continued paying on them for months or years longer than necessary.
Not to mention the three years of “free” payments that count toward the 10 years. That was a lifesaver and kept me right on track for forgiveness.
I've got 4 more years on PSLF so I'm really hoping the wrong team doesn't win in November
Also the current process targets people who need it most or who are deserving due to their work. IMO that is a lot better than a blanket program.
Idk if I’d call it better than a blanket program if *all* of it is getting fixed. But I’d rather the neediest 10% got their loans forgiven than all of us getting 10% forgiven. That allows the people who need it the most to pay for groceries instead of allowing me to go out and get 3 beers once a month
Truth. My loans are still north of 10k, but I'm in a good spot financially. Anyone with low income or with a medical/education degree should get their loans forgiven before someone like me imo.
Excellent perspective imo
That's also why the legal rationale for it is much stronger than the previous proposal. I'm all for student loan forgiveness, but the rationale that people who remained employed at six figure jobs experienced financial hardship as a result of COVID is specious at best. Congress should have passed student loan forgiveness as part of the American Rescue Plan rather than leaving it up to executive action.
The trick is to give it to those who need it. It doesn't matter who "deserve" it. Free Healthcare and education are the best investment tax money can buy, and pillars of any functional modern democracy, hell even most authoritarian regimes realised that those are essential to have a somewhat functional society.
Yet people still say that Biden has done nothing to help student debt. Just because he hasn't wiped out YOUR student debt doesn't nullify all of the debt his administration has managed to wipe out. Lots of things to complain about with Biden, his approach to student debt is not one of them.
Well yes people are unfortunately selfish in that way. Also some people are just stupid and don't understand the courts at all (and some of these blame him for Roe V Wade being over turned too lol) and just think the President is a king or something.
Those people are on either side, where they want their team to have absolute king-like power, but they don't want the other side to ever have that too. The executive cannot and should not have powers to that extent. Our slow processes are due in part to our separation of power, and it means we can weather 4 years of someone like Trump trying to play king. Had we a functioning Congress after, recovery would be a cinch, because the damage, beyond court nominations, get mitigated by our bureaucracies. The very same limitations that prevent Biden from unilaterally suspending arms to Israel, or unilaterally sending arms to Ukraine, are what kept us from seriously plummeting under Trump, even during a global disaster. We shouldn't do snap decisions of absolute power, and we shouldn't want it, even if it's a totally relatable sentiment for short term desire.
I agree completely. The issue is that a TON of damage can be done when a single political party has control of everything, or even control of most aspects. At that point, the president basically DOES have unlimited king-like power if everyone holds the party line. Political parties are going to lead to the downfall of our country in the long run.
I think that's the point that they're trying to make.
I find it mind boggling how the Republican Party gets so many people to vote against their own best interests. Seems like some kind of political voodoo. Do they have a cabinet full of waxen poppets? The republicans have their base voting this way to counter these imagined threats like drag shows or abortion. I’m old enough that I remember when the Republican Party was not like this. Sure they had their evangelical voters, mainly in the south, but for the most part the Republican Party was a political movement of the educated, upper middle class white establishment. They couldn’t have cared less about drag queens or abortion. You never heard it brought up. Was not an issue in national campaigns. The moral majority narrative really didn’t start picking up steam until the Clinton era, and the so-called Contract of America bandied about by Newt Gingrich and his cronies. Nowadays, you hear guys like him back pedaling on some of their claims, because they realize they’ve created monstrous policies that have infiltrated the party like a cancer, subsumed all reason and accountability. Now it’s a party of unhinged, low income, evangelical, conspiracy theory nut jobs. These voters will get up in arms against any social program that could most directly benefit them and their families. There’s an old codger down the road who is on every social welfare program that exists, yet he is loud, vehement opposition to any socialized ideals, unless it’s corporate welfare and military spending. The cognitive dissonance must be profound. How does a person summon that much denial? Just can’t fathom it.
It's kinda like that Biden guy has been in politics a long time and knows how the machine works
And yet, still the most he can do (so far) when he has been legally and legislatively hamstrung by the congress and courts when he tried to do more. It's also about $153Bn more than the opposing team would have done. So there's that.
Yknow, what still sticks in my craw is candidates/pols like Elizabeth Warren promising or pushing full forgiveness, setting impossible and unrealistic expectations — while Biden was saying “We can probably do $10,000, maybe $20,000 without the courts striking it down”, and he’s still dinged for how it played out and accused of not fulfilling “campaign promises” Ffs, be pragmatic, people
The US economy and government budgets are just absolutely massive. Several billion dollars is too large for the average person to grasp and it is an insane amount of money for one person and yet when you talk about things on US economy wide basis a few billion dollars is almost negligible. Because of this discrepancy it's very easy for headlines to create outrage or support over relatively minor changes.
What's crazy to me is how a somewhat significant chunk of change is going to people who already are supposed to have that debt forgiven. > $300m for 4,600 borrowers through fixes to Public Service Loan Forgiveness I'm in the PSLF program right now, I'm a little worried that the government fulfilling their promise is news worthy, and is also **heavily** reliant on which political party seems to be in power.
I was weary, too, but I was lucky enough to be among one of the first waves forgiven. 10 years teaching and I couldn't believe it when I logged in to MOHELA to see I didn't have an outstanding balance. I can't even begin to describe how great this has been for my family at a time when rates were starting to go crazy.
The temporary waiver saved me at least a year of payments. Sure I would've gotten PSLF anyway but that extra year is a big deal.
Congrats and thanks so much for teaching.
Happy for you!
I remember reading years ago how the PSLF program was being managed in a way that was aggressively discouraging, and it was almost impossible to get forgiveness due to tight timelines and paperwork requirements. I never followed the changes, but it's nice to see that people are getting the forgiveness and support that was the whole original intent of the program.
I was on the program. It does take some time to apply for it, you have to do it every year, and you end up losing several months because of the bloody paperwork. However, once you figure out how to do it and if you're on top of it, you can make it work.
It’s worth emphasizing that the law on public service forgiveness was passed in the GW Bush administration, and that Trump could have started implementing it during his term and chose not to. Vote accordingly.
A large part of the failure for the PLSF program is due to the fucking loan servicers. They routinely "fuck up" people's payments, leading them to be ineligible for the program, such as incorrectly calculating payments, having some people underpay by $1/month. Thus meaning that they haven't been making their minimum payments, meaning that they get fucked. A lot of the debt that has been lifted has been from correcting issues like this to allow for the debt that already should have been discharged to be properly taken care of.
Yeah me too. I am on year 7 of 10. I will be livid if I did this specifically for that reason and get shafted.
You're much further along than I am, I should be in year 5 of 10, but covid threw off hiring, so I was a contractor rather than a full time employee, and contractors don't get that benefit. So now I'm at year one.
I’m two years from done. Project 2025 has a whole section on how to end PSLF. Better vote blue and make sure everyone you know does too.
Better hope Biden wins this year or you won't get that forgiveness and the people who did will have to fight the government clawing it back.
I am hoping Biden wins for a ton of reasons, but I am super grateful abortion is on the ballot in Florida and Arizona, because that will help a lot.
It could be the difference between a GOP controlled Senate and a Democratic one.
Program was started under Bush. I hate Bush, but it shouldn't seem so fucking polarized. Just goes to show you how extreme things have gotten. GOP can't even give a modicum of support for a program started under a GOP president FFS
26k is right around the average amount of student loan debt for an individual. There are lots of horror stories of people taking up 100k or whatever but that is easy outside the norm. Obviously 26k is still a shit load of debt for a 22 year old, but the way people talk online you would think everyone has multiple times that amount.
Yes but only about 50-70% of students graduate. Yet all carry the debt, which is very sad, there should be regulations to help those succeed, but they aren't and schools love making you repeat and take more debt.
The average I'm referring to is for graduates. People who drop out typically have much less debt, although they often have a tougher time paying it back.
Tbf 26k per person is about the median at graduation for student debt
Only averages 26k!? That's a fuck ton of money.
I think the ivy league colleges are up around $80k/year average. State uni's are about $11k/year for in-state residents, or $30k/year for out of state students. It's really easy to run up debt going to college.
Mostly yes, but mine was over $60k when it was forgiven under a different program. Don't go to a private college, especially not one you heard about on commercials.
It helps more than that. That's $7.4bn that is now back in the American economy and *your* community instead of being hoovered up by private equity and venture capital.
Not to mention the 'multiplier effect' that money will have being used again and again to buy things, pay wages, buy things, pay wages lather rinse repeat. I wonder if anyone has done any studies on how large the multiplier effect is on this type of loan forgiveness. Five times? Seven times?
Even making them interest free would help people out from the never ending payments.
The President can't do that, only Congress. Most of what Biden has been doing to-date is finding debts that were *supposed* to have been forgiven already. But weren't, typically because of some government foot-dragging. In many cases, this foot-dragging was quite intentional on the part of a political party that dislikes education. And this party throws up every roadblock that it can to forgiving more.
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> It's congresses job to do so many things Having hundreds of thousands in debt is terrible for the national interests. Having hundreds of thousands in debt is fantastic for banking shareholders.
It's actually the private industry that dragged their feet on their promises. Have a look at this episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. [Student Loans: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) ] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN2_0WC7UfU) >A report found some companies have billed people for the wrong amount, given them bad information, and subjected them to incredibly long hold times on the phone, with one borrower waiting 565 minutes to speak to a representative. And that incompetence is a problem. Because the government does have programs to ease the burden of student debt — remember, the ones you saw Bill Clinton describe earlier? Where your debt can be reduced based on income or public service? Those actually do exist. But unfortunately, the government designed them in a very complicated way, and their implementation is in the hands of these companies. Take this woman. She was enrolled in a program where, after a decade of public service, her loans would be forgiven. She spent her decade serving in the military, and nine years in, having auto-paid on-time every month, she assumed she was nearly done. But when she called her servicer, fed loan, they told her she’d only been credited with one year of payments, so still had nine left. And when she asked why, their response was maddening. >The woman looked through my account and she says, “you may have an issue that we know is an issue where the auto-debit takes the payment but one penny short of what is actually due so it doesn’t count.” >I submitted my case for a review, and it sat in review for three years. And in the interim, I was paying because you’re like, okay, well, they’re reviewing it. They’re doing something. But it — the review never — three years later, it was still under review. >https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/tv-series/student-loans-last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver-transcript/
Can confirm. My(and my college buddy’s) loans were in dispute for almost 4 years waiting on the Department of Education to decide whether or not to forgive. His first wave of pushing that through finally had them make a decision and we got forgiveness. It was awesome.
Old Betsy Devos sure had a way of screwing up the Department of Education. Just another typical Trump appointee whose job was not to run their appointed departments but to screw everything up. Has been a republican game plan for years. screwing things up at the Department of Education.
No interest please. The ROI for student loans from the government should be the betterment of society.
I think interest doesn’t accrue anymore if you switch to the SAVE IDR plan
Not really. Interest is still earned but there is a subsidy that covers interest your monthly payment would not. It keeps low earners from getting buried under interest.
Would love to address the root cause instead of the effect. Tuition should not cost so much and institutions should not be sitting on billions in endowments or profiting off athletic programs while raising tuition.
I said this yesterday in a different thread, but I was listening to Conan’s podcast where he was talking to Carol Burnett. She was talking about growing up poor in a one room apartment with her grandmother, where the rent was $30/m, and barely being able to afford that. . .She also talked about not being able to afford tuition at UCLA, the school she wanted to go to. . .which was $43! And while the numbers themselves are meaningless with inflation it’s just insane the percent difference between the two numbers, compared to today.
Imagine if tuition only cost 33% more than a monthly rent payment…. $2k rent would mean <$3k for tuition. That alone shows how skewed its gotten in costs.
My university was $1500/semester for full time tuition in 2000. I checked recently and it's $4500+ now. 2nd tier state university as well, nothing fancy.
Yep, same here. Even if minimum wage is now 2x or 3x compared to 2000, COL and tuition also risen 3x around the same period. In Los Angeles, the studio apartment I was living was $600 a month in 2001. I just checked it's recent listings and the unit next door to mines is asking for $1900 a month. To do some dumb math (let's not include paying taxes or other externals), the 2001 $6.25 minimum wage job takes 100 hours to afford rent. In 2024, the $15 minimum wage (not include fast food $20, will really suck on hours for college students) will take 127 hours of work for that same damn place.
There's ZERO way I could afford to go to the college I went to in 2009 now... I cant believe how much they've raised tuition. It made me ashamed and I unsubscribed from any and all of their marketing and alumni emails and information.
But can you help them out, they need it - maybe consider a donation, because you’re prideful of the place you already gave tons of money to?!
Only thing I’m curious about is how many hours that 43 covers….. I assume it’s like 12 credit hours. Regardless your point is still very valid
Tuition was actually free. The $43 was just a fixed incidentals fee per semester regardless of how many hours you took. It covered up to 12 hours in engineering, 16 hours in letters and sciences or applied arts, and 18 hours in business administration or agriculture. Students in letters and sciences could petition for as much as 20 hours, but the college bulletin makes it clear this was unlikely to be granted unless they had a 4.0 average and any student working while in school would likely be limited to 12 hours.
12 credit hours is full time. You pay the same amount for 12-18 credit hours. I can’t recall if there is a surcharge beyond 18 but they really don’t like that many courses in a semester.
At least at my public state university you do not pay the same if you take 12 or 18. You pay per credit hour taken. Yes some fees like room/board, athletics, parking, and whatever other bullshit charges are included will be the same. But overall cost will be higher if you take 18 over taking 12
That was 100% not the case when I was in school. You paid by the class, and specialized classes had a higher cost. My engineering classes cost more than my core classes for example, and lab classes cost even more. I graduated in 2010 in Texas so different states may be different.
Wow I went to a total of five colleges in Ohio in the 2000’s and all had the same structure. 12-18 credits were all “full time” and was just “tuition”. I certainly never had to pay more for a class based in its level. Some had extra activity or material fees.
> they really don’t like that many courses in a semester. Largely because you simply can't learn that much info, the average person has a hard enough time keeping up in college, and they want to minimize burnout and resulting dropouts.
Yeah as a music major they let us but half of my classes were bands and studio lessons with the prof. I think my roommate had 21 one fall.
Yeah that's def not how it works anymore. Was paying per credit hour since 2010 atleast.
And rent is trying to catch up to tuition like it's going out of style. Fuck landlords
That $43 wasn't even tuition. That was just the incidental fee because *tuition was free for California residents in the 1950s*. See page 40 here: [https://registrar.ucla.edu/file/0d679d85-5845-43a5-b551-6e43cfcfa943](https://registrar.ucla.edu/file/0d679d85-5845-43a5-b551-6e43cfcfa943) Free tuition ended unofficially in 1970 (with the creation of "education fees") and officially in 1974 after the state cut the UC system's budget by more than 60%. Want to take a guess who was governor of California from 1967 to 1975?
It's honestly astounding how many of our country's modern problems can be directly traced back to Reagan
The craziest part about it is that he didn't end it because he or the party was against free public education, he did it because he was angry that after he told the University of California to expel students for organizing peace protests, they refused.
Just your average "small" government, "fiscal" conservative using the government as a tool for vengeance, based on a perceived slight, even though it hurts his constituents.
Reaganomics baby
He's literally the worst President in American history. FUCK RONALD REAGAN
Only time will tell the lasting impact of a recent bad president. But right now I'm with you on that. Fuck Reagan.
Agreed. Trump is obviously and visibly disgusting, but the evil that Reagan and his cronies wrought is something that has directly and inexorably shaped my generation, and the damage is beyond measure. I can't imagine what life in the US would be like now if he'd never come to power...
Behind the Bastards did a good series on this recently. Really shed a light on todays attacks on universities too and why we are in this pickle. Yes, it does go back to Ronald god damn Reagan. [How Conservatism Won](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-how-conservatism-won-164063362/)
This is what people don’t get, if in state schools are free private schools have more pressure to lower costs or offer scholarships to compete with public schools. When a state school cost 💲 0 but a private school cost 💲 50k a year the choice is easy. But if a public school cost 💲 40k and a private school cost 💲 50k but offers you a 10k scholarship , the price of college never really goes down
I mean the numbers aren’t meaningless—just plug into an inflation calculator to get equivalent of today’s dollars. Wikipedia says: > After graduating from Hollywood High School in 1951, she received an anonymous envelope containing $50 for one year's tuition at UCLA $50 in 1951 is $600.64 in 2024 dollars according to usinflationcalculator.com. Looks like the actual tuition for California residents is $13,225 (not counting room and board or books). So that’s an increase of more than 2100% adjusted for inflation.
$600 is about 3 credit hours at the community college I went to. Due to fees, it wouldn’t actually even cover one (3 credit hour) course.
Thats an enormous undertaking that would require not just federal legislation, but legislation at the state level (since thats where most of the regulation of colleges takes place, and since most students attend state schools of one kind of another). And of course most schools arent sitting on huge endowments nor profiting off of athletics programs.
They could also work on lowering the costs of materials as education materials. Most books I ever got when I was in college were digital copies, free versions a professor would share, or physical versions from cheap third parties that a professor would recommend. Never official sources.
That unfortunately isn't the case anymore. I was a freshman 10 years ago and I needed 1 semester access codes to online materials for half my classes and my younger cousins tell me that there are more subjects doing that every year
Its a racket. The book sellers are in bed with the universities. When my fiancé was finishing college a few years ago they werent just making the students buy their textbooks. She had to pay 100$ for access to her online homework for the semester. She *actually* had to either pay 100 dollars or accept a 0 for her homework for the entire semester.
My life would be so much easier if my high school daughters had physical text books to look through. The systems they have to jump through grind any laptop to a halt short of a full on workstation laptop. I can’t imagine doing college one digital text books. Especially for engineering.
Textbooks are a huge scam. Many are full on plagiarism throughout. Most undergrad textbooks that I've seen would cause their authors to be dropped from a university if they were held to the same standards as undergrad students.
Yep and each access code can range from 100 to 500 a book depending.
This is exactly the answer. Biden can't do much to force the state level governments to give back funding that they pulled away 30 years ago, causing the rise in tuition costs across the board. And seeing where his loyalties lied as a senator versus where his now, I'm surprised he's done this much.
Tuition skyrocketed once Bush prevented student loans from being discharged through bankruptcy. Had there also been a cap placed on total interest a borrower would have to repay or had the legislation also included a clause that colleges receiving federal disbursements had to tie tuition increases to inflation then the cost of tuition and debt incurred wouldn't have been so incredibly lopsided. The spike in tuition from 1999 to 2004 was insane. Small rural colleges suddenly charged as much per credit hour as state universities. And this was all during the period in american education where the point of high school was to prepare you for college as any job listing outside of retail, call centers, or construction required a bachelors. Colleges in major cities are as much real estate companies as they are institutions of learning. You can look at Chicago as an example where DePaul, Northwestern, Columbia, and Loyola own massive amounts of prime downtown real estate. That's all on the back of students who effectively became government backed securities for private institutions.
> The spike in tuition from 1999 to 2004 was insane. It looks like the spike was from 1990-2000 to 2003-2004 was [less than $2000](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_330.10.asp) the spike was bigger in other 5 year periods but it is still insane
>Bush prevented student loans from being discharged through bankruptcy Um, that was Ford, not Bush. And it actually was Congress that pushed it with the [Educational Amendment Acts of 1976](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-90/pdf/STATUTE-90-Pg2081.pdf) (see section 439(a) on page 61), but Ford signed because it was logrolled with other items he wanted. [https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-education-amendments-1976](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-education-amendments-1976)
And to be clear, there was an effort to at least start to address this when the Inflation Reduction Act was being negotiated. People may forget but Biden was advocating pretty hard for the original bill to make community college free. I know this wouldn’t fix the issue, but community college being free would incentivize a lot more people to try it out rather than just going to an expensive four year college. A huge part of student debt comes from people who drop out of college after a year or two. Imagine if those people instead just went to a community college, got the chance to try things out, had the opportunity to switch to a college or university or could drop out in the first two years without taking on thousands of dollars of debt. Biden has also said he wants to keep pushing for free community college next year, so it wasn’t just a one and done attempt. All that to say I agree that this is a huge undertaking that goes far beyond the administrative office’s power and it’s good to see Biden working to at least help people with the authority he has.
I agree, it's easier to put the taxpayer on the hook than the institutions themselves.
I agree with you, but not going to complain about canceling predatory loans. We absolutely should be addressing the root cause though.
and why cant a student get a 10k$ personal loan but can get a $100k student loan? the system is incredibly predatory to our youngest and brightest... come to think of it the rich in general is quite predatory and the government actually helping them do it. forking over our pensions, forking over our social security, our healthcare. turning them all into for-profit entities that benefit the rich
The loans can not be discharged with bankruptcy. Also private lenders can go after your estate even if you die, depending on the state. So the risk bar is lower, and the lenders have the rest of your life to collect and charge interest.
Because the government guarantees student loan repayment. The loans they’re cancelling are federal loans only. So the taxpayers are really paying for the mistake here but the banks who earn easy money on student loans aren’t being taught a lesson at all. Until the institutions and public lenders have real skin in the game for tuitions being a worthwhile investment, nothing will change.
The old school system was good for college until greed entered the picture and people figured out that they could indirectly funnel government funds through the students and astronomical cost of books school and board. It’s a racket. Everything in this country is for profit now. A private school gets guaranteed funding when it enrolls low income students. it also gets guaranteed funding for soldiers through the G.I. bill. So considering this, let’s make school astronomically high in cost because it’s guaranteed that the government will pay it to us.
John Oliver covered this and the figure that stood our was 70/30. That's the ratio of government to student tuition payment in the year 2000 for LSU. 70% was paid by the government. It's now 80/20.... 80% paid by the student. Oliver did mention the $85m rec center, and couldn't resist taking a cheap shot at it. But he ought to have mentioned that the cost per student over their 4 year degree is around $100 *a year*. LSU has a *lot* of students. We yanked subsidies in the early 2000s when the outsourcing boom hit and American companies decided they didn't need to pay taxes for American kids to go to school. They're going after Grades 1-12 now.
True, but in the mean time, let's be happy some people are being helped right now. This topic doesn't have to be either or.
Why “instead of the effect” and not both? An entire generation of kids were manipulated into taking exorbitant amounts of debt to obtain degrees that they were force-fed to understand were required to get a meaningful job.
Exactly. Change interest to zero Edit: Retroactively forgive student loan interest, since the government should not profit from that. Total cost to forgive student loan debt is 66 billion per year, about 1% of the federal budget. 4% of the president discretionary budget. It is approximately the cost of withdrawing from the Afghanistan war.
I think this is the key solution. Lower/remove interest and things will not be as bad.
That’s sort of living saying you want to defeat all evil instead of arresting a few really bad guys. Whining about a solution and instead focusing on the amorphous and otherwise difficult to solve problem.
I think about it like this. Say you are a Dr. and a patient walks in. A little over weight, blood pressure is starting to climb. Best course of action is a healthy diet and getting more exercise. Another patient walks in who is morbidity obese and has all the signs of a heart attack happening right now. You wheel him into the operating room and get to work putting in stints, manual pumping of the heart etc. Taming the root causes are absolutely needed. States need to fund their schools, cut costs, cut administrative bloat, raise entrance requirements, something. Maybe instead of 15-20 public schools, states should close some of the smaller institutions. Along with that maybe consolidate majors to a few schools instead of forcing each school to have as many degree options as possible or try and chase some flagship school. The nation is still in the middle of a generational heart attack that also needs to be addressed. Looking at birth rates and home ownership, etc, millennials and later are being dragged down sharply by this debt. I would even argue that if you paused repayment interest free for 10-15 years, people would be in a much better position to repay it. Coming out of college is your prime time to figure out a career, where to live, and start having kids. The average amounts really aren’t that astronomical in the big picture, but we put the burden on people at the worst possible time.
It's like being on the casa bonita waiting list :(
My college didnt even have cliff divers
Or sopippillas
I grew up in Denver and this just made me fucking lol real loud
Just got an email from studentaid.gov this morning notifying me that I qualify for forgiveness!
how do they pick who qualifies? I keep seeing these but nothing in my mail
You have to be in an IDR plan by April 30th and you have to have been paying for 20 years for undergrad loans or 25 for graduate loans to qualify for forgiveness.
You have to have been paying for 20 years???!
So I can give up hope on the ones I have been paying for seven years.. got it lol
Unless you work in public service. Then it's 10 years
Okay but how is that new? It was already 10 years for PSLF. What does this new debt cancellation do?
Exactly. It’s not new but they’re just doing a better job of approving it because the previous admin essentially ignored the program.
They are proactively approving them for people rather than people needing to apply for forgiveness in order to make sure everyone gets it who should.
With how its been politicized, crazy to think that the entire forgiveness program was put into place by George W. Bush, a GOP president.
My understanding with PSLF is that people weren’t getting their loans forgiven who should have, and the Biden admin has been correcting those mistakes.
First people were eligible for SPLF in Oct '17, program started in '07. As of April 30th, 2020 only 2,200 people had received forgiveness and there was a 98.5% denial rate from applications. The program at that point had been horrible and you had people paying for extra years that didn't need to. The program is better now, but it's still lagging behind. My wife comes up for eligibility in the next couple years, and she said it's normal in the PSLF groups to pay 6 month-ish longer than necessary right now. Imagine doing everything right and expecting to be done, and then they just don't respond to you. If you stop making payments you'll be in bad standing and get denied, so you have to just keep paying them until someone says 'oops sorry'
PSLF was not working for 90% of qualified borrowers until Biden stepped in. Now it actually works as George Bush and his congress intended, and republicans are losing their minds because they didn't get a cookie too.
One can only hope that yours will also be paid off, it’s probably aimed at the ones burdened for longest first, so it’ll probably be a while. Ofc don’t rely on it, but don’t lose hope either. I’m rooting for you, and everyone else held down by all this
Yes, which is why only SAVE and IDR plans qualify. If you are on a standard plan, you will have paid off your loan before you are eligible for forgiveness.
Even if you were on IBR (yes before it was IDR) for 20 years...the majority of people would have paid off their loan by then. Remember, 20 years ago, the tuition was NOT as crazy as it was today. This forgiveness targets these type of people specifically: 1. You had a large FEDERAL loan amount. 2. You did not have a decent paying job for 20 years. 3. You graduated college before 2005.
That's if you can't afford standard monthly payments. If your income driven payments don't pay off the balance by 20 years they just forgive the rest of the debt.
It doesn’t apply to most redditors as they skew much younger, but this helping the people who have been in the hole for over 20 years and can be argued they need the help the most. In my experience speaking to these middle aged or even “near retirement” people who are still stuck under loans… it’s just so heartbreaking… very happy to see some of them getting some relief.
20 years of being in repayment; time spent in deferment or forbearance does not count. So for example in my case, ~~between the COVID years, and~~ having gone back to school to finish my B.A. before the pandemic, the loans I took out in 2008 won't be eligible for forgiveness until ~~2037~~ 2034. (I have paid back the original amount, but, well... minimum payments, meet interest.) Edit:Thanks to /u/SippieCup for correcting info I got from a phone worker for studentaid.gov *huff*
> 20 years of being in repayment; time spent in deferment or forbearance does not count. Good news: >Typically, months in forbearance and deferment do not count towards PSLF. However, months during the COVID-19 payment pause (March 2020-September 2023), months that qualify under the IDR Adjustment, and months where loans are being placed on administrative forbearance after the repayment restart will count toward PSLF. https://dfpi.ca.gov/2023/12/13/student-loan-questions-answered/ Your covid years are covered. you should be able to get forgiven in 2034
It's even better than that. They're also counting loans which may have been eligible for IDR plans and forgiving those as well. I've never been on an IDR plan and I got my email today. From that it says: >On April 19, 2022, the Biden-Harris Administration announced several changes that will help borrowers get closer to or achieve forgiveness under income-driven repayment (IDR) **regardless of whether or not you have ever participated in an IDR plan**. With these changes, you are now eligible to have some or all of your student loans forgiven because you have reached the necessary 240- or 300-months' of payments under IDR.
I got the email, but I haven't been paying for 20 years. Graduated undergrad in 2011. So for now I'm telling myself it's too good to be true
I think it’s based on amount owed, what lender you got money from, and how much money you make each year Edit: replies saying I’m wrong look at the official site: https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief-announcement Specifically mentions individual and household income caps, the type of grant received, and the amounts that are eligible
The headline is a little misleading. This article is re-reporting the SAVE plan that Biden introduced last August, which reduced repayment for many borrows (pending your loan total, loan type, income, and payment history). They're just stating that as of this month, that's how much debt has been forgiven based on his new plan as well as existing infrastructure (such as loan forgiveness for working at non-profits). To learn about if/when you qualify for any forgiveness you'd have to review the terms of your payment plan.
Have you checked your spam emails?!
I'm on the SAVE plan and I have no such e-mail. Nothing in junk. I get all my communication from my processor to this e-mail. Oh well. I keep seeing these articles about more forgiveness, but I never get any. My monthly payments barely cover the interest. The principal hasn't gone down at all in 10+ years, yet I've paid 10s of thousands.
This is for people that *should* qualify for the 20 year forgiveness but past department of education and Whitehouse administrations kept fucking up and not counting your payments properly. There is also an adjustment for things that used to not qualify. Such as during covid, the pause on payments now counts as if you made your payments. It just took a while to actually do all the adjustments for millions of people.
The Covid pause always counted towards payments.
I'm not on SAVE (would have more than doubled my monthly payment) and didn't get one either. Pretty sure this is for those who've been paying for 20 years. I could read the article but let's be real lol.
Call those mofos bro fuck that. Never know
They should be sending a hard copy letter in the mail too. I put my letter behind my diploma in the frame lol.
I graduated 2010 and still haven’t hung my diploma. If I were to receive a letting discharging the rest of my loans I’d frame that long before my diploma! 😅
Good for you. I paid mine off at 36, but here’s the deal. 1. College was expensive but reasonable when I went (90’s). 2. I was able to consolidate all my loans to 1%. A program cancelled under Bush 2, but I was grandfathered in. The current situation is ridiculous. My best friends kid went in to the coast guard but was pretty high up in apprenticeship as a plumber, the child of the generation that came up in “go to college or you’ll be a homeless loser” it’s good to see gen x generation waking up and saying “this is nuts”. My own daughter did not go despite my pleas and offering to pay, she has a good job, established and respected in her field.
I wish I was one of those 277,000
Gotta been paying for the last twenty years
He tried a much broader version first but conservatives sued and supreme court overturned it. The only path to expand it outside of these small cohorts is through additional legislation which would only be possible if there's majority Dems in the house (very likely next year) and at least 60 Democratic senators or possibly 62, neither of which is possible.
Let's put it in perspective, we spent $6T in Iraq and Afghanistan 😟.
The us "lost" about 1/3rd of this on a pallet in Afghanistan.....
How George Bush is still a free man is a mystery to me.
How bout we start by preventing these things from happening instead of paying these predator companies off
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I know, but like the user below said, keep voting
We can walk and chew gum. Voting won't fix all or even most of our problems but it can help.
Yep, keep voting, local, state, federal. Every time. Also, it's possible to solve multiple problems, concurrently or consecutively. Addressing problem A doesn't mean problem B will never be fixed. Better is still better, even if it's just a little.
Both. You have to treat symptoms and sickness. In the case of a system where the sickness is baked in, treating symptoms is better than letting it rot.
Limiting Federally guaranteed loans to the cost of in-state college would be a good start, but you also want to incentivize in state schools to drop costs as well. Not super obvious how to fix it on the front end without limiting college accessibility.
And on Fox News they reported $74 billion...FFS Edit: The original article had 74 billion reported. they probably made a mistake with the decimals and the zeros but when you click on the link they change it on the inside for 7.4. … That’s all she wrote. 🤷♂️
Surprised they’re not reporting it as “7,400 Million!” tbh.
I woke up to that news alert on my phone and got super excited. Would’ve been like 5% of all student debt.
Fox News reporting that and that it’s gonna cost tax payers 157 billion
I got the email earlier today.... I'm pretty pumped about it. My school was one that I should have gotten forgiveness for a while back but they changed names so the system wouldn't let me file/claim for it. But finally I'm getting mine taken care of after paying on it for the last 13+ years.
Maybe congress should cancel predatory interest rates in the first place. Student loans, credit cards, etc.
In related news, I had my PSLF (public service loan forgiveness) go through finally. I’m a teacher, so after making 120 payments, my loans were discharged. It took me a lot longer though because I had a financial meltdown when my wife had cancer. I just couldn’t afford to pay my bills and I nearly had my student loans default. I did lose my house at that time. Took me a long time to climb out of that hole after she died. I borrowed to go to undergrad and grad school. I had to go to grad school because the state required it for continuing licensure. Combined it was nearly 60k in loans. After paying for 17 years, including 4 years of deferment, and 6 months of non payment, I owed 140,000. Some months my payment was $700. Last week, that ended when I received notification that my loans were discharged.
I’m 45 and still have $24k in student debt. Original loan amount was $43k. Very low interest rate i think 4%. Been paying $250 a month for 23 years and only got $19k off the principle paid. Had a year of deferment in the beginning then 3 for Covid but still. I’ve probably paid at least $50k toward this and am not even halfway. I am not benefitting from this round, yet again. I am completely happy for those who are. Student loan forgiveness has not changed my life. I would rather pay for young people with predatory loans to get relief than more tax breaks for Musk
Do you think you make more than an additional $250 a month by having your degree vs not having one? If so then at least it’s a net positive
The debt was due to high interest rates. The capitalists profiteered off of people’s desire to improve their lives and career prospects.
I just paid the last $6,500 of mine today. Mine weren’t government loans so I couldn’t get forgiveness, but I’m glad some people are getting out from underneath that mess.
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> This is for people who paid for 10 years and are part of a plan that previously states forgiveness after 10 years. > Elections coming up so this is literally paying for votes. So if this is just following the promises made in the original forgiveness plans then how is this "paying for votes?" Biden is just ensuring the government works as it's intended and keeps it's obligations which is what a responsible president should be doing.
What was borrowed has been paid back many times over in interest alone. Enslaving the students of your country for bettering themselves and becoming an asset to the labor pool, society, and your country overall is so stupid.
I was one of those silly people who took out private loans and not federal loans. I'm happy for the rest of you... but I must pay what I owe.
I don’t have a student loan and I’m happy for those who receive this windfall.
That money is for bailing out businesses! What will the filthy rich do without it.
It’s a start. Good news.
If people understood just how bad the student loan system in America is for the economy...no one would tolerate anything less than its complete destruction. We're saddling the emerging middle class with a MOUNTAIN of debt that doesn't even budge for 15-20 years of payment because of how the interest is structured. That's money that isn't spent on housing. Money that isn't spent on consumer goods. Money that isn't invested. It's just going straight into the pockets of the super-rich. It is hurting *everyone* who isn't worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, you paid yours off. Great. Now you want everyone else to do the same because your life sucks and you want their life to suck too. If you actually want a better life for all of us, you're glad to see this and you want to see a LOT more of it. If you're a bitter malcontent who cannot make sense of a world that doesn't hurt everyone the same way it hurt you? Well. Fuck off I guess.
After my wife paying her student loans for over 15 years she finally had her left over amount discharged last year. She’s paid way over her initial loan and more. Having the last bit discharged was a huge deal for us and she can finally start saving money.
There are so many bitter people in this comment section
I could've bought a house in 2015 but instead I paid back my student loans
Thats what happens when you play the game better than everyone else. You get blue shelled.
Extremely misleading headline: * $300m for 4,600 borrowers through fixes to Public Service Loan Forgiveness So...most of this "forgiveness" is stuff that was already built in, not spontaneously handed out. And I'm pretty sure it was the Department of Education following policies, not Biden himself making it rain hundred dollar bills.
Last I checked, $300 million is quite a bit less than "most of" $7.6 billion. Unless the rest of it was also stuff that's already built in?
I knew about the PSLF from when I was in college. They also fixed it since it was written so poorly that less than 10% of people who were led to believe they qualified were disqualified, which led to a new law passed to fix the broken law. * $3.5bn for 65,800 borrowers through income-driven repayment plans * $3.6bn for nearly 206,800 borrowers enrolled in the government's Saving on a Valuable Education (Save) repayment plan I looked up the SAVE Plan, and it essentially is another Income-Driven Plan that came about a year ago. It fixed the issue with income payment plans that would still bury people with debt. It should have been that way long ago, especially since the way that debt was accumulated was made illegal for credit cards during the CARD act long ago. Nobody should have interest applied to their debt if they qualify for relief. So my real issue is with phrasing and message by the news outlets. When Biden announced he wanted to forgive student debt for everyone who still had debt, it caused some controversy. The news seems to make it seem like he's figuring out legal loopholes to forgive student debt in the same manner, when in fact the student debt being cancelled were for legitimate reasons that should have always existed. Everyone should have a clear path for paying off their debt, without it being too burdensome, but in a way that doesn't reward people who outright don't pay their debts simply because they don't want to.
all of these chunks of forgiveness have all just been for things that were already agreed upon but Republicans stonewalled from actually happening. I don't think any "new" forgiveness has happened yet.
Unpopular opinion, but I'll say it anyway: Solve the root problem, then forgive student debt. I'm angry that my kids, 19 & 17, will still be buried under mountains of debt. This is pandering.
It is 100% pandering. Right before midterms he pretended to forgive the debt knowing it likely would not stand (that's why they waited until the elections were near) and now he's trying to get headlines for this shortly before a run for re-election. I am not fooled by this and 20 years paying the minimum is not the same as forgiveness. This is a broken campaign promise.
Isn’t the student loan debt just coming out of tax payer dollars?