(VitalNews.org) – The Biden administration announced that they will be forgiving another set of student loans amounting to over seven billion dollars for more than one hundred and sixty thousand borrowers.
The relief is a result of the U.S. Department of Education’s improvements to their income-driven repayment plans as well as their Student Loan Forgiveness Program. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said, “The Biden-Harris Administration remains persistent about our efforts to bring student debt relief to millions more across the country.”
This batch of loan forgiveness includes over five billion for sixty thousand borrowers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness and almost two billion dollars for forty thousand people enrolled in the income-driven repayment plan.
Another six hundred million dollars will also go to fifty thousand people who are under the Biden administration’s new income-driven payment plan known as the SAVE plan. The SAVE plan would help students who have had debt for more than ten years if they took out an original balance of under twelve thousand dollars.
The Supreme Court turned down President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan last year, but since then the administration has been experimenting with their existing authority to forgive student debt.
Since they began loan forgiveness, the Biden administration has forgiven the student debt of almost five million people. The programs have undergone some adjustments as some people have stated the programs were difficult to navigate or they weren’t receiving the aid they were promised. One of the problems that occurred, for example, was one rule that would lead to a full loan erasure after a certain period of time, but it was found that loan companies were not keeping a record of the borrowers’ timelines.
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