President Joe Biden recently announced an additional $4.5 billion in student debt cancellation for over 60,000 borrowers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.
This latest relief brings the total number of public service workers who have had their student loans forgiven under the Biden-Harris administration to over 1 million. Before Biden took office, only 7,000 borrowers had received forgiveness through PSLF, highlighting the transformative impact of the administration's reforms to the program.
“For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments. We vowed to fix that, and because of actions from our administration, now over 1 million public service workers have gotten the relief they are entitled to under the law,” Biden said in a statement.
Launched in 2007, PSLF was supposed to give student loan relief to teachers and other public servants who spent at least 10 years on the job – from firefighters to police officers, to nurses to members of the military. The problem was that the program was poorly designed, meaning many public servants were denied assistance and, in some years, 98 percent of applicants were rejected. Often, it was discovered after 10 years of timely payments that they had not been enrolled in the right kind of repayment plan or had taken out the wrong kind of loan.
The Biden administration revised and expanded PSLF in the past year. This made the program easier to qualify for, reinstated forms of eligibility, and issued blanket waivers to make credit earned simpler for many borrowers. A Limited PSLF Waiver was created to support public service workers impacted by the pandemic, allowing prior payments on direct and federally held FFEL loans to count towards PSLF regardless of repayment plan or type of loan. Pell Grants make college more affordable for vulnerable populations and borrowers and employers can now complete an online application, making it quicker to see loans forgiven.