4 ms·

> At least 40,000 borrowers will receive immediate debt cancellation under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program. How is this news?

• protonimitate 4y ago
  > Several thousand borrowers with older loans will also receive forgiveness through income-driven repayment (IDR) forgiveness, plus another 3.6 million borrowers will receive at least three years of additional credit toward IDR forgiveness, the Education Department said in a statement. I think this is the actual news. Although it doesn't state what the selection process is.
• adoxyz 4y ago
  I think historically, the number of loans actually forgiven by the PSLF program has been very very low, even for people that qualify.
  • Spellman 4y ago
    Particularly a while ago it was nearly impossible to utilize the program because it was a bureaucratic and underfunded mess. So the number who qualified was effectively zero. Now it's marginally less terrible and actually forgiving some people's loans.
    • jhpaul 4y ago
      Specifically, the previous Dept of Ed administration torpedoed the program. When the first class of PSLF candidates hit the 10 yr mark in 2017, 99% were rejected [0]. [0]: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/23/public-service-loan-forgiveness-program-1442311 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/23/public-service-loa...
  • _moof 4y ago
    I know folks who have worked towards PSLF and ended up getting screwed because they weren't on the right repayment plan. Absolutely devastating to find out you've spent ten years working on something only to have it fall apart because you checked the wrong box once. And apparently this is a very, very easy mistake to make.
• dv_dt 4y ago
  It's news in that they're actually unblocking programs which actually had been long legislatively approved paths for forgiveness and were already supposed to have been operating to this end for years. It's not news in that these are not new categories of, nor expansions of previous commitments to student loan forgiveness. When you look at the overall stats of student loans, a increasing number of them (a majority!) look like they will be never paid off over their lifetime, and we are still in a situation where if an individual has a small loan problem it's the responsibility of an individual. But if an entire class or multiple-generations (or a big enough individual loan), has problems, then it's a problem for the bank - in this case the US gov't and an even bigger problem of our overall society and providing an sustainable economically competitive skilled labor pool.
• musicale 4y ago
  It used to be that for PSLF you had to make 120 sequential "on-time" payments and if your loan provider claimed (correctly or incorrectly) that one of them was late then the clock would reset, making it next to impossible for anyone to claim the benefit. A 10-year clock that can be reset at any time by the bank isn't good. I believe they fixed it (possibly temporarily) so that the clock no longer resets. This is a partial fix. The full fix would be to have PLSF pay out incrementally, say 10% after each 12 payments.
  • ffggvv 4y ago
    is it really next to impossible to pay on time? i assume you can dispute if they claim late incorrectly
  • bombcar 4y ago
    The real solution is to stop figleafing the problem and have the government handle all aspects of the loans directly without the involvement of any banks. The government already has a large department of the Treasury that handles this kind of thing.
• Fomite 4y ago
  Given it was actively blocked during the previous administration? The PSLF Program actually working as intended is news.