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Please, please, please take note before commenting: These are being forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created in 2007 (fifteen years a

by _moof 4y ago

Please, please, please take note before commenting: These are being forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created in 2007 (fifteen years ago), which eliminates your remaining debt after you've made ten years of payments while working in the public sector (government or non-profit). This has nothing to do with current debates around loan forgiveness.

endtime 4y ago
That's where the 40,000 in the headline comes from. But the article also says this: > 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.
- colpabar 4y ago
  I'll believe it when I see it. I vividly remember getting "credits" for $1 from fafsa, so if it's anything like that, it will be meaningless.
  - stonogo 4y ago
    I think you might be misremembering, because the FAFSA is just the application you fill out to apply for student aid. Maybe the Department of Education issued the credits?
- branon 4y ago
  Does this mean full-time public service workers with pre-PSLF loans, or are the feds debating broadening the scope of loan forgiveness to include persons in other careers as well?
  - tedivm 4y ago
    They aren't changing the scope at all- they're just fixing some problems that meant people who should have gotten their loans forgiven but didn't will finally get that problem corrected, and they're granting credits for people who are already in the system. This will now allow a single person outside of that program to benefit, and it won't add new people to the program. This may change with future actions, but quite frankly it's kind of embarrassing that they're claiming this is a win when all they did was follow through on a promise made years ago that was basically ignored.
- marricks 4y ago
  45 million folks in the US have student loans so even some action for 3.6 million folks isn’t a large percentage.
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    So since it's only 8% it's fine? How many 8% increments can there be until we're allowed to be against this? I'm against any percentage of funneling taxpayer money to college administrators. Reduce tuition, don't rubber stamp federal loans while letting administrators increase costs.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      Student debt is massive, yes, but why are so few people asking where that money actually went? A cursory search says student loan debt is roughly $1.6 trillion dollars and there are around 4,000 to 6,000 colleges/universities. This is a rough number and the actual amount depends on your criteria, but the gist is that you have a ton of money flowing into a relatively small pool. Yes, I know not every dollar of loans goes to the school, but I really have to beg the question on what these institutions have done with all this money. Seems like any discussion about forgiving debt should involve going after some of these universities themselves.
      - CSSer 4y ago
        In the case of my alum, I think I can tell you: they spent it on housing and amenities to attract more students (quantity, not quality). I watched it happen while I attended. A university operates under the same principles as any other business in this case. Administrators are not innocent here, but they do have to live within the system and work with the incentives they are provided. Loans are made available to students and parents to shop around. This is a big part of what has created the upward pressure on tuition. We’ve revitalized a lot of state school campuses while letting their academics rot. Parents and students see fancy common areas, gyms, cafeterias and living spaces when they visit campuses then use that to decide where to go unless they’re very focused on the education, which they’re likely not because most very focused students require less financial help. If that money had been given to the administrators we are often so quick to villify, this picture may be a very different one.
nr2x 4y ago
Exactly, this is pure PR the headline should be “Government Fulfills Terms of Loans it Failed to Meet”
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Alternative could also be “government obfuscates prices for education and certain types of labor by offering nebulous benefit, the cost of which can be subject to much manipulation for purposes of presenting it as a low cost benefit”. It would be straight forward to simply pay for higher education expenses directly, with much less bureaucracy and more transparent pricing, allowing for better allocation of society’s resources. But, as always, that would reduce the avenues for corruption, and so the politically viable option is the circuitous option.
  - nr2x 4y ago
    This is the Cal system before Reagan basically. Generated more than a few Nobels in addition to the educational mission.
    - frumper 4y ago
      California state university tuition was heavily subsidized by taxpayers 50 years ago. It’s less subsidized today and it’s still over 50% taxpayer funding. That feels like the opposite of transparent pricing.
mywittyname 4y ago
I believe a lot of this wave of forgiveness is due to correcting/removing the road blocks for this program put into place by Devos in previous years. The article refers to these as "historical failures" but I think that being very generous.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  It wasn't just the Trump administration; it was clear there were significant problems with the way the program was administered well before the first loans were supposed to start qualifying in 2017. Among other things, the Bush and Obama administrations that created and administrated the program provided no guidance and no oversight to the companies overseeing the loans, so the companies made it effectively impossible to qualify.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    Hard disagree. The Obama administration drastically altered federal student loans worked, end-to-end. One of the largest changes was to get the DoE directly into the market of lending and holding student loan debt. Cutting out servicers like Navient, and costing them tons of money in lost subsidies and essentially nationalizing the industry. Policies such as Public Search Loan Forgiveness, Pay as You Earn (PAYE), Perkins Loan cancellation, and several others were part of the Student Aid Bill of Rights. Having the government hold student loan debt is foundational to making these policies work. This was a key policy platform of the Obama administration. It's less widely known about, compared to ACA, but still an important one. And this is probably the reason that it's been a day-one policy issue for the Biden administration.
    - InitialLastName 4y ago
      > And this is probably the reason that it's been a day-one policy issue for the Biden administration Here on day 455 of the Biden administration (who, by the way, was the least interested in resolving the student loan issue among his Democratic Primary rivals), it sure doesn't look like it was a "day one" issue.
MR4D 4y ago
This is a good point. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program is like the GI Bill, but they pay off your college debt after service instead of paying your college after service.
throwingrocks 4y ago
Seeing tons of comments about what people THINK an article says or about their opinion on something related is causing me to use this site less and less.
- soheil 4y ago
  Completely agree that some of the comments are off the wall. But in all fairness the Ruerters article doesn't highlight the public sector part enough. To learn more you'd have to do your own research to find that PSLF has stringent requirements. IMO this is more an example of how bad journalism can have damaging effect on even a well versed audience.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Most of the people who "get" the article already knew what the PSLF was (I suspected it from the headline alone).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jbergens 4y ago
  In this case I also think the article was really thin on details. Some people get $10,000 written off, others get some other limit to how much they will pay and so on. No clear details I could see about what the limits are and who will be targeted. There probably are details somewhere but this was not really answering my questions.
jeegsy 4y ago
What then is the point of the article? To tout something implemented by another administration? I haven't been employed by the taxpayers so who cares?
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  The PSLF has been very badly administered to date. The Biden administration is finally applying it the way it was intended.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  Comments like these boggle my mind. This is news. This is reporting. Literally taking what is done and sharing it with the masses: X did Y. That's it. Did you know this happened before this article? No. Does your caring change the fact that it's news? No. "What's the point of the article?" To inform. That this needs to be questioned is upsetting.
  - jwarden 4y ago
    Oh, but it is so much more than “X did Y”. The choice of which facts to report, when, and how, has huge impact on what people come to believe. There are a thousand ways to deceive while uttering nothing but true statements. The question to ask is not “is the headline literally true?”, but “what does the headline cause people to believe?”
  - jeegsy 4y ago
    It is news to me yes and yet, by any definition of news I understand, a measure taken in 2007 is continuing is not. To further make my point, the original commenter felt the need, correctly I think to clarify that the article is not discussing a new policy! "What's the point of the article?" is a short way of asking both what the author wishes to communicate, why and most importantly what the intention is. I had hoped my asking the question in the first place would be a clue that I dont buy that it is just "to inform"
commandlinefan 4y ago
> are being forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created in 2007 ... nothing to do with current debates around loan forgiveness Well, FWIW, I'd never heard of that program before now, but I'm not super happy about it, either.
- dangerlibrary 4y ago
  There are a lot of different versions of these income-based repayment programs, dating back to the early 00s at least. They are all structured similarly but have differing eligibility cutoffs and rules. Typically they involved making payments on your loans for 20-25 years at some maximum % of your income before the remaining balance is forgiven. PSLF has a shorter forgiveness window (10 years) but you need to make 120 payments while working some job that is socially useful but not-market-optimal like public service or working for a nonprofit. FWIW, IBR systems they are a common policy suggestion from both conservatives and liberals (with differing priorities / rules).
- halJordan 4y ago
  Idk why you dont like the program but generally speaking this program is only needed because civil servants get paid absurdly low salaries.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cato_the_elder 4y ago
> Public Service Loan Forgiveness program Come work for the permanent undemocratic bureaucracy, and you'll even your student loans forgiven. But if you decide to go down the path of becoming a kulak, the student loans will be with you even if you go bankrupt. I'm curious where the sudden bump to 40k comes from. According to Wikipedia [1]: > The Department of Education reported that 2,215 borrowers had the remainder of their respective student loans forgiven under the program as of April 30, 2020. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Servic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Servic
- oldgregg 4y ago
  FAANG has plenty of private XKeyscore wrong-think APIs that the bureaucracy utilizes under the auspices of "fraud prevention" to filter out "bad thinkers" from various activities. Welcome to fascism, folks.
nimbius 4y ago
Its an interesting piece of legislation to see, and strongly implies former senator Joe Bidens initial student debt legislation was beginning to have seriously negative repercussions at the federal level for employee retention and hiring not even 5 years into its inception. Back in 2005 Biden supported and stumped for a bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protections and led the country into a 1.7 trillion dollar student debt crisis. Watching President Joe Biden offer token debt forgiveness in 2022 is a little bit infuriating to watch as he could easily have spent the last seventeen years working to reform his mistake. If i had to weigh in on the sudden rise of student debt forgiveness under the current administration id say its political. inflation, gas prices, housing shortages, and supply chain issues have made it all the more practical to take action now and shore up the old midterm voter appeal.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  If you had actually read the article, you would have seen that the loans were forgiven under a student loan forgiveness program introduced in 2007.
  - nimbius 4y ago
    i read the article. the point im making is that the federal government enacted forgiveness for its employees only 2 years after the 2005 reform to make discharging student loans impossible. you can learn more about the 2005 bankruptcy reform act here: https://www.lawb.uscourts.gov/bankruptcy-reform-act-2005 https://www.lawb.uscourts.gov/bankruptcy-reform-act-2005
jatone 4y ago
its 100% intentional on the administrations part. this is their 'creative' way of trying to not meet their campaign promise. highly annoying.
- MCllorf 4y ago
  He still has time to do loan forgiveness "helicopter money" style. But even if all we got was an expansion of targeted relief programs I think it totally counts as fulfilling his talking point. The issue with student debt is that for some people there's no way out, but generally speaking college-educated people are more well-off and forgiving all debt would be a regressive stimulus that targets the wealthier side of the population. Targeted relief is a great way around that.
  - jatone 4y ago
    this isn't targetted relief. this is shit that was already suppose to be done. also regressive stimulus are not even a thing. maybe you're thinking of regressive taxes? which still wouldn't be right.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >also regressive stimulus are not even a thing. maybe you're thinking of regressive taxes? Regressive taxes favor the rich over the poor. By "regressive stimulus" I'm presuming he's talking about stimulus that favors the rich (eg. well off layers/doctors with high student loan debt but high earning potential) over people with modest student loans but low earning potential.
      - jatone 4y ago
        which still isn't correct. it doesn't hurt the poor that the upper middle class will also receive this benefit. regressive taxes do. in fact this policy still helps the lower income class because many of them will also benefit from it and far more than the upper middle class. this means testing bullshit has got to stop.
      - 4y ago

by _moof 4y ago

endtime 4y ago

That's where the 40,000 in the headline comes from. But the article also says this: > 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.

colpabar 4y ago
I'll believe it when I see it. I vividly remember getting "credits" for $1 from fafsa, so if it's anything like that, it will be meaningless.
- stonogo 4y ago
  I think you might be misremembering, because the FAFSA is just the application you fill out to apply for student aid. Maybe the Department of Education issued the credits?
branon 4y ago
Does this mean full-time public service workers with pre-PSLF loans, or are the feds debating broadening the scope of loan forgiveness to include persons in other careers as well?
- tedivm 4y ago
  They aren't changing the scope at all- they're just fixing some problems that meant people who should have gotten their loans forgiven but didn't will finally get that problem corrected, and they're granting credits for people who are already in the system. This will now allow a single person outside of that program to benefit, and it won't add new people to the program. This may change with future actions, but quite frankly it's kind of embarrassing that they're claiming this is a win when all they did was follow through on a promise made years ago that was basically ignored.
marricks 4y ago
45 million folks in the US have student loans so even some action for 3.6 million folks isn’t a large percentage.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  So since it's only 8% it's fine? How many 8% increments can there be until we're allowed to be against this? I'm against any percentage of funneling taxpayer money to college administrators. Reduce tuition, don't rubber stamp federal loans while letting administrators increase costs.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    Student debt is massive, yes, but why are so few people asking where that money actually went? A cursory search says student loan debt is roughly $1.6 trillion dollars and there are around 4,000 to 6,000 colleges/universities. This is a rough number and the actual amount depends on your criteria, but the gist is that you have a ton of money flowing into a relatively small pool. Yes, I know not every dollar of loans goes to the school, but I really have to beg the question on what these institutions have done with all this money. Seems like any discussion about forgiving debt should involve going after some of these universities themselves.
    - CSSer 4y ago
      In the case of my alum, I think I can tell you: they spent it on housing and amenities to attract more students (quantity, not quality). I watched it happen while I attended. A university operates under the same principles as any other business in this case. Administrators are not innocent here, but they do have to live within the system and work with the incentives they are provided. Loans are made available to students and parents to shop around. This is a big part of what has created the upward pressure on tuition. We’ve revitalized a lot of state school campuses while letting their academics rot. Parents and students see fancy common areas, gyms, cafeterias and living spaces when they visit campuses then use that to decide where to go unless they’re very focused on the education, which they’re likely not because most very focused students require less financial help. If that money had been given to the administrators we are often so quick to villify, this picture may be a very different one.

nr2x 4y ago

Exactly, this is pure PR the headline should be “Government Fulfills Terms of Loans it Failed to Meet”

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Alternative could also be “government obfuscates prices for education and certain types of labor by offering nebulous benefit, the cost of which can be subject to much manipulation for purposes of presenting it as a low cost benefit”. It would be straight forward to simply pay for higher education expenses directly, with much less bureaucracy and more transparent pricing, allowing for better allocation of society’s resources. But, as always, that would reduce the avenues for corruption, and so the politically viable option is the circuitous option.
- nr2x 4y ago
  This is the Cal system before Reagan basically. Generated more than a few Nobels in addition to the educational mission.
  - frumper 4y ago
    California state university tuition was heavily subsidized by taxpayers 50 years ago. It’s less subsidized today and it’s still over 50% taxpayer funding. That feels like the opposite of transparent pricing.

mywittyname 4y ago

I believe a lot of this wave of forgiveness is due to correcting/removing the road blocks for this program put into place by Devos in previous years. The article refers to these as "historical failures" but I think that being very generous.

InitialLastName 4y ago
It wasn't just the Trump administration; it was clear there were significant problems with the way the program was administered well before the first loans were supposed to start qualifying in 2017. Among other things, the Bush and Obama administrations that created and administrated the program provided no guidance and no oversight to the companies overseeing the loans, so the companies made it effectively impossible to qualify.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Hard disagree. The Obama administration drastically altered federal student loans worked, end-to-end. One of the largest changes was to get the DoE directly into the market of lending and holding student loan debt. Cutting out servicers like Navient, and costing them tons of money in lost subsidies and essentially nationalizing the industry. Policies such as Public Search Loan Forgiveness, Pay as You Earn (PAYE), Perkins Loan cancellation, and several others were part of the Student Aid Bill of Rights. Having the government hold student loan debt is foundational to making these policies work. This was a key policy platform of the Obama administration. It's less widely known about, compared to ACA, but still an important one. And this is probably the reason that it's been a day-one policy issue for the Biden administration.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    > And this is probably the reason that it's been a day-one policy issue for the Biden administration Here on day 455 of the Biden administration (who, by the way, was the least interested in resolving the student loan issue among his Democratic Primary rivals), it sure doesn't look like it was a "day one" issue.

MR4D 4y ago

This is a good point. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program is like the GI Bill, but they pay off your college debt after service instead of paying your college after service.

throwingrocks 4y ago

Seeing tons of comments about what people THINK an article says or about their opinion on something related is causing me to use this site less and less.

soheil 4y ago
Completely agree that some of the comments are off the wall. But in all fairness the Ruerters article doesn't highlight the public sector part enough. To learn more you'd have to do your own research to find that PSLF has stringent requirements. IMO this is more an example of how bad journalism can have damaging effect on even a well versed audience.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Most of the people who "get" the article already knew what the PSLF was (I suspected it from the headline alone).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jbergens 4y ago
In this case I also think the article was really thin on details. Some people get $10,000 written off, others get some other limit to how much they will pay and so on. No clear details I could see about what the limits are and who will be targeted. There probably are details somewhere but this was not really answering my questions.

jeegsy 4y ago

What then is the point of the article? To tout something implemented by another administration? I haven't been employed by the taxpayers so who cares?

NelsonMinar 4y ago
The PSLF has been very badly administered to date. The Biden administration is finally applying it the way it was intended.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jasonlotito 4y ago
Comments like these boggle my mind. This is news. This is reporting. Literally taking what is done and sharing it with the masses: X did Y. That's it. Did you know this happened before this article? No. Does your caring change the fact that it's news? No. "What's the point of the article?" To inform. That this needs to be questioned is upsetting.
- jwarden 4y ago
  Oh, but it is so much more than “X did Y”. The choice of which facts to report, when, and how, has huge impact on what people come to believe. There are a thousand ways to deceive while uttering nothing but true statements. The question to ask is not “is the headline literally true?”, but “what does the headline cause people to believe?”
- jeegsy 4y ago
  It is news to me yes and yet, by any definition of news I understand, a measure taken in 2007 is continuing is not. To further make my point, the original commenter felt the need, correctly I think to clarify that the article is not discussing a new policy! "What's the point of the article?" is a short way of asking both what the author wishes to communicate, why and most importantly what the intention is. I had hoped my asking the question in the first place would be a clue that I dont buy that it is just "to inform"

commandlinefan 4y ago

> are being forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created in 2007 ... nothing to do with current debates around loan forgiveness Well, FWIW, I'd never heard of that program before now, but I'm not super happy about it, either.

dangerlibrary 4y ago
There are a lot of different versions of these income-based repayment programs, dating back to the early 00s at least. They are all structured similarly but have differing eligibility cutoffs and rules. Typically they involved making payments on your loans for 20-25 years at some maximum % of your income before the remaining balance is forgiven. PSLF has a shorter forgiveness window (10 years) but you need to make 120 payments while working some job that is socially useful but not-market-optimal like public service or working for a nonprofit. FWIW, IBR systems they are a common policy suggestion from both conservatives and liberals (with differing priorities / rules).
halJordan 4y ago
Idk why you dont like the program but generally speaking this program is only needed because civil servants get paid absurdly low salaries.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cato_the_elder 4y ago

> Public Service Loan Forgiveness program Come work for the permanent undemocratic bureaucracy, and you'll even your student loans forgiven. But if you decide to go down the path of becoming a kulak, the student loans will be with you even if you go bankrupt. I'm curious where the sudden bump to 40k comes from. According to Wikipedia [1]: > The Department of Education reported that 2,215 borrowers had the remainder of their respective student loans forgiven under the program as of April 30, 2020. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Servic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Servic

oldgregg 4y ago
FAANG has plenty of private XKeyscore wrong-think APIs that the bureaucracy utilizes under the auspices of "fraud prevention" to filter out "bad thinkers" from various activities. Welcome to fascism, folks.

nimbius 4y ago

Its an interesting piece of legislation to see, and strongly implies former senator Joe Bidens initial student debt legislation was beginning to have seriously negative repercussions at the federal level for employee retention and hiring not even 5 years into its inception. Back in 2005 Biden supported and stumped for a bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protections and led the country into a 1.7 trillion dollar student debt crisis. Watching President Joe Biden offer token debt forgiveness in 2022 is a little bit infuriating to watch as he could easily have spent the last seventeen years working to reform his mistake. If i had to weigh in on the sudden rise of student debt forgiveness under the current administration id say its political. inflation, gas prices, housing shortages, and supply chain issues have made it all the more practical to take action now and shore up the old midterm voter appeal.

gamblor956 4y ago
If you had actually read the article, you would have seen that the loans were forgiven under a student loan forgiveness program introduced in 2007.
- nimbius 4y ago
  i read the article. the point im making is that the federal government enacted forgiveness for its employees only 2 years after the 2005 reform to make discharging student loans impossible. you can learn more about the 2005 bankruptcy reform act here: https://www.lawb.uscourts.gov/bankruptcy-reform-act-2005 https://www.lawb.uscourts.gov/bankruptcy-reform-act-2005

jatone 4y ago

its 100% intentional on the administrations part. this is their 'creative' way of trying to not meet their campaign promise. highly annoying.

MCllorf 4y ago
He still has time to do loan forgiveness "helicopter money" style. But even if all we got was an expansion of targeted relief programs I think it totally counts as fulfilling his talking point. The issue with student debt is that for some people there's no way out, but generally speaking college-educated people are more well-off and forgiving all debt would be a regressive stimulus that targets the wealthier side of the population. Targeted relief is a great way around that.
- jatone 4y ago
  this isn't targetted relief. this is shit that was already suppose to be done. also regressive stimulus are not even a thing. maybe you're thinking of regressive taxes? which still wouldn't be right.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >also regressive stimulus are not even a thing. maybe you're thinking of regressive taxes? Regressive taxes favor the rich over the poor. By "regressive stimulus" I'm presuming he's talking about stimulus that favors the rich (eg. well off layers/doctors with high student loan debt but high earning potential) over people with modest student loans but low earning potential.
    - jatone 4y ago
      which still isn't correct. it doesn't hurt the poor that the upper middle class will also receive this benefit. regressive taxes do. in fact this policy still helps the lower income class because many of them will also benefit from it and far more than the upper middle class. this means testing bullshit has got to stop.
    - 4y ago