The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it approved an additional $4.8 billion in federal student loan debt cancellation for roughly 80,000 borrowers.
The move is the latest in a series of efforts underway at the Education Department to provide student loan debt relief to as many borrowers as possible in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision this summer to block President Joe Biden’s sweeping debt cancellation plan.
To date, the department has approved $132 billion in federal student loan debt cancellation for 3.6 million borrowers.
“It’s historic,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters on Wednesday, speaking about the totality of relief provided. “No other administration even comes close. We are being intentional about ensuring that higher education is affordable.”
“These latest discharges are the result of this administration’s relentless efforts to fix a broken student loan system,” he said. “When I first joined the department, I was appalled by the dysfunction in our existing student loan program. It was virtually impossible for eligible borrowers to access the student debt relief they rightfully earned.”
The latest round of relief stems from fixes to the income-driven repayment plan and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, bringing the total relief derived from those two buckets to $44 billion and $53.5 billion, respectively.
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The department has also canceled $11.7 billion for borrowers with a total and permanent disability as well as $22.5 billion for borrowers who were cheated by their schools or saw their institutions suddenly close.
“This level of debt relief is unparalleled, and we have no intention of slowing down,” Cardona said.
Indeed, in October the department began the formal regulatory process to provide debt cancellation to potentially five additional groups of borrowers, which Cardona announced they would pursue after the Supreme Court blocked what was set to be one of the Biden administration’s biggest policy wins of his first term.
“I vowed to improve the student loan system so that a higher education provides Americans with opportunity and prosperity – not unmanageable burdens of student loan debt,” Biden said in a statement. “I won’t back down from using every tool at our disposal.”
While it hasn’t necessarily garnered significant attention, the administration has been making top-to-bottom changes to the American higher education system – including the finalized rule for how for-profit colleges must prove their graduates are gainfully employed and earning enough to pay back their debt in order to be eligible to receive federal student aid, and a blueprint for colleges and universities seeking to continue using race in their admissions process in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that barred the use of affirmative action.
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