Credit: Abhiram Juvvadi
A service offered by Penn is providing millions in student loan forgiveness for employees.
Penn offers the free service to help faculty, staff, and postdoctoral researchers and fellows navigate the nationally offered Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program. The loan has helped 29 employees save more than $2 million in less than a year. The loan’s have ranged from from $5,000 to $300,000.
The PSLF Program forgives federal loans for eligible employees who work full-time in public services. Since Penn is a not-for-profit organization, some employees qualify for the PSLF program, according to Penn Today.
Because of the program, Chambrel Jones, chief of staff to the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, had $87,215 in student loans forgiven. Jones told Penn Today she signed her first loan when she was 19 and was projected to pay it off at age 45.
“Honestly, it felt like I would be paying my student loans off for the rest of my life,” she said to Penn Today.
In September 2022, Jones reached out to PeopleJoy, the organization that administers the loan service. By late April 2023, all her student loans had been forgiven.
“I was at home at the time, and it just felt like an unbelievable reality,” Jones said.
The Division of Human Resources at Penn first engaged with PeopleJoy in September 2022, striving to help Penn employees handle student loan debt.
As a whole, Americans hold about $1.75 trillion in student debt, according to Forbes.
“We looked at ways to help employees alleviate the financial and mental health burden of having debt and going through the PSLF process, so it just made sense to us to offer this service to our employees,” director of HR programs in Penn’s Division of Human Resources Elena McClelland.
In July 2023 in the decision on Biden, President of the United States, et al. v. Nebraska et al., the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Secretary of Education did not have the authority to cancel student debt, rejecting the plan Biden announced in August 2022. The proposal would have forgiven up to $20,000 in student loans for low-income borrowers, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.
563 additional employees are in the process of engaging with PeopleJoy about their student loans. It takes a minimum of six months from the opening online assessment to loan forgiveness, Penn Today reported.
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