Student loans

The administration of President Joe Biden has not made a final decision on student loan cancellation, a White House spokesperson said on Friday, ...

read more Not to mention tens of billions more saved by the 41 million borrowers who have benefited from the extended student loan payment pause," Patel said. "No decisions have been made yet. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com The Washington Post report cited three people familiar with the plan. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Eliminating $10,000 in federal student loans would cancel the student loan debt of up to 16 million borrowers, representing around a third of all student loan ...

Biden officials could also rely on the HEROES Act of 2003, which allows the Secretary of Education to “modify” federal student loan programs during a national emergency. Administration officials have not confirmed the anticipated legal basis for mass student loan forgiveness. Advocates had been calling on Biden to make any student loan forgiveness initiative universal and automatic so that the relief could be implemented quickly, and its impacts would be as broad as possible. But imposing any sort of income cap on student loan forgiveness could inevitably make implementation more complicated. Top administration officials have been saying for weeks that some sort of widespread student loan cancellation initiative is under serious consideration. Speculation has been building that Biden will make an announcement as soon as this Saturday, when he is scheduled to give a commencement address at the University of Delaware, his alma mater.

President Biden is nearing a decision on student loan debt forgiveness, with the president and his team zeroing in on canceling $10000 per borrower, ...

The move is likely to reignite fights between Democrats and the GOP over federal spending and higher education.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that roughly 70 percent of the benefit will go to those in the top half of the income spectrum. The administration has already wiped out $18.5 billion in loans for more than 750,000 people by temporarily expanding or streamlining existing forgiveness programs, including those designed to help public servants and borrowers defrauded by their colleges. Still, even by capping forgiveness at $10,000, the Biden administration could help people who are arguably most in need of cancellation — those in default on their loans. Proponents of student debt forgiveness, including Warren and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), have urged the administration to go much further and cancel at least $50,000 per borrower, if not all outstanding federal education loans. Canceling $10,000 in debt for everyone with federal student loans would settle the balances of roughly a third of borrowers, while cutting total debt by at least half for another 20 percent, according to the latest data from the Education Department. It’s unclear, however, how income limits would affect those numbers. A self-attestation process, whereby people would certify that their income qualifies, could pose challenges for the government to verify the information. And because it probably will take months for the Education Department to implement any program, the political benefits could be limited. Most of the nation’s 41 million student borrowers stand to benefit. But while the administration has looked at polling suggesting a large majority of young voters support debt cancellation, the politics of the move remain unclear. It was unclear whether the administration will simultaneously require interest and payments to resume at the end of August, when the current pause is scheduled to lapse. Biden told a meeting of Hispanic lawmakers last month that he was open to canceling student loan debt. The decision will also ignite new fights between Democrats and Republicans over federal spending and could prove to be a defining issue on the campaign trail, as GOP lawmakers have already said the idea amounts to wasteful spending that primarily benefits affluent college-educated professionals.

After months of deliberation and two years of extending a pause on student loan repayments, President Joe Biden is expected to announce a plan to cancel ...

The bill is unlikely to become law anytime soon with a 50-50 Senate, a Democratic-controlled House, and Biden in the Oval Office. According to Forbes, the White House is denying the report of a decision on forgiving some portion of the debt, saying Biden is still considering options and has not settled on a plan. After months of deliberation and two years of extending a pause on student loan repayments, President Joe Biden is expected to announce a plan to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, The Washington Post is reporting.

The Biden administration is reiterating that student loan borrowers haven't been required to pay a single dollar of their federal student loans since Biden ...

Regardless of Biden’s announcement on student loan forgiveness, pay close attention to the end of the student loan payment pause. The next major deadline for student loan borrowers is the end of temporary student loan relief on August 31, 2022. Whether Biden shares a full-scale plan or provides an updated timetable on a decision, the president could reference the next steps for student loan borrowers. For example, the U.S. Department of Education announced a major overhaul of student loan servicing. While the White House says Biden hasn’t decided on wide-scale student loan forgiveness, the president could use tomorrow’s graduation as an opportunity to announce his intentions on student loan relief. Earlier this month, the Biden administration floated this same income cap to qualify for student loan forgiveness.

Canceling $10000 and excluding the highest earners, as Biden's plan does, appears to align with what a substantial majority of Americans want.

Ultimately, of course, the politics of this are still to be determined. And perhaps the lower amount won’t do as much to potentially alienate those opposed to the concept, or who have no higher education and don’t stand to benefit themselves. On the other, the criticisms that this would accrue to the benefit of people who are generally wealthier already are valid. A Grinnell College poll earlier this year gave people three options: canceling all student debt, canceling it only for those in need, and canceling none of it. This isn’t the only poll to suggest people are wary of canceling student debt for the wealthy. And he’s eschewing bold action in favor of what seems to be about the most broadly acceptable option.

The Washington Post reported that the plan — which has not been finalized — would limit loan forgiveness to Americans who earned fewer than $150000 the ...

At the same time, it will worsen inflation.” Biden has extended the moratorium three times since taking office. “There’s no such thing as student loan ‘forgiveness,'” Cotton added. “I am considering dealing with some debt reduction. Married couples filing jointly would have had to earn less than $300,000 to qualify. Republicans say student loan debt forgiveness would amount to a giveaway to wealthy parents who can afford to pay down their children’s debt — while shifting the burden to taxpayers, many of whom have never attended college.

President Biden is nearing a decision on student loan debt forgiveness, with the president and his team zeroing in on canceling $10000 per borrower, ...

President Biden has said he will announce some sort of decision regarding student loan forgiveness in the coming weeks. Even among those who hold student ...

These are just a few of the millions of different stories and perspectives of the costs and rewards of higher education. “I was kind of born and raised on a farm,” Hernandez said. And then, kind of looking at it with COVID (and) everything else, I’ve always just seen trades was kind of where the money is at.” And it’s fine.’ When I signed my name for those loans when I was 18, I knew that I was going to have to pay it back. Sueper carried that debt for the next 18 years — a feeling she described as “heavy” — until the pandemic pause in accrued interest gave her a chance to pay down the remaining balance. She even made the decision to leave Boston University, where she spent her freshman year, based in large part on the higher cost of tuition and the financial aid available. The costs of going to college have gone up dramatically and continue to climb. According to NerdWallet, the cost of tuition at public colleges and universities has gone up by 233% since 1973, and overall student debt has increased by 266% since 2006. On the flip side, there’s another relevant statistic in this discussion: 18% of student loan borrowers continued to make payments throughout the pandemic, even when they weren’t required to. She and her coworkers at New Era Colorado feel tomorrow’s workers are being crushed and forgotten, and they’re pushing on leaders to forgive student loans. “Because I wouldn’t have to worry about my parents.… But, on the campaign trail in 2020, he pledged to cancel up to $10,000 as president.

Employers are heeding the call of younger workers for help with their education debt, and taking advantage of a new tax break born out of the pandemic.

After the tax change, Fidelity Investments upped the maximum benefit it offers employees to help pay off education debt to $15,000 from $10,000. A little-noticed provision of the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or Cares Act, has also made it cheaper for companies to help employees repay their student loans. Meanwhile, a third of the 238 employers surveyed by advisory firm Willis Towers Watson in 2021 said they would offer direct student loan repayment. Craig Copeland, a senior research associate at the Institute, said the two-year pause on federal student loan payments also placed employer-sponsored programs on the back burner. “We want them to feel like they have a competitive set of pay and benefit programs to match the excellence we expect." Still, there are more firms considering the perk than actually implementing it, a reluctance experts say is rooted in uncertainty about federal policies on debt cancellation and repayment.

By excluding higher earners from relief, Biden could be creating a bureaucratic nightmare and "paperwork trap" for the rest, experts say.

One Senate Democrat says he is pushing the White House to establish a program that doesn't bury borrowers under a mound of paperwork. Should Biden place income thresholds on forgiveness, not only will the relief likely not be automatic and take weeks to hit borrowers' accounts — it could also coincide with the expiration of the student-loan payment pause planned for September 1. The initiative many Democrats are counting on to help them in the polls ahead of the fall midterms risks morphing into a bureaucratic fiasco that shuts out the borrowers least able to repay and blunting its effectiveness ahead. "The other problem with an income test is over what period are you going to apply it?" Under those parameters, roughly 97% of borrowers would qualify in an apparent attempt to keep relief narrowly targeted for those in default. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden promised federal borrowers with student debt he would approve $10,000 in relief.

Public opinion on student loan forgiveness has shifted in the past decade, Natasha Quadlin and Brian Powell write.

In short, we suspect that the security of a bachelor’s degree was starting to feel more precarious, and this sentiment was beginning to resonate among the public. We have seen a massive shift in favor of government support of higher education in the decade we have been conducting research on this issue. Given Americans’ emphasis on affordability, as well as their belief in government support of higher education, this is an opportunity for Biden to act boldly. This led some of our interviewees to say that college should be “somewhat free”—a phrasing that initially confounded us because college cannot be somewhat free, just as a person cannot be somewhat pregnant. For the past decade, we have been conducting interviews with nationally representative samples of Americans to assess how they think about the funding of college. As President Biden considers canceling at least a portion of federal student debt, scholars and the media have debated the merits of the different approaches he could take.