Biden administration forgives $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers

The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it was forgiving another $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 borrowers.

The latest round of relief is a result of the U.S. Department of Education’s fixes to the popular, but once troubled, Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

President Joe Biden, who has forgiven more education debt than any other president in U.S history, said that the number of borrowers to benefit from the program under his administration now exceeded 1 million.

“Public service workers – teachers, nurses, firefighters, and more – are the bedrocks of our communities and our country,” Biden said in a statement. “But for too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments.”

The PSLF program, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, allows certain not-for-profit and government employees to have their federal student loans canceled after 10 years. In 2013, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimated that one-quarter of American workers may be eligible.

However, the program was plagued by problems. Often, borrowers believed they were on track to loan cancellation only to discover at some point that they didn’t qualify on a technicality, such as their loan type or repayment plan.

Before Biden took office, only 7,000 people had ever received the debt relief under PSLF, the U.S. Department of Education said. The program’s rejection rate was as high as 98% in some years, it added.

Under Biden, the U.S. Department of Education has relaxed the program’s requirements and overhauled how it’s managed.

Borrowers eligible for this round of relief should learn of their cancelled debt in the coming weeks. The average student loan balance forgiven under PSLF is around $70,000, according to a rough estimate by higher education expert Mark Kantowitz.

Thursday’s announcement comes in the final weeks of an extremely close race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Harris, in addition to working in the Biden administration on its student loan relief efforts, has also promised to strengthen the PSLF program if she wins in November, with a focus on helping more Black men become public school teachers.

By contrast, Trump has called for the elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness initiative and expressed opposition to the Biden administration’s other efforts to cancel education debt.