Century Foundation Fellow Comments on the Fate of Student Debt Forgiveness
Under a program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, some student loan borrowers were supposed to be able to have the balance of their student loans forgiven after ten years of both on-time payments and eligible work in the public sector. Meaning, a qualifying nonprofit, federal, local, state, or tribal government. The program started in 2007, so the first debt was set to be forgiven this coming fall.
Last year a small group of borrowers learned that their eligibility for the program had revoked. These include four people, all attorneys, working for the American Bar Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and Vietnam Veterans of America. Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a former Deputy Undersecretary of Education under Obama, where he was responsible for overseeing the Public Service Loan Forgivenes program during its early years, says "the retroactive aspect of this filing reasonably causes people to be nervous."