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Comment by _moof | Hacker News Reader

Please, please, please take note before commenting: These are being forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created in 2007 (fifteen years ago), which eliminates your remaining debt after you've made ten years of payments while working in the public sector (government or non-profit). This has nothing to do with current debates around loan forgiveness.

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That's where the 40,000 in the headline comes from. But the article also says this:

> Several thousand borrowers with older loans will also receive forgiveness through income-driven repayment (IDR) forgiveness, plus another 3.6 million borrowers will receive at least three years of additional credit toward IDR forgiveness, the Education Department said in a statement.

I'll believe it when I see it. I vividly remember getting "credits" for $1 from fafsa, so if it's anything like that, it will be meaningless.

I think you might be misremembering, because the FAFSA is just the application you fill out to apply for student aid. Maybe the Department of Education issued the credits?

Does this mean full-time public service workers with pre-PSLF loans, or are the feds debating broadening the scope of loan forgiveness to include persons in other careers as well?

They aren't changing the scope at all- they're just fixing some problems that meant people who should have gotten their loans forgiven but didn't will finally get that problem corrected, and they're granting credits for people who are already in the system. This will now allow a single person outside of that program to benefit, and it won't add new people to the program.

This may change with future actions, but quite frankly it's kind of embarrassing that they're claiming this is a win when all they did was follow through on a promise made years ago that was basically ignored.

45 million folks in the US have student loans so even some action for 3.6 million folks isn’t a large percentage.

So since it's only 8% it's fine?

How many 8% increments can there be until we're allowed to be against this?

I'm against any percentage of funneling taxpayer money to college administrators.

Reduce tuition, don't rubber stamp federal loans while letting administrators increase costs.

Student debt is massive, yes, but why are so few people asking where that money actually went? A cursory search says student loan debt is roughly $1.6 trillion dollars and there are around 4,000 to 6,000 colleges/universities. This is a rough number and the actual amount depends on your criteria, but the gist is that you have a ton of money flowing into a relatively small pool. Yes, I know not every dollar of loans goes to the school, but I really have to beg the question on what these institutions have done with all this money.

Seems like any discussion about forgiving debt should involve going after some of these universities themselves.

In the case of my alum, I think I can tell you: they spent it on housing and amenities to attract more students (quantity, not quality). I watched it happen while I attended. A university operates under the same principles as any other business in this case. Administrators are not innocent here, but they do have to live within the system and work with the incentives they are provided. Loans are made available to students and parents to shop around. This is a big part of what has created the upward pressure on tuition. We’ve revitalized a lot of state school campuses while letting their academics rot. Parents and students see fancy common areas, gyms, cafeterias and living spaces when they visit campuses then use that to decide where to go unless they’re very focused on the education, which they’re likely not because most very focused students require less financial help. If that money had been given to the administrators we are often so quick to villify, this picture may be a very different one.

One big name school I've been to had a new gym where the bathroom hand dryers all had custom graphics on them. This is where the money goes.

Turns out "alum" is the gender neutral term for a graduate, not the school. I should've used "alma mater" here. I've never had a chance to learn latin properly and it shows :)

University administrative costs have blown up with all of the easy to acquire loan money.

Just a few highly paid and many mildly paid bureaucrats doing things which don’t need to be done… or in some cases doing very little at all (I’ve heard stories)

Also lots of fundraising and shiny new buildings which are more advertisements than useful expansions.

This is a great question that no one is really asking. Too much of the conversation revolves around what’s fair for student borrowers and not enough on what in the world these universities have done with all of that money.

Just housing and feeding around 50 million borrowers while they attend school for 4-ish years ends up being a damn lot of money.

I thought college was expensive until I looked into historical tuition prior to the modern era. Turns out our grand parents, parents, and siblings just lived in a golden age of fair wages and massively affordable and available education.

I am younger than your grandparents but I have children that range for 14-31 and I can tell you that I could afford to go to college based on what I made as a short order cook but my kids would not have been able to earn enough to even pay for school much less have enough left over for life.

It sure feels like schools have taken advantage of the student loan programs to increase fees and tuition while at the same time lowering the admission standards to put even more asses in seats.

My alma mater needed to bring their student center into compliance on the last ~50 years of building code changes. The project was estimated to cost high-8-figures, for nothing but code compliance.

Instead, they spent $120,000,000 renovating it to be shiny and modern and also up to code. I don't understand why it was so expensive, but I'll assume it's not an order of magnitude away from true cost.

$1.6 trillion is "only" a few hundred million per school. If the cost of renovating one building is any indication, it's easy for a university to use up that much money.

This tracks because my alma mater built new housing and a new student center over the course of a few years at the cost of roughly $300 million.

If you’re against wasting taxes spend your time typing about but defense boondoggles which actually waste tax payer money not a trillion owed to the government which it wasn’t ever going to get back anyways.

That's whataboutism. I'm also against that, but it's not the topic.

Submit an article about it, I'll for sure post my opinions on the matter.

This is just the Education department doing what it is required to do under various federal programs that have (pretty much by definition) existed for over a decade.

We can have a productive conversation about whether those programs were too generous or had unintended consequences, but millions of people have structured their finances around these programs and the rules in them - it's a rug-pull to suddenly have regrets and oppose the policies only now that the remaining balances are being wiped out.

Yeah it's like this with the people who want to kill Social Security as well. How are people who are supposed to retire in 10 years going to do so if you kill Social Security in 5? Retirement preparation starts when people are in their 20s, so any changes to SS that do not include an equivalent replacement need to be planned 50-60 years in advance.

The common procedure is to freeze everything and let inflation slowly destroy it.

Who cares if you can get a $20k student loan in 2122 when a hamburger costs $70?

Why not do both?

Forgiving past loans for graduated students does not put future money into the hands of college administrators unless you continue issuing and forgiving future loans.

Fixing the grift and providing relief to those who were grifted should be two sides of the same coin.

Sure, do both. But the relief, as it were, needs to come after the fix.

And frankly, rather than just give a relatively privileged subset of the population some money, we might as well crank up that printing press again and just got a $10K check to every last citizen, student loans or not. Might as well be equitable about it.

The relief we are discussing being some partial credits given to a small percentage of loan holders under an existing income-based program?

I'm all for contributing to admin salaries. I'd even go so far as to say state-funded schools shouldn't charge tuition at all.

That said, I have to agree that tuition definitely seems bloated and many admins make absurd salaries.

Until that's fixed, which seems unlikely in the near future, how do we fix the issue of massive debt that hangs over people for their whole lives?

The obvious solution would be to reduce tuition and other costs, but now we're in a loop. It seems like an intractable problem.

I think we already have a solution built into the legal system: Lemon Laws.

From the Great Wiki in the Sky: "Lemon laws are laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance."

Obviously, these degrees did not meet the standards of quality to make "productive members of society" so the universities should have to "buy them back", preferably using their own endowments.

In the short term, it would hurt them immensely - which is deserved for selling a "product" that wasn't worthwhile but in the long term, it would mean that they're more likely to a) keep prices more reasonable and b) make a higher quality "product".

Or repeal the Clinton-era law that made student loan debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. In that way, potential lenders would have incentive to determine ability to repay.

>would have incentive to determine ability to repay.

It's a mixed bag. On one hand it should decrease costs and incentivize students into choosing better career plans (ie. not going to college just because), but it will also mean disadvantaged students won't be able to attend because their projected credit risk is so high.

The problem that law was meant to address was that most of the debt being discharged came from a relatively small pool of students who attended very expensive or prestigious schools.

If they had set a limit for discharge to the value of the median cost of tuition, it might have prevented the runaway train of inflated costs in the education and perhaps even medical sector, outside of what was caused by malpractice insurance rates in the 70s.

Also, individualizing risk to the students irrespective of degree choices and economics without dutifully notifying students isn't ethical behavior, especially when they are responsible for the magnitude of the risk by not controlling costs or advocating for the value of the students they graduate.

Seeing tons of comments about what people THINK an article says or about their opinion on something related is causing me to use this site less and less.

Completely agree that some of the comments are off the wall. But in all fairness the Ruerters article doesn't highlight the public sector part enough. To learn more you'd have to do your own research to find that PSLF has stringent requirements.

IMO this is more an example of how bad journalism can have damaging effect on even a well versed audience.

Most of the people who "get" the article already knew what the PSLF was (I suspected it from the headline alone).

In this case I also think the article was really thin on details. Some people get $10,000 written off, others get some other limit to how much they will pay and so on. No clear details I could see about what the limits are and who will be targeted. There probably are details somewhere but this was not really answering my questions.

its 100% intentional on the administrations part. this is their 'creative' way of trying to not meet their campaign promise. highly annoying.

He still has time to do loan forgiveness "helicopter money" style. But even if all we got was an expansion of targeted relief programs I think it totally counts as fulfilling his talking point. The issue with student debt is that for some people there's no way out, but generally speaking college-educated people are more well-off and forgiving all debt would be a regressive stimulus that targets the wealthier side of the population. Targeted relief is a great way around that.

this isn't targetted relief. this is shit that was already suppose to be done.

also regressive stimulus are not even a thing. maybe you're thinking of regressive taxes? which still wouldn't be right.

>also regressive stimulus are not even a thing. maybe you're thinking of regressive taxes?

Regressive taxes favor the rich over the poor. By "regressive stimulus" I'm presuming he's talking about stimulus that favors the rich (eg. well off layers/doctors with high student loan debt but high earning potential) over people with modest student loans but low earning potential.

which still isn't correct. it doesn't hurt the poor that the upper middle class will also receive this benefit. regressive taxes do. in fact this policy still helps the lower income class because many of them will also benefit from it and far more than the upper middle class.

this means testing bullshit has got to stop.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's amazing how easy communication is when your words aren't interpreted in the most obtuse and uncharitable way by extreme progressives

words have meaning; using them correctly in context matters. the fact of the matter is the term you used has nothing to do with stimulus'. you were attempting to imply that forgiveness somehow harms the lower classes when it categorically doesnt.

the only person being 'uncharitable' here is you; attempting to label someone calling out your BS position as 'extreme' and then attempting to categorically label an entire political spectrum with the same brush.

No. The previous guy installed people in the DOE that made it virtually impossible to forgive the loans even after they jumped through all the hoops to qualify under the law.

All Biden's administration is doing here is ungumming people who were eligible years ago. This is cleanup from the prior administration

I'm aware. and but these things are being trotted out by people as 'look hes (biden) done so much!!'

when in reality: hes done jack shit except what already is suppose to happen!

I promise you biden's PR group is the force behind these articles.

As demonstrated by the last admin it doesnt have to happen so feel free to complain about the current President doing “jack shit” until the last guy wins the next election…

Sometimes keeping promises are important.

Have fun blaming the "last guy" for almost everything, that sure worked out so far for the "current guy's" approval rating and will definitely not help the last guy win if he was to try again. This is even more ridiculous than even the "thanks Obama" reflexive blaming conservatives had.

I don't think you realize how self defeating and ineffective it is to find every tiny reason to deflect blame from "your team". Saying that "actually.... Biden couldn't do it because of some officials in the DoE and totally couldn't have known that this was possible when he made the promise, oops!" is such a cop out. It's obvious that the Biden team knew exactly how the DoE worked, and if x or y promise is feasible or not.

I'm perfectly capable of complaining about both. biden hasn't done jack shit beyond not being a raging asshole.

working american's are still getting shit on; american's are still being disenfranchised of their votes.

and none of his action are helping the very real situation of income inequality.

and I'm still waiting for him to actually deliver on campaign promises.

Exactly, this is pure PR the headline should be “Government Fulfills Terms of Loans it Failed to Meet”

Alternative could also be “government obfuscates prices for education and certain types of labor by offering nebulous benefit, the cost of which can be subject to much manipulation for purposes of presenting it as a low cost benefit”.

It would be straight forward to simply pay for higher education expenses directly, with much less bureaucracy and more transparent pricing, allowing for better allocation of society’s resources. But, as always, that would reduce the avenues for corruption, and so the politically viable option is the circuitous option.

This is the Cal system before Reagan basically. Generated more than a few Nobels in addition to the educational mission.

California state university tuition was heavily subsidized by taxpayers 50 years ago. It’s less subsidized today and it’s still over 50% taxpayer funding. That feels like the opposite of transparent pricing.

This is a good point. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program is like the GI Bill, but they pay off your college debt after service instead of paying your college after service.

Its an interesting piece of legislation to see, and strongly implies former senator Joe Bidens initial student debt legislation was beginning to have seriously negative repercussions at the federal level for employee retention and hiring not even 5 years into its inception.

Back in 2005 Biden supported and stumped for a bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protections and led the country into a 1.7 trillion dollar student debt crisis. Watching President Joe Biden offer token debt forgiveness in 2022 is a little bit infuriating to watch as he could easily have spent the last seventeen years working to reform his mistake. If i had to weigh in on the sudden rise of student debt forgiveness under the current administration id say its political. inflation, gas prices, housing shortages, and supply chain issues have made it all the more practical to take action now and shore up the old midterm voter appeal.

If you had actually read the article, you would have seen that the loans were forgiven under a student loan forgiveness program introduced in 2007.

i read the article.

the point im making is that the federal government enacted forgiveness for its employees only 2 years after the 2005 reform to make discharging student loans impossible.

you can learn more about the 2005 bankruptcy reform act here: https://www.lawb.uscourts.gov/bankruptcy-reform-act-2005

> are being forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, created in 2007 ... nothing to do with current debates around loan forgiveness

Well, FWIW, I'd never heard of that program before now, but I'm not super happy about it, either.

There are a lot of different versions of these income-based repayment programs, dating back to the early 00s at least. They are all structured similarly but have differing eligibility cutoffs and rules. Typically they involved making payments on your loans for 20-25 years at some maximum % of your income before the remaining balance is forgiven. PSLF has a shorter forgiveness window (10 years) but you need to make 120 payments while working some job that is socially useful but not-market-optimal like public service or working for a nonprofit.

FWIW, IBR systems they are a common policy suggestion from both conservatives and liberals (with differing priorities / rules).

Idk why you dont like the program but generally speaking this program is only needed because civil servants get paid absurdly low salaries.

What then is the point of the article? To tout something implemented by another administration? I haven't been employed by the taxpayers so who cares?

The PSLF has been very badly administered to date. The Biden administration is finally applying it the way it was intended.

Comments like these boggle my mind. This is news. This is reporting. Literally taking what is done and sharing it with the masses: X did Y. That's it.

Did you know this happened before this article? No. Does your caring change the fact that it's news? No.

"What's the point of the article?" To inform. That this needs to be questioned is upsetting.

Oh, but it is so much more than “X did Y”. The choice of which facts to report, when, and how, has huge impact on what people come to believe.

There are a thousand ways to deceive while uttering nothing but true statements. The question to ask is not “is the headline literally true?”, but “what does the headline cause people to believe?”

It is news to me yes and yet, by any definition of news I understand, a measure taken in 2007 is continuing is not. To further make my point, the original commenter felt the need, correctly I think to clarify that the article is not discussing a new policy! "What's the point of the article?" is a short way of asking both what the author wishes to communicate, why and most importantly what the intention is. I had hoped my asking the question in the first place would be a clue that I dont buy that it is just "to inform"

I believe a lot of this wave of forgiveness is due to correcting/removing the road blocks for this program put into place by Devos in previous years.

The article refers to these as "historical failures" but I think that being very generous.

It wasn't just the Trump administration; it was clear there were significant problems with the way the program was administered well before the first loans were supposed to start qualifying in 2017. Among other things, the Bush and Obama administrations that created and administrated the program provided no guidance and no oversight to the companies overseeing the loans, so the companies made it effectively impossible to qualify.

Hard disagree. The Obama administration drastically altered federal student loans worked, end-to-end. One of the largest changes was to get the DoE directly into the market of lending and holding student loan debt. Cutting out servicers like Navient, and costing them tons of money in lost subsidies and essentially nationalizing the industry.

Policies such as Public Search Loan Forgiveness, Pay as You Earn (PAYE), Perkins Loan cancellation, and several others were part of the Student Aid Bill of Rights. Having the government hold student loan debt is foundational to making these policies work.

This was a key policy platform of the Obama administration. It's less widely known about, compared to ACA, but still an important one. And this is probably the reason that it's been a day-one policy issue for the Biden administration.

> And this is probably the reason that it's been a day-one policy issue for the Biden administration

Here on day 455 of the Biden administration (who, by the way, was the least interested in resolving the student loan issue among his Democratic Primary rivals), it sure doesn't look like it was a "day one" issue.

I know someone who is enrolled in this program - unfucking it has been an ongoing task since very early in the administration. But like many things, it takes a bit to figure out how to untangle a program that was actively sabotaged for four years prior.

> Public Service Loan Forgiveness program

Come work for the permanent undemocratic bureaucracy, and you'll even your student loans forgiven. But if you decide to go down the path of becoming a kulak, the student loans will be with you even if you go bankrupt.

I'm curious where the sudden bump to 40k comes from. According to Wikipedia [1]:

> The Department of Education reported that 2,215 borrowers had the remainder of their respective student loans forgiven under the program as of April 30, 2020. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Servic

FAANG has plenty of private XKeyscore wrong-think APIs that the bureaucracy utilizes under the auspices of "fraud prevention" to filter out "bad thinkers" from various activities. Welcome to fascism, folks.

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