This month, the Biden-Harris administration approved an additional $4.5 billion in student debt relief for 60,000 public servants. In total, the administration has forgiven student loans for 1 million public service workers — a category that includes public school educators, nurses, social workers, unelected municipal employees, police, firefighters and other emergency service workers. Of those 1 million recipients, 44,150 are Pennsylvanians who are now relieved of over $3 million in debt. That’s cheap at the price.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and certainly the Philadelphia region have a stake in rewarding and retaining citizens who have committed to public service work, work where people with college or graduate degrees often accept lower pay in exchange for the chance to make a career contributing to the public good. These people deserve to be celebrated — which is why The Philadelphia Citizen honors them every year at our Integrity Icon Awards — not saddled with debt that could prevent them from buying a home, paying for groceries or medical care — or sending their own family members to college.
What’s more, forgiving these workers’ loans doesn’t benefit just the workers; it also benefits taxpayers, who won’t have to shoulder the expensive burden of replacing essential city, state and federal government employees who can’t afford to stay in their jobs because of loan repayment.
A bipartisan program has its day
Congress passed the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program with bipartisan support in 2007. The program effectively wiped out outstanding loans for qualified borrowers after 10 years of regular payments. But because of poor administration and unfair denials of benefits, few public servants took advantage — until the Biden administration improved communication and made the funds easier to access.
According to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, “Before President Biden and Vice President Harris entered the White House, the PSLF program was so riddled by dysfunction that just 7,000 Americans ever qualified and countless public servants were trapped making payments on debts that should have been forgiven. From day one the Biden-Harris administration made fixing this program a top priority.”
Forgiving these workers’ loans doesn’t benefit just the workers; it also benefits taxpayers, who won’t have to shoulder the expensive burden of replacing essential government employees who can’t afford to stay in their jobs because of loan repayment.
I wrote about these welcome changes on January 31, 2022. But initial steps were not enough. This summer the Department of Education took over PSLF from the outside student loan service that had been inadequately running it. “After years of very little forgiveness through PSLF, 1 million borrowers free from debt is a massive achievement,” Kristin McGuire, executive director of Young Invincibles, a young adult nonprofit advocacy group, told Inside Higher Ed.
Importantly, both Democrats and Republicans — working together — passed the PSLF in 2007. The reason they worked across the aisle? Clearly, forgiving student loans for public service workers was and is the right thing to do. Today, some congressional Republicans and conservative groups have proposed eliminating the program because it supports people in public sector jobs over those in private-sector employment. Get real! It’s to everyone’s benefit, no matter your political philosophy, to support teachers, nurses, and first-responders. It’s depressing to observe what I can only call mean-spiritedness whenever loan forgiveness is mentioned.
We must reestablish the 2007 bipartisan advocacy for PSLF and for other reasonable loan forgiveness programs. But we also must support the continuing existence of the Department of Education (DOE) for well-functioning implementation. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Department of Education. It took DOE action for PSLF to work as intended. Forbes reports that more than 30 million student loan borrowers have been adversely affected by mismanagement and billing mistakes by loan servicing companies: Navient, MOHELA, Aidvantage, Nelnet, and EdFinancial. This is one case where federal bureaucracy can work for taxpayers’ benefit.
Support reform in student loan indebtedness for senior citizens
Another anomaly that must be remedied is the student loan indebtedness of senior citizens. Most of the attention in the student debt crisis has been paid to Generation Z and Millennials, with opponents highlighting Ivy League alumni who might benefit at the expense of those who have not attended college. But a new fact sheet from the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) and the New American Foundation shows that over the last 20 years the number of adults aged 60 or over with student debt has multiplied six times, while the amount of debt they are burdened with has multiplied 20 times.
According to the Education Data Initiative (EDI), 75,100 Pennsylvanians 62 years and older owe an average of $45,539, totaling $3.42 billion. Abby Shafroth, co-director of advocacy at the NCLC, as quoted in Inside Higher Education, says, “This debt is now threatening millions of people’s ability to meet their basic needs in old age.”
“The federal government shouldn’t be pushing 60 and 70-year-olds into poverty because they tried to get an education decades ago,” Abby Shafroth, co-director of advocacy at NCLC, said in a news release.
Policy groups advocate protecting Social Security checks and tax refunds from seizure. Imagine the hardship for senior citizens living on fixed incomes facing the diminishment of Social Security benefits because of interest that has relentlessly accumulated on student loans incurred in their youth or on Parent PLUS loans they were poorly advised to take out, New America analyst Tia Caldwell says.
“Most older borrowers dutifully try to repay their student loans — doing what they feel necessary to pay their debts — only to find themselves trapped in a cycle of financial instability,” Mary O’Donnell, CEO of Chicago’s RFF, RFP Foundation for Aging, wrote in the Chicago Sun Times, “In many cases, the balance due is more than the original amount of the loan.”
It’s also the case that Black Americans and women outpace other groups in carrying higher education debt as they approach retirement.
And yet when student loan forgiveness is mentioned, many have a knee-jerk reaction opposing relief. They imagine a 20-something exploiting former high school classmates who did not attend college. That image is not accurate for young debt holders, and it is certainly not true for the grandmoms and granddads who fear smaller Social Security checks because their younger selves simply tried to get an education.
Elaine Maimon, Ph.D., is an Advisor at the American Council on Education. She is the author of Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation. Her long career in higher education has encompassed top executive positions at public universities as well as distinction as a scholar in rhetoric/composition. Her co-authored book, Writing In The Arts and Sciences, has been designated as a landmark text. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.
