[Svartalfiar]

"....after they have made their payments for 20 or 25 years...."

After making payments. That's the clever little PR rub.

I don't know.. Are there really 800,000 people who have been paying their loans for 20+ years and still have a balance (average $50M)?

To do that, you'd have to be in your mid-40s at the youngest. So pulling demo data for these US, we'll say 45 is the line since that's how most of these demo numbers are grouped. 45+ is 42% of the 333MM population, so 140MM people.

Pulling random data from Brave search, looks like ~45% of adults have an associate's, 35% have a bachelors, and ~15% have masters. So lets go with 45% at bachelor's level (15% masters adds to that +10% to associates to even out into a bachelors cost). That brings us down to 63MM people in this population group.

Several random colleges' blurbs show they generally have 40-60% of students receiving some aid. So 31MM. Actually way less since many of these are partial loans, and we're ignoring grants/GI Bill/etc also.

So out of the less than 30MM 45+ adults who received some aid, 2.5% still haven't paid them off? With a remaining balance of $50M average?!!?! (Well, $40M average. Gotta take 10% for admin costs and 10% for the big guy.)
And this is people with a history of paying their loan payments properly that still haven't paid it off, and not including people who actually did already get their balances forgiven?

I dunno, seems like 800M people is an excessively large number based on the requirements to qualify above...?

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

--- "I dunno, seems like 800M people is an excessively large number based on the requirements to qualify above...?"

Agree. But "pulling numbers out of a hat" is the political media model for the Left these days. They are not interested in reality, but how they can manipulate it to their own ends.