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Jason Collier, a special education teacher in Virginia, often needs to wait until payday to fill up the gas tank of his car — and in the meantime hopes he doesn’t run out. “Money is tight when you’re a teacher,” Collier, 46, said. Now he’s afraid that the U.S. Department of Education will soon garnish up to 15% of his wages because he’s behind on his student debt payments. Collier said he hasn’t been able to meet his monthly bill for years, while juggling the expenses of raising two children and medical expenses from a cancer diagnosis. If his paycheck...

Aubrey Bertram was starting to imagine her life without student debt. Bertram, a staff attorney at Wild Montana, a nonprofit that works on land conservation in the state, had just around two and a half years left of payments before her $247,804 federal student loan balance would be excused under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Bertram took out her loans in law school knowing that she’d work in public service and pursue PSLF. “That was the only way taking on this debt made any sense,” Bertram said. Millions of other student loan holders are in the same frustrating limbo...

Last week we shared some charts on the utter failure and folly of federal intervention in education for K-12.An even bigger failure has been the $1.5 trillion student loan boondoggle. As even more federal dollars have flowed into higher education in grants and (largely forgivable) loans. This is the result:We got a lot of praise and criticism from readers for our call to impose an excise tax on university tax-free endowments above $1 billion. But what is clear is that almost none of these treasure chests of wealth are being used to make college more affordable. Shameful.

A Connecticut student who graduated with honors in June is now suing her former high school, claiming she can't read or write and is failing college as a result of her alma mater's poor curriculum. Aleysha Ortiz was born in Puerto Rico and moved with her family to Hartford, Connecticut, when she was 5 years old. She graduated through the school program despite reading at a kindergarten or first grade level as a sixth grader, according to reporting by CNN. During her last month at Hartford Public High School, after she disclosed she was attending the University of Connecticut in...

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration’s recent changes to student loans are causing frustration and confusion for some borrowers. In response to a February court ruling that blocked some Biden-era programs, the Education Department has taken down online and paper applications for income-driven repayment plans. “This especially hurts anyone who’s lost their jobs, including federal workers,” said Natalia Abrams, founder and president of the Student Debt Crisis Center. “A few months ago, they would have been able to get on a zero-dollar income-driven repayment plan.” Adding to the uncertainty are layoffs at the Education Department, which oversees the federal...

As Joe Biden’s presidency ends, it’s clear his record makes him the most aggressive president in history on student-loan forgiveness. His Department of Education * extended the COVID-19 interest-accumulation freeze; * introduced the new SAVE plan, which offered unprecedented interest forgiveness; * began the process of blanket forgiveness of up to $20,000 for borrowers. The second and third initiatives were so aggressive that the judicial branch ultimately blocked them. And, although student-loan forgiveness was not the headline of every speech by Vice President Kamala Harris, it was clear to voters that Democrats were the way forward for removing student debt....

Even a presidential administration as incompetent, feckless, and clueless as the Biden administration, it seems, can read the writing on the wall — if they get their noses rubbed in it. In the latest example of just this, the administration has withdrawn its plan to forgive a large number of student loans — and we can take the word "forgive" to mean "transfer the liability to the taxpayers."The Biden administration has withdrawn two major plans to deliver student loan forgiveness.The proposed regulations would have allowed the secretary of the U.S. Department of Education to cancel student loans for several groups...

Departing President Joe Biden’s administration is nothing if not busy as desks are cleaned out and preparations for final departure made. On Friday it announced federal student loans for another 55,000 workers will be canceled through an existing program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Biden has now canceled an unprecedented $180 billion in federal student loans through existing programs during his term in office, covering 4.9 million Americans. The total cost for Biden’s latest act of Christmas charity will come in at $4.28 billion, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, the bulk of whom previously questioned just how fair such acts...

A coalition of Democratic senators on Wednesday night sent a letter to federal agencies about an investigation that found that a "faulty" transfer of student loan accounts in 2023 resulted in “millions of consumer credit reporting errors." The error occurred when the student loan provider NelNet transferred student loan accounts to MOHELA last year. The change resulted in nearly 2 million duplicate student loan records appearing on borrowers’ credit reports, and negatively impacted hundreds of thousands of borrowers’ credit scores, which were incorrectly reported for up to a year and a half, per CNBC. The senators, led by Massachusetts Sen....

Proposal uses ‘hardship’ as the rubric for granting student loan forgiveness. Joe Biden’s Department of Education has proposed a student loan forgiveness plan to take effect after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. While the Department of Education puts the estimated cost at $112 billion, one analyst called it a “gross underestimate” and suggested the cost could be five times larger. An economist and public policy analyst who spoke to The College Fix also criticized the regulation as “worrisome.” The department opened comments on Oct. 31, just days before the election. The comment period for the proposed regulation just...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A student loan cancellation program for public workers has granted relief to more than 1 million Americans — up from just 7,000 who were approved before it was updated by the Biden administration two years ago. President Joe Biden announced the milestone on Thursday, saying his administration restored a promise to America’s teachers, firefighters, nurses and other public servants. He celebrated it even as his broader student loan plans remain halted by courts following legal challenges by Republican-led states... In all, the program has erased $74 billion in loans for public workers.

We're told that we need to forgive every dollar of the $1.74 trillion in student loan debt because young people are being crushed under a mountain of bad loans. How were they supposed to know that majoring in Environmental Activism wouldn't allow them to earn enough money to pay back their loan? That said, young people are so overburdened in college loan debt that they can't buy a house, or start a family, or even move out of their parent's home. That's been the narrative advanced by Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and every other advocate to make student...

Seven Republican-led states on Tuesday filed a lawsuit to challenge the Biden administration's latest student debt forgiveness plan, saying the U.S. Department of Education was taking steps to start canceling loans as soon as this week. The lawsuit came less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Biden administration's bid to revive a different student debt relief plan that was designed to lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers and speed up loan forgiveness for some.

The Supreme Court declined on Wednesday to lift a sweeping block on President Joe Biden’s student loan repayment plan that aims to slash monthly payments and quicken the path to loan forgiveness. The high court turned down a request from the Biden administration to put the plan back in play after lower courts blocked it this summer in a legal challenge to the plan brought by GOP-led states. There were no noted dissents in the brief order

The Supreme Court declined Wednesday to unblock President Joe Biden’s income-driven student loan repayment program. In a brief order, the Supreme Court rejected the Biden administration’s request to reinstate the program after it was paused by a federal appeals court. The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, which lowers monthly loan payments based on income and creates a faster path to loan forgiveness, was challenged by a group of red states. “The Court expects that the Court of Appeals will render its decision with appropriate dispatch,” the Wednesday order states. The Biden administration argued the appeals court’s injunction “severely...

Student loan borrowers who benefited from Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness are still burdened by their finances as their debt is continuing to accumulate... Biden, who made student loan forgiveness a key promise in 2020, has pushed forward with the initiative despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling 6-3 in late June 2023 to strike down his plan for nearly 40 million Americans. However, despite the loan relief, interviews with borrowers who have had their debt eliminated reportedly show that financial stress is still a major component of their daily lives, as debt from other sources piles up... A July study by...

Getting tens of thousands of dollars in student debt canceled isn’t guaranteeing an immediately better financial life for Americans. So far, about 943,000 people have had their loans eliminated through the federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness plan, with balances averaging $72,000 when they are cleared. Nearly two million more had their student debt erased through programs for disabled borrowers or under income-driven repayment plans. An additional 1.3 million borrowers with $20 billion in loans have been approved for discharge through a program aimed at students who were misled by their colleges about things like job prospects. Many more are...

The courts keep slapping down Biden Administration lawbreaking, not that the Harris or Trump campaigns seem to notice. An Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Friday blocked President Biden’s SAVE student loan forgiveness plan and rapped the Administration for canceling debt in defiance of a lower-court order. The Administration rolled out the SAVE plan last summer after the Supreme Court blocked its gambit to cancel $10,000 to $20,000 for each borrower. The new plans cap monthly payments at 5% of discretionary income—defined as exceeding 225% of the poverty level—and cancel remaining balances after 10 to 20 years. Borrowers don’t...

The Biden-Harris team has signaled that it’s gearing up for an “October Surprise” on student loan cancellation — although it might come even sooner, sneaking in before early voting starts. Once again, they are trying to shift hundreds of billions of dollars in loans onto the 90% of Americans who don’t owe student debt, to gain favor with voters who do. And this time they’ve added a brazen direct-marketing campaign to appeal to those indebted voters, just ahead of the presidential election. Their new loan-forgiveness effort is particularly devious because it is designed with the administration’s previous court losses in...

Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which could have cost taxpayers $475 billion. Additional loan-cancelation initiatives—also certain to face legal challenges—are in the works. But the high drama of loan cancelation has drawn attention away from a more pressing issue in the student-loan system. After the pandemic-induced student-loan payment pause ended last year, the Education Department implemented a one-year transition period to allow borrowers time to ease back into the habit of paying their loans. That so-called...