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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. It's not that often that the government admits a program launched with good intentions is not working well in real life, but that happened yesterday and it may affect your student loan. Listen up if you're a teacher or a nurse or a first responder or a military member or a veteran, or anyone else with a student loan working at what might be called a public service profession, or if you know someone who does.

The New York Times headline on this simply says, "Troubled Student Loan Forgiveness Program Gets an Overhaul." With us now is New York Times correspondent Stacy Cowley. She's a consumer finance reporter who writes that the Biden administration is taking a chainsaw to the program's rules. Thanks for coming on to explain this to us, Stacy. You have a lot of people with student debt now sitting the edge of their car seats or wherever they are. Welcome to WNYC.

Stacy Cowley: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: What is the student loan forgiveness program? What are the jobs it applies to?

Stacy Cowley: It applies to a pretty giant swath of jobs. It covers anyone who's in non-profit work or government work. That's about 25% of the American workforce. This is a program that Congress created in 2007, and the deal at the time was you work in public service for 10 years, you make 10 years of qualifying payments on your student loans, and in 10 years, we'll forgive what's left. The idea was to lure people into public service recognizing that they might take a lower paycheck to do it so this was an incentive.

The problem is that this program has been just a complete bureaucratic quagmire ever since. In the first couple years of people applying for forgiveness, it had a rejection rate of about 98%. There has just been problems all through this thing.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, right from the start, we're going to open up the phones for you to help us report this story or ask for some help. Are you in the student loan forgiveness program because of the professional direction that you took out of college? (646) 435-7280. Have you been rejected for student loan forgiveness from the program like the 98% of the applicants that our guest just cited and is now being acknowledged by the government? If it has actually worked for you, tell us about that too. (646) 435-7280. Any questions or opinions you have about the changes announced yesterday. If you followed [unintelligible 00:02:40], we'll keep explaining them. Maybe New York Times consumer finance reporter Stacy Cowley can help answer any questions or give us some more context. (646) 435-7280. Of course, you can always tweet your thought or question. We'll watch our Twitter feed go by @BrianLehrer.

Here are a couple of examples that they used on 60 Minutes this weekend when Lesley Stahl interviewed several people in the military, military lawyers who had paid for the required 10 years or 120 monthly payments of student owns, but for various reasons were told they had years to go, and in some cases, even owed more than when they started repayments. Here is Major Heather Tregle who had been making monthly payments for nine years when she told that only 12 of those monthly payments were valid.

Major Heather Tregle: I obviously called them and said, "I don't understand. I have been in auto payment the entire time so you guys take my payment when it's due and the amount that is due." The woman looked through my account, and she says, "You may have an issue that we know is an issue where the auto debit takes the payment, but one penny short of what is actually due, so it doesn't count."

Brian Lehrer: Oh my God, Stacy, one penny short of what was actually due so it doesn't count.

Stacy Cowley: That was quite the stunning example. It's a great example of why this program has been so strewn with so many obstacles. There were a bunch of issues at the outset that could knock people out if they had the wrong kind of loan, if they were in the wrong repayment program. There were also a bunch of simple bureaucratic errors that happened because the government outsources the work of collecting on student loans and guiding people through repayment programs to these hired servicers. It has about eight of them at the moment.

They are pretty notorious for making mistakes. They've been the subject of scathing government audits for years. Multiple state attorney generals have sued over this. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has filed lawsuits over how bad servicing has been, and this, in particular, was a really complex program and servicers often made mistakes. That borrower was a great example. People who were making their payments thought they were doing everything correctly, could be knocked out by mistakes as simple as the servicer making a mistake, as the servicer missing a payment, the servicer counting their payments wrong, and that happened a lot.

Brian Lehrer: Here's another one from that 60 Minutes segment, Lesley Stahl with army lawyer, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Hirsch.

Jonathan Hirsch: I got a letter that said I had zero months accumulated towards public service loan forgiveness, zero, and I had been paying for 10 years.

Lesley Stahl: He had the right type of loans, but the wrong type of repayment plan so he had another decade to go.

Jonathan Hirsch: All of my kids are going to college so I am taking out Parent PLUS loans to help pay for their college at the same time that I am making payments on my loans.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, that from 60 Minutes. Stacy, isn't that the American story these days, people taking out loans as parents for their kids going to college while they're still paying back their own student loans from long ago? He pointed out something that you write about in your article, the wrong type of repayment problem. Tell us about that.

Stacy Cowley: The two main things that knocked people out on this were the wrong type of loan, and we can get to that in a moment, but the wrong repayment plan was also a really major problem. There's about 30 different repayment plans you can use to repay your loans, and there was pretty much only one that qualified for this program. You had to be using what was called an income driven repayment plan that made your payments based on your income.

If you were using any other type you weren't going to qualify, and the problem is that servicers often didn't tell people that in some cases because they themselves didn't know. It took quite a number of years for the education department to give clear guidance about this, and the servicers themselves were very confused for a long time. If you called your servicer and said, "Hey, put me in the payment plan that gives me the lowest monthly payment," they would've put you in a plan that didn't qualify for this and probably didn't tell you about that.

Brian Lehrer: What's that other problem that you referred to, and I know that's in the article too, the wrong loan problem?

Stacy Cowley: This was probably the single biggest problem with this program, which is that when Congress created it in 2007 to keep the cost down, they said that only one type of federal loan was going to be eligible. It's called a direct loan and you get it directly from the education department. The problem was that in 2007, most federal loans weren't that type of loan. They were being made through something else called the Federal Family Education Loan Program known as FFEL loans, which are government subsidized loans actually made by banks.

In 2010, the government eliminated that program. It switched to entirely direct lending, but for that first three years, most people were getting this other kind of loan, FFEL loans, that didn't qualify and they were never told. Most of them were never told that. For years people were making payments on these loans only to find out 5, 6, 7, in some cases, 10 years in that none of those payments counted.

That's really the major change that's happening now is for years the government has resisted doing anything about that problem. It said it didn't have the authority to make that change. This time they have invoked some pandemic powers and decided they now have the authority and they're going to retroactively count those payments. That's a really major change that's going to benefit hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.

Brian Lehrer: They can do that retroactively? The Biden administration can just snap its fingers and say, "These loans that you took that were loans that didn't qualify for the loan forgiveness now retroactively qualify"?

Stacy Cowley: It's something that advocates have been pushing for for years and it's been a real legal minefield for years. What they finally did here is they decided to use a 2003 law that gave the education department a whole bunch of extraordinary authority in times of national emergency. The Biden administration looked around and said, "Well, we have this pandemic going on right now," and decided that that was going to be the grounds they were going to use to finally make this change.

Brian Lehrer: On the Biden administration, suddenly announcing it's going to do a big overhaul of its failed student loan forgiveness program, Maya in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with New York Times consumer finance reporter, Stacy Cowley. Hi, Maya.

Maya: Hi. My question was about just how to even get enrolled in the program. I just graduated from law school and I know about public service loan forgiveness. I'm in a qualifying job and pretty much have been told by my financial aid servicer they can't really help me with that, and I'm like, "Well, what's the point of a financial aid office if they can't help me with that?" to the extent that I ended up reaching out to my undergraduate college financial aid office. They were super helpful, but I still have no idea how to actually enroll into the program, and I'm about to go into repayment now. I'm just freaking out. [laughs]

Stacy Cowley: That's a common reaction.

Brian Lehrer: Stacey, can you help Maya and stop her freaking out?

Stacy Cowley: Definitely. This is a common reaction because it's a very confusing program. The good news in your case is that first of all, things should, in theory, work a little smoother, going forward. A lot of people who were caught in this over the last 10 years, it was because the program was being figured out. Now the loan servicers are a lot more aware that this exists, the education department's built a lot more tools to help people deal with it. It's starting to be a lot easier.

The first step is go to studentaid.gov/pslf. That's the page and they updated it rapidly this week, that has a lot of information about the program. The very short version is that you actually don't have to enroll, which is, again, something that's not terribly obvious to people. The way you do it is you work at a qualifying job and then you send what's called a certification form. You technically don't really have to do this until you're ready to apply for forgiveness. You could wait 10 years and then do it but that's a bad idea.

What they recommend people do is send these in about once a year to check in, to say, "I'm having my employer certify my job, I want my loan servicer to check my payment count." You send this form in and they should come back to you with an answer saying, "Yes, your job qualifies. Here's how many qualifying payments you made," and giving you an update. The certification form is on that website.

Also when you do start having repayment, call your loan servicer because they should be aware of this more so than your financial aid office. The loan servicer, when you say to them, "I'm looking to do public service loan forgiveness," should be able to make sure that you have the right paperwork that you are on track with it. As long as you work a qualifying job and have the right kind of loan, your payments should, in theory, automatically count without you having to enroll.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Maya, are you taking notes?

Maya: Yes. I actually pulled up the website. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much.

Stacy Cowley: Good luck.

Brian Lehrer: Good luck. Stacy, give that web address one more time so thousands of our listeners can go to it at the same moment and crash it.

Stacy Cowley: Sure. It's studentaid.gov/pslf.

Brian Lehrer: You know I'm joking about crashing the website, just that we could be sending a lot of people to it at the same time right now.

Stacy Cowley: Bring it on.

Brian Lehrer: I assume part of the point is to motivate college students, and you said this, to go into jobs that may not pay as well as others, but have value to society. Is there evidence that it has worked to get more people into such jobs and into such fields than there would be today without it?

Stacy Cowley: Not on a large number in part because this program was quite obscure for a number of years. The first wave of people actually getting loans discharge didn't happen until 2017, and also because it's been pretty notorious since then as a complete mess, but for a number of people, it makes a critical difference. Where you really see, this program is available to public school teachers, to public school nurses or public hospital nurses. It's a huge subset of people where it becomes critically valuable. I have seen people making career decisions because of this.

If you're taking out huge loans from medical school or law school, a lot of people do rely on this. This is their financial salvation. If you're going to take out $150,000 in law school loans, and then work as a public defender, this may be the only way you're ever going to escape from that debt.

Brian Lehrer: Ralph in Peekskill. You're on WNYC. Hi, Ralph.

Ralph: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. You've got a story of two generations of student debt, I see.

Ralph: Oh, yes. Well, it's just that I worked for 15, 16 years for a residential facility, Office of Child and Family Services licensed residential facility. I made no money. When my kid, my oldest went to school, they would not allow him to borrow money. It had to be parents signing for everything. It's just the way it worked. I'm sure your guest will tell you that there was no way I could get him through the FAFSA without my signature on a lot of loans, so we do Parent PLUS. There's no consideration for us afterwards.

Now, he took out separate loans that he's paying back, but we took out the Parent PLUS loans and we are paying them back. Two more kids after that, fortunately, the Empire program really helped with that. The New York State program that Cuomo put in was able to get a lot of that paid for a lot cheaper. We learned our lesson, but for that, I'm $40,000 in debt at 60 years old because of Parent PLUS loans. It's tough. I made no money for a long time doing exactly what they said I should do, but there's no consideration for that. I had to take those loans because I was making no money.

Brian Lehrer: Did you apply for the student loan forgiveness program? Did you think that your job qualified?

Ralph: I don't qualify.

Brian Lehrer: Don't qualify because?

Ralph: They're my loans. My name's on them, but they're for my son.

Stacy Cowley: Parent PLUS, that was one of the fixes that many advocates sought.

Brian Lehrer: I meant for yourself after you had worked in a residential facility.

Ralph: No, I'm saying my work, my loans, and yet they're my son's loans, but they're mine. I signed for that. They're my-

Brian Lehrer: Right. It's the son's loans at this point. Anything for him, Stacy? Any encouragement or to put this in context for other listeners?

Stacy Cowley: Sadly, this is one of the fixes that people were seeking that didn't happen in this update. They specifically left Parent PLUS out. The only thing I can suggest there unfortunately, is let your representatives know because this change was made in part because Congress has been hammering on the administration about this. This is one of those issues that people barrage their lawmakers with complaints about, and that got them to go barrage the bureaucrats with complaints. Parent PLUS was left out. If you feel it should be included, definitely go express that feeling to your representatives.

Brian Lehrer: Good luck, Ralph. Thank you for sharing your story and I hope you pay off that loan successfully. Listener on Twitter, Jennifer asks, "I already paid off my loans, but worked in qualified non-profit. Might the retro payment refund?"

Stacy Cowley: The retro payment is a little slippery. I'm honestly a little fuzzy on exactly which payments they are crediting back. They've said they're going to credit back some. If you had several years of payments on one of these unqualifying loans like the FFEL loans, that are now going to be qualified, it looks like there's some ability to get refunds on those, otherwise it looks like it's largely going to be your out of luck.

The best thing we can suggest to people is, about your specific case, if you have questions, go to that studentaid.gov website. There's also a place there where you can file a complaint or a question. If you have a particularly tricky case, I highly recommend go to the studentaid.gov ombuds office, the ombudsman for the agency and file a complaint, file a question. That at least gets an actual human to look into your individual situation.

Brian Lehrer: If you have to make 10 years of student loan payments before you qualify, how much debt is being forgiven even theoretically, for most people?

Stacy Cowley: It can be some pretty huge numbers. You can have six figures worth of debt forgiven if that's what you've got. One of the interesting quirks here, which also gives people heart attacks is that if you have a really large debt, it's entirely possible that your monthly payments, the income-based payments you make aren't even enough to cover your insurance. I've heard plenty of cases where somebody started with $100,000 in debt and makes their payments for 10 years and ends up with $200,000 in debt. Interest really whacks people.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take short break here and continue with Stacy Cowley, consumer finance reporter for the New York Times on the New York Times headline, was Troubled Student Loan Forgiveness Program Gets an Overhaul. We'll keep taking your calls. So many people are calling in, Stacy, as I'm sure it does not surprise you.

We're going to talk next, when we come back, to Heather in Brooklyn, Heather, we see you, who's going to raise the topic of people who work in education, higher education in her case. We'll also talk about pre-K-12. I know there's a Trump administration-related lawsuit that one of the teachers unions brought that's part of that. We'll get to that. Stay with us folks. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Are you a teacher? Are you a nurse? Are you a military veteran? Are you a first responder? Did you even know about the federal government student loan forgiveness program? Or are you one of the 98% of applicants to that program who thought you qualify, but then got turned down for your student loan forgiveness? They're trying to fix that now in the Biden administration, and we're getting into it with Stacy Cowley, consumer finance reporter for the New York Times. Heather in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Heather.

Heather: Hey, thank you so much. I'm wondering if adjunct professors at CUNY qualify and if it matters, if you're at a four-year or a two-year or a combination, like I am, and like most people are especially because we have caps at how many classes we can teach at our primary and our secondary CUNY. If we do it for 10 years, will we qualify? Do we have to be 10 years at the same CUNY? Any information on that would be great.

Brian Lehrer: Stacy?

Stacy Cowley: Yes, definitely don't have to be 10 years. The key thing that matters is you probably have to be a W2 employee. Someone who's on a 1099, a contractor is probably not going to be eligible on this, but if you were an employee of the school, all that matters is whether your employer is a non-profit, not what job you do there, or your job status, anything like that. On that website I mentioned earlier, student aid.gov/pslf, they've created an employer look-up tool. You should be able to log in and make sure that your employer does qualify.

Brian Lehrer: Part-time status, which was part of her question, that doesn't qualify or disqualify you?

Stacy Cowley: As long as they're paying you as an actual staff member-- Oh, I'm sorry, you do have to actually be working full time to qualify for this. You can, however, work full-time through a combination of jobs. Full-time is defined for this program as 30 hours a week. You have to be amassing roughly 30 hours a week through some combination of non-profit jobs to qualify.

Brian Lehrer: For an adjunct professor, if she's at CUNY part-time, and maybe she's at a SUNY school part-time or at Iona part-time or whatever it is, and it adds up to 30 hours, plus then she would qualify just by virtue of that?

Stacy Cowley: Yes, it can be a combination of jobs. It's just that every job has to be with the government or non-profit employer.

Brian Lehrer: Is that true of every college professor who has a student loan?

Stacy Cowley: For most of them, if their school is a non-profit school, they're probably going to qualify for this.

Brian Lehrer: There are hardly any for-profit schools. I think even the most famous private, elite schools, be it K-12 or universities are non-profit institutions for overwhelming part, right?

Stacy Cowley: Quite a large number. There are some large for-profit chains, several of them collapsed in recent years. There are fewer of them than there used to be, but there are still some schools out there that are these for-profit usually training career schools, typically a college or university that's focused on a general education, those are typically all non-profit schools.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have to pay back the first 10 years of the loan continuously? Or what if you take some time off to have a kid or take parental leave or something like that?

Stacy Cowley: That's okay. Fortunately, the program requires 120 payments. It does not require that they be consecutive, but it does require that you get all 120. There's no partial credit here. If you worked for nine years and six months for a non-profit employer and then left, you're out of luck. It is a really complicated program in a lot of ways.

Brian Lehrer: Stephanie in New Haven, you're on WNYC with Stacy Cowley, consumer finance reporter for the Times. Hi, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm a physician, who's $250,000 in debt. I'm wondering if with the reforms there's any change in access to qualifying payment counts. I've tried to access how many qualifying payments I've made in the past, but there's major barriers. You have to completely change lenders. You have to reach out to every employer and every school you've ever trained at, get forms filled out. I'm wondering if any of those handicaps have been removed.

Stacy Cowley: Some are, some aren't. One of the things that department's trying to do right now is they're saying, "Look, if you are anywhere in the ballpark of being part of this program, file a certification form between now and October of 2022." That's also really important to mention by the way, a lot of these changes are temporary changes. You have to take advantage of them before October of next year.

What they're encouraging people to do is file that certification form, put as much information as you can there and then they'll start trying to work with you to piece together the history here. One of the complications, which you just mentioned is that technically you can do this with any loan servicer, but there was one specific loan servicer, a company called FedLoan, that was, up until now, supposed to be the primary servicer for this.

If you were with a different servicer, if you were with Naviance or Nelnet or Great Lakes, and you told them, "Hey, I'm working towards PSLF," they were supposed to transfer your account to FedLoan. What's complicated in all of this is that FedLoan is in the process of quitting. Its contract ends at the end of this year, and they don't want to renew it. The Department of Education is trying to find the successor for FedLoan, and they told people to just muddle through for the moment and stay tuned.

One of the big open questions here is they're going to be doing a lot of administrative things over the next year at a time when their main servicer for this program is trying to leave.

The best thing I can suggest there is file that certification form, get your case on the radar of the education department and be prepared to unfortunately do some of this leg work. This is the first time I've seen the education department come out and say, "We're going to try to help you with that leg work." They recognize finally that these employment accounts are a jumble, the certification forms are a jumble, the servicer records are a jumble, and they're claiming they're going to try to use their own databases and things to help sort through this.

Brian Lehrer: Stephanie, thanks for your call. Good luck with that. I hope that's helpful at least a little bit. Why is this company, FedLoan, quitting, as you called it, its contract to do this? It seems like it's a big government contract. It's probably only going to get bigger now with these changes. Why are they getting out of this?

Stacy Cowley: This is another major problem that's looming. They're not the only ones. Two of the government's major services are quitting. Naviance is the other one that has given notice. The reason in both cases, they say this program has simply become too costly, too complex, and they're not being paid enough to do it. A lot of these contracts go back close to a decade, at this point and they're not wrong. The program has become a lot more complex. What they're expected to do has become a lot more demanding.

Brian Lehrer: Listener tweets can't discuss this topic without mentioning Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos's hostility to this program and her role in the severe bureaucratic problems. I know outside of this tweet that the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten's union had sued the Trump administration education department over something having to do with this. Tell us that story.

Stacy Cowley: There have been several lawsuits over this. The teachers union is one of the most high profile. Indeed, Betsy DeVos had made clear she was not a fan of this program. The Trump administration had proposed cutting it several times and the quagmire that it was just continued on her watch. To be fair, it started as quagmire before she became the education secretary. This has been a troubled program for many years, but she implied she wasn't interested in doing a lot to fix it. A lot of these problems just kept getting worse and worse over the last couple of years. The teachers union had sued saying, "Hey, education department, fix this."

Brian Lehrer: Another tweet from a listener with a horror story, Katie on Twitter writes, "I'm a CUNY professor who made 10 years of payments to Naviance, the payments were three times what an income-driven plan would have required. Then I was denied forgiveness." It sounds like that's excruciatingly common.

Stacy Cowley: It has been. You just hit on another wrong loan program. It was one of the more Kafkaesque aspects of this is that if you were on a payment plan that actually charged you more than you would have paid under IBR, you still were often told you weren't eligible. That is again, one of the things that they are supposed to be now fixing. Again, the recommendation is, file that certification form over the next year, and assuming you still have remaining debts, they can finally get this addressed.

Brian Lehrer: If you sometimes paid back more than you were required to at a given moment, does that make you more likely to be denied?

Stacy Cowley: It did for quite a number of years, that was one of the things that would trip the system. It's nuts.

Brian Lehrer: Someone else asks, let's see, this flipped up on my screen, "Because this is a forgiveness program that kicks in after what we're casually calling 10 years of student loan payments, you already established that they don't have to be continuous. If you take time off for parental leave or something like that, it's just 120-monthly payments all together. What if you leave the non-profit sector for a while, work at a for-profit that doesn't qualify for the loan forgiveness, and then go back into non-profit and you still wind up with 120 months of loan payments while you're working at non-profit agencies?" Listener asks.

I know that's a little complicated, but it would be a fairly common career path. People don't necessarily stay in non-profit agencies their whole careers. Maybe they go back and forth between the profit and non-profit sectors. What about that scenario? What counts?

Stacy Cowley: My understanding is that that should qualify. The key thing is that 120 months wrapped up at some combination of non-profits, it doesn't matter if there's interruptions along the way.

Brian Lehrer: Mark in Somerset County, you are on WNYC. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Thank you so much for taking the call. I was a former academic and saw the light and left the field to work for state government in helping those with mental health and substance abuse disorders. I've been in state government for over about 13 years. I've always been looking, trying to get into the student loan forgiveness but my issue is I'd be a state employee not making a lot of money, but my loans were so much that even in the program, they would say I'd have to make about $2,000 worth of payments every month for 10 years, just clearly outside my financial realm.

I'm wondering, I certainly want to make payments and pay it all off, but the options they gave, to be in the program you have to pay slightly less than you're making a month, just every month for 10 years. I want to know if the new policy has got any changes to that.

Stacey Cowley: This is a good example of where the servicers did not always give people the most correct information. For the last several years, the rule has been that you're supposed to be using an income-driven repayment plan to qualify for this, and those are generally capped at 10% of your income. Unless something's really strange there, they should not be asking for a payment that is anywhere near most of your income, it should be capped at about 10% of your income, would be the maximum you'd be asked to pay.

Mark: To be fair, the loans, and what happened, I once made the mistake of going to a very expensive undergraduate school and then deferring. You mentioned earlier, the interest just accrues, accrues, accrues. I don't know how that bears apple. Will there be any changes that puts people with the right type of payment plan, do you think?

Stacey Cowley: I think that's where getting into the income-driven plan is supposed to help because if you look at the standard repayment plan for a loan, is 10 years, and those can lead to, as you just said, astronomical payments. I've seen people who, on the standard repayment plan, have payments that are $2,000, $3,000, $5000. The income-driven plan is supposed to keep that from happening, your servicer is supposed to be able to work with you and say, "Okay, let's get the form submitted, let's document your income, and then it's going to calculate the monthly payment that comes out to no more than 10% of your annual income."

In theory, that's supposed to be affordable for most people. Now, we recognize that it isn't always. Once you factor in cost of living and things like that, these payments can still be quite high, but that's the guardrail that's supposed to make this, in theory, affordable for people.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, I hope that's helpful. Thank you for your call. Stacey, I'm still thinking about the politics of this. Did the Trump administration have a hostility to the program itself because of a Republican hostility to the non-profit sector? Is that a fair characterization that they think might tend to lean left or be subversive to capitalism in some way that they may see it, so the Biden administration now in its first year, declaring that it's going to get serious about fixing this program is also consistent with the Democrat's larger support for the non-profit institutions of the world in general? Or am I overthinking this?

Stacey Cowley: I think there's some. Trump himself was certainly often not a fan of government employees. I think largely, the Republican hostility came from viewing this as a taxpayer giveaway that ultimately the costs of loan forgiveness are borne by taxpayers. This was a program that the Trump administration went after in the budget. This was a program that Betsy DeVos, who was never really a fan of taxpayer-subsidized college educations, often targeted.

Certainly, under the Biden administration, there is much more of a focus on trying to get relief for these groups of people. Although, I will note that this is a program that had some level of bipartisan support because it really is frontline workers. When you see the police officers and the firefighters and the nurses and the teachers in your community, very few politicians are going to come out and say that those are not groups that deserve support.

Brian Lehrer: Does it apply to journalism too, if somebody works for WNYC, because it's a non-profit organization, they would qualify for this loan forgiveness, but not if they work for CBS News, which did the 60 Minutes report on it?

Stacey Cowley: It's true. If you work for a non-profit newsroom, you would qualify. One of the nice things about this program is that it actually is very clear-cut. Virtually all non-profit work and virtually all government work qualifies. There isn't a lot of room for the government to make distinctions about what it likes and what it doesn't.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I don't have student loans. My parents paid for me to go to SUNY, but colleagues take note. How does this play into the larger progressive policy agenda, if at all, of a broad student debt forgiveness, or free public college?

Stacey Cowley: There's certainly a lot of reaction from borrowers' advocates saying, "This is great. Now, go further." There's been no quieting of that progressive push for some sort of broad student debt cancellation. The Biden administration has honestly been pretty resistant to that. He's been very open about if Congress did it, he would welcome that, but he doesn't really seem to want to try to push his executive authority to do it that way.

Brian Lehrer: There, I guess, we leave it. Give that web address one more time. You gave it at the beginning of the segment. For people who weren't listening then, if folks you're just tuning in and just getting your heads around this news from yesterday, that The Biden administration is trying to fix the student loan forgiveness program for people who've worked in non-profits for 10 years, there's a web address that people can go for more information or to apply or try to fix their circumstances.

Stacey Cowley: Yes, that's studentaid.gov./pslf, which stands for public service loan forgiveness.

Brian Lehrer: Stacey Cowley is a consumer finance reporter for the New York Times. Thanks for all the great information.

Stacey Cowley: Thanks so much.

 

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