The sabotage of public service student loan forgiveness

Too many Americans are finishing school saddled with a prohibitive "debt sentence" that prevents them from seeking careers that may not pay like Wall Street but offer a different kind of enrichment. To ease that burden and encourage more graduates to enter public service, Congress passed a bill, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2007, that created the bipartisan Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. The program offers us an opportunity to do right by public servants and the communities they serve by forgiving their student debt after 10 years of qualifying repayments.

But despite the bipartisan commitment to loan forgiveness for public service, evidence shows that the Department of Education is failing, or refusing, to help qualified borrowers.

In response, Congress provided in 2018 $700 million in additional funding to the Department of Education for Temporary Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness to allow borrowers, many of whom had received inaccurate or incomplete information from their student loan servicing companies, to access the loan relief they were entitled to.

Since then, both our offices have requested data on the administration of the TEPSLF program, to find out exactly what is going wrong. Earlier this month, we received some of the information, and the results it showed were abysmal: Only 262 people have qualified for TEPSLF, out of more than 38,000 applicants. Out of the $700 million authorized to cover loan cancellations, only $10.6 million in debt has actually been forgiven.

At a recent student debt clinic in Brentwood, New York, one AFT member had documentation showing her loan servicing company had recorded the incorrect number of qualifying payments she'd made. She was told by her servicer it would take a year before it would even consider correcting her information in the system, let alone reconsider her application.

Countless public servants from Florida, New York, Virginia and across the country have been sharing these horror stories. To end this nightmare for them, we're pushing for legislative fixes to PSLF. The What You Can Do for Your Country Act, introduced this month, would make every type of federal loan and every type of repayment plan eligible for student loan forgiveness. Servicers could no longer use trivial technicalities, like choosing the wrong repayment plan, to deny people the forgiveness they've earned. The bill would also require the Education Department to better communicate how borrowers can apply for forgiveness and simplify that application process. Finally, the bill would allow for partial forgiveness so public servants could have half their loans forgiven after five years of service.

We're also considering strategies to fix this program that go beyond legislation: Several unions and consumer protection groups are sending a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau asking it to investigate the agencies and companies involved directly in implementing PSLF, and we are pursuing requests for documents, alongside the Student Borrower Protection Center, to help uncover records, data, contracts and other filings that shed light on just why PSLF is failing the people it was intended to serve and who is playing a role in this failure. Several classes of borrowers — including a group of AFT members — and a number of state attorneys general are also suing loan servicers for their failure to implement PSLF effectively, in the hopes that this might streamline the process and offer some relief to current and future borrowers.

Public service transcends politics. It's one of the greatest reflections of American values, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness is a promise worth our continued investment so the great tradition of service in this country can move forward without enforcing a lifetime sentence of debt.