The federal Department of Education said recently that it would offer to write off $7.7 billion of student debt owed by disabled individuals, taking a big step to streamline a loan forgiveness program long plagued by bureaucratic delay and inefficiency.
Starting April 18, loan forgiveness letters started going out to approximately 387,000 borrowers who have been identified as totally and permanently disabled by the Social Security Administration, allowing them to sign and file a simplified application form to have their debt forgiven.
The move was enabled by changes in the department’s regulations governing the loan forgiveness program, which resulted from a 2011 ProPublica investigation published in partnership with Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and the Center for Public Integrity.
[For more of this story, written by Cezary Podkul & Marcelo Rochabrun, go to https://psmag.com/the-federal-...9b2184fc1#.2sc9fnnam]
Comments (0)