After making payments on her student loans since 2005, Karen Tongson is finally free of her debt.
In November, Tongson, an English and gender studies professor, signed into her loan account and discovered her balance had fallen from $47,000 to $0, thanks to the public service loan forgiveness program.
That program, signed into law in 2007 by then-President George W. Bush, permits nonprofit and government employees to have their remaining federal student loans canceled after 10 years, or 120 payments.
However, the program has been defined by problems and rejections, with borrowers often believing they’re paying their way to loan cancellation only to learn at some point in the process that they don’t qualify, often for wonky and unclear reasons. Lenders have been accused of misleading borrowers and miscounting their qualifying payments.
To get your student loans forgiven under PSLF, you need to have made 120 payments over 10 years while working a public service job.
The problem the Biden administration is working to fix is that many borrowers are told by their lenders that they’ve made fewer payments than they actually have, or that some of their payments aren’t counted for technical reasons, such as the type of federal loan they hold or being late one month.
To give people the proper credit for their payments, the administration is now looking not at the number of your qualifying payments but the months that you’ve been in repayment, said Elaine Griffin Rubin, senior contributor and communications specialist at Edvisors.
