Скачать или смотреть Exclusive How the student loan safety net has failed low income borrowers

A federal program intended to help low-income student loan borrowers, and eventually offer them debt cancellation, has failed to live up to its promise, an NPR investigation has found. More than 9 million borrowers are currently enrolled in income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, which are designed to help people who cannot afford to make large monthly payments. The plans also promise loan cancellation after 20-25 years. But documents obtained by NPR offer striking evidence that these plans have been badly mismanaged by loan servicers and the U. S. Department of Education. NPR obtained two-dozen pages of internal department documents, including emails and, most notably, a previously unreported, 2016 review of student loan servicers' struggles to implement IDR. The documents shed new light on the 2021 revelation that, at the time, 4.4 million borrowers had been repaying for at least 20 years but only 32 had had loans canceled under IDR. The documents also offer surprising new revelations. For example, some servicers weren't clearly tracking IDR payments and did not know when borrowers qualified for cancellation. The Education Department did not respond in time to NPR's request for comment. In all, these records paint a breathtaking picture of IDR's failure, and cast a shadow over the federal student loan program. While the Biden administration did not make these problems, it must now address them as it weighs restarting repayment after a two-year pandemic pause. The Education Department offers several IDR plans that make similar promises: a manageable monthly payment (as low as $0) as well as loan cancellation after 20-25 years of qualifying payments. It is the servicer's job to count how many payments a borrower has made and proactively notify them when they qualify for loan cancellation (after 240 - 300 payments). But the previously unreleased 2016 review of servicers, conducted by the department's office of Federal Student Aid (FSA), found that three servicers – PHEAA, CornerStone and MOHELA – did "not have an IDR forgiveness payment counter" to track borrowers' progress toward cancellation. The review notes that borrowers with accounts at PHEAA, for example, would have had to request a manual count of past payments to gauge their eligibility for cancellation. Ultimately, this means some servicers didn't know if borrowers qualified for cancellation unless they were asked, by borrowers, to do a labor-intensive records review."It is not on borrowers to be keeping two decades' worth of records of how their student loan payments were made and whether each payment counted towards cancellation," says Abby Shafroth, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), a nonprofit that has previously called for reform of IDR.


All data is taken from the source: http://npr.org
Article Link: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/01/108975...


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