Education

Robert Reich -  Biden is announcing a new plan to reduce student debt for about 30M Americans & cancel it entirely for more than 4M, on top of the $146B he's already canceled — this after Republicans successfully sued to block previous debt relief.

 The extraordinary cost of going to college

NPR - The Department of Education released new proposals that could eliminate student debt for millions of Americans. The new proposals emphasize reducing or eliminating accrued interest. The proposal would cancel $20,000 in interest for any borrower, regardless of income. It would also make it so that low and middle-income borrowers could become eligible to have all of their interest forgiven. Millions of borrowers owe more money now than they originally took out, NPR’s Sequoia Carrillo explains on Up First. This new proposal hopes to tackle this problem. The Biden administration is using a process called “negotiated rulemaking” to ensure that the proposal can survive legal challenges this time around. The negotiated rulemaking process is a slower and far more traditional path to change higher education policy. The stakes for getting student debt relief passed are high for the administration, Carrillo says, because student loan borrowers are a pretty young group, which is a key demographic the president is hoping to keep in his camp.