Biden's Grand Plans to Cancel Student Debt Fell Apart — but Millions Still Benefited

President Joe Biden may have under-delivered on his promise to provide broad student loan forgiveness, but his administration still succeeded in wiping out billions of dollars of student debt.

Just days before he leaves the White House, Biden made his final three rounds of targeted student debt forgiveness, announcing this week that another 400,000 borrowers would have a collective $10 billion of debt canceled.

Biden noted in a statement that these last measures bring the total number of borrowers who have received student loan forgiveness under his administration to over 5 million.

“I’m proud to say we have forgiven more student loan debt than any other administration in history,” Biden said.

In total, the Education Department has discharged about $190 billion of student debt as part of 33 targeted relief measures since Biden took office, the agency said Thursday.

Republicans largely balked at the final wave of forgiveness efforts. Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mi., called it a “swan song” that ignores previous court rulings.

“It is shameful that, in its final days, the Biden-Harris administration is doubling down on efforts to push as much forgiveness as possible through the door,” he said, “once again ignoring the rule of law.”

Who benefits from Biden’s last rounds of student debt relief

Biden’s final relief efforts are largely tailored toward public service workers, borrowers who were misled by their schools into taking out loans and borrowers who are permanently disabled.

These groups qualified for student debt relief under long-standing programs run by the Education Department and were not approved as part of Biden’s separate, failed attempts at broad forgiveness. That said, Biden's White House oversaw several changes that made it simpler for borrowers to actually access forgiveness through these programs.

• About 350,000 borrowers approved for Borrower Defense forgiveness: Hundreds of thousands of borrowers who attended for-profit schools that the Education Department found as having engaged in misleading or deceptive practices — including Ashford University, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education and others — will have their student loans forgiven automatically.

• 61,000 borrowers to receive Total and Permanent Disability Discharge: Thanks to the Education Department’s recent ability to automatically pull data from the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veteran Affairs, this group of disabled borrowers is getting their loans forgiven automatically.

• 6,100 qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF): Through PSLF, this latest batch of public-sector workers — i.e. doctors, nurses, teachers and social workers — are getting their remaining loans forgiven after working for 10 years in the field while making loan payments. This program requires an application and certification of payments and work history.

• Over 4,500 to receive relief via Income-Based Repayment (IBR): After decades of making payments through the IBR plan, one of several income-driven repayment plans that bases one’s monthly loan payments on their earnings, 4,550 borrowers are getting their remaining balances forgiven, the Education Department said Thursday.

According to the department, these discharge measures can't be reversed by the incoming Trump administration.

“This is a final agency determination," an official said on a press call Monday.

A look at loan forgiveness under Biden

When Biden took office in 2021, he had big student loan forgiveness plans, after campaigning on a promise to forgive at least $10,000 of student loan debt per borrower. Broad debt relief never panned out — though it wasn’t for lack of trying.

In 2022, he unveiled his first major forgiveness plan, a proposal to cancel up to $20,000 per borrower, a measure that was slated to benefit upwards of 40 million federal student loan borrowers. Of course, that never happened. The U.S. Supreme Court struck the plan down, stating the president didn’t have the legal authority to broadly cancel student debt.

The Biden administration went back to the drawing board, creating a narrower forgiveness plan that underwent an official rulemaking process. It was aimed at providing relief to borrowers who are struggling financially or have been repaying their loans for decades. This plan, too, faced major legal challenges. Right before the Presidential Election, his administration pared down the plan even further, essentially crafting a Plan C that it viewed as adhering to the courts’ previous rulings.

Given that Vice President Kamala Harris lost her presidential bid to President-elect Donald Trump, Biden ultimately abandoned his broad forgiveness efforts and formally withdrew the measures.

As the larger legal battles were playing out, Biden made many piecemeal changes to the student loan repayment system — improving the application and approval processes for the Department of Education’s handful of existing relief programs.

He also reformed income-driven repayment by creating a new plan called SAVE, short for Saving on a Value Education. This program was ultimately halted by the courts as well, but not before forgiving debt for about 1 million borrowers.

All the while, Biden utilized several long-standing forgiveness programs (such as PSLF and others mentioned above) to provide relief to millions more.

Here’s a tally of the various programs Biden used to forgive student loans in lieu of his broader plans being struck down:

• Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans: $57.1 billion for 1.45 million borrowers

• PSLF: $78.5 billion for over 1 million borrowers

• Disability discharge: $18.7 billion for over 630,000 borrowers

• Borrower Defense: $34.5 billion for nearly 2 million borrowers

What student loan borrowers can expect under Trump

While Trump has thus far kept mum on student loan forgiveness, borrowers should not get their hopes up.

His cabinet and other advisors in his orbit — including some conservative agenda-setters of Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute — are strongly against student loan forgiveness.

More broadly, Trump has said he wants to dismantle the Education Department as one of his first acts in office. Doing so requires Congressional approval. In the unlikely event that the department is dismantled, it’s not exactly clear what would happen to the estimated $1.5 trillion of federal student loans it oversees.

One possibility, as outlined in Project 2025, is that the loans are transferred over to the U.S. Department of the Treasury (and not accidentally forgiven, as some wishful theories are suggesting).

Michael Itzkowitz, an education policy consultant and founder of HEA Group, recently told Money that borrowers should expect a continuation of Trump’s first term: That is, a scaling back of Obama and Biden-era relief policies.

“It’s likely that the incoming administration will abandon forgiveness programs,” he said, “whenever and wherever possible.”

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