News Clips

In recent days, the White House has drawn widespread blowback as advocates and progressives implore the administration to push back, or forego entirely, a February date to lift a pandemic forbearance on student loan payments.

Today, the Student Borrower Protection Center sent a letter to President Biden alongside 207 other organizations (including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the NAACP) calling for the pause to be extended. 

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic the federal government has allowed for millions of student loan payments to be paused, but in a few short months those repayments will resume. Now, over 200 organizations are urging President Biden to extend the pause yet again.

On Thursday, over 200 organizations, led by the Student Borrower Protection Center, sent yet another letter to Biden calling on him to extend the pause until he fulfills his campaign promises of fixing loan forgiveness programs and cancelling student debt.

Advocacy groups representing student loan borrowers sent out a warning on Monday that student loan servicing companies may provide misleading information to borrowers on a new expansion of a key federal student loan forgiveness program.

Some legal experts and computer scientists have been more wary. Just because something is a machine doesn’t mean it’s free of human biases, they say, as the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in other areas illustrates. In the criminal justice sphere, for example, use of this type of technology was once seen as a way to reduce bias in sentencing, but now evidence indicates that the data it pulls in reproduces already present inequality. 

New data from the Education Department reveals that of the 7.7 million federal student-loan borrowers in the US that were behind on payments at that start of the pandemic, 93% are still behind — despite a nearly two-year pause in payments.

Watch: Student loan debt relief may be in sight for some as the Department of Education announces an overhaul of its student loan forgiveness program for public servants.

And while the memo itself tells us almost nothing, experts believe its existence and paper trail proves that the president has the authority to forgive all debt but lacks the political will to do so.