Social Security

Over the past few weeks, 128 House Republican lawmakers filed an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court ahead of oral arguments on February 28 urging it to strike down Biden’s debt relief. An analysis of the new data from advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) shows that nearly 12 million student-loan borrowers are eligible for the relief, over 7 million applied or auto-enrolled, and over 4 million of them were approved…

The difference between the mass debt cancellation plan and other pandemic economic supports can be found in the very structure of higher education finance in the U.S., Mr. Pierce said, where over 90% of student loans are issued by the federal government. “The government is the creditor here—they can decide when loans get repaid, if at all,” he said.

Bonnie Latreille, the FSA ombudsman and co-founder of the Student Borrower Protection Center, took over the ombudsman’s office in July 2021… Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, said the ombudsman’s report did a good job of highlighting the pain points in student loan policy and putting a face on the issues. “The previous [ombudsman] reports have been technical and dry and didn’t do a good job of lifting up borrowers’ voices,”…

“If Frank’s primary function was to get people through the financial aid application, and Frank promised to JPMorgan Chase that their account holders comprised [4.25] million people, that would be a quarter of all financial aid applications in America, depending on how you measure it,” said Mike Pierce, executive director and co-founder of the Student Borrower Protection Center, a nonprofit that focuses on student debt. “There should always be skepticism about how these…

In a series of letters Massachusetts Sen. Warren sent out on Wednesday, she asked nearly 20 advocacy groups — including the NAACP, the Student Borrower Protection Center, and The Debt Collective — how the efforts to block President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers are impacting the groups’ members.

Advocates lauded the proposed improvements but expressed disappointment with this exclusion. “It ignores the reality that low-income families—especially low-income families of color—are more likely to rely on Parent PLUS loans or need to get a graduate degree to earn the same salary as their wealthier white peers,” Persis Yu, deputy executive director of advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center, said in a statement.