This is likely to be a popular topic. Full disclosure: I was "around" the political process at the start of the PSLF scheme. It was a recommendation in a 2003 paper I wrote for Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly.
Here's the question: How can you succeed with student loan forgiveness?
Especially given the basket-case that is the DoE under DeVos?
Aimee and I have some experience with this because in February 2020 we managed to get our loans forgiven, all $110,000 of them. This sounds like a lot, but remember it was the cost of a BA and a BS, two MS's, and two PhD's. This was without counting the tuition remission and research assistant stipends we also had.
We also got nearly $10,000 of payments that we had already made refunded. Without this event, losing our jobs at Unity College would have been a much bigger family financial disaster than it was.
First up, what is PSLF?
PLSF is federal student loan forgiveness for all government and non-profit employees. Your loans have to be federal subsidized or unsubsidized loans, not private for-profit loans. If you don't know the difference you need extra help and had better email us separately. And you must be employed by the government, (federal, state, or local), or a "qualifying" IRS 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit charitable institution. Again, if you don't know the difference between government, non-profit, and for-profit organizations, a) you should have taken economics in college!, and b) you need extra help and should email us separately.
But many students that won jobs after taking degrees at the old, "real" Unity College will qualify.
(If you are reading this and are a student at the new, purely online Unity College, you need a different kind of help. There are pedagogical reasons why so many of the old students are employed in their target jobs.)
How long does it take? Ten years qualifying payments or 120 payments on time and the rest of your loans are forgiven. There's no limit to how much, at least not right now. But, and this is a timely warning, Congress is very likely to overhaul the system completely after the Biden inauguration, so you should stay tuned. I'll add updates to the bottom of the page as necessary.
How do I start? You have to be enrolled in an income-driven repayment scheme (IDR) and your loans must be consolidated under Pennsylvania's FedLoan program. Fedloan is the federal contractor for all ordinary PLSF loan forgiveness processes. FedLoan has a seven-step start page here. Scroll down a little to expand the seven steps:
https://myfedloan.org/borrowers/special-programs/pslf
What if I haven't been in an IDR? Congress realized that a lot of former students had been counseled by loan providers, including state and federal government ones like FedLoan, out of IDR schemes, so they approved Temporary Expanded PSLF (TEPSLF) to give these folks a window of opportunity for forgiveness (section 3 of the Act). The amount authorized is limited, but hasn't all been used yet because of how crap FedLoan is. (More on dealing with this below.) DoE has a start page for TEPSLF here:
PSLF or TEPSLF? If you work for government or qualifying non-profit and are in an IDR scheme and make 120 on-time payments, you qualify for PSLF. If you work for government or a non-profit, and have made payments under a different scheme, you may still qualify for TEPSLF.
What if I've already made 120 payments? If you made 120 on-time payments that qualify as IDR for PSLF, you'll get forgiveness under that program. If you made 120 payments under a different repayment program, you may qualify for TEPSLF if there's enough of the tranche of money that Congress authorized left. or if they allocate more money. Both PSLF and TEPSLF allow for backdating of payments, so approval can happen in less than ten (further) years with that program if you have kept up. And even if you missed a payment, or were in forbearance for a month, that will only be one extra month of payments. (When we first started work at Unity College the pay wasn't very good, and so there were a couple times we asked for forbearance so we could pay an auto repair bill or buy a necessary household item. Or get married! We asked for and got forbearance to have more money to pay for our wedding. Not that it was a particularly "big" wedding. But that's how tight things were. There's a reason we had to build our own house!)
First step: You have to reconsolidate your loans under an IDR with FedLoan to begin PSLF or TEPSLF. It's advisable to do this in any case, because consolidation saves money and time, and, to be honest, none of the loan servicers are much better than FedLoan. Beware for-profit consolidation schemes. These vultures will charge high interest and drive you bankrupt. And there's no forgiveness if you are foolish enough to consolidate with a private student loan company.
This is all too difficult. What do I do? It is way too freakin' difficult. The paperwork is unnecessarily difficult, even before FedLoan loses your papers and miscounts your payments! We have PhDs and are good readers, writers, and critical thinkers, but it still took us four solid months to figure it all out and qualify. The reading level for the documentation is way too high, probably around grade fourteen or fifteen (sophomore/junior in college) and it's very disorganized. And this is even before you get deeper into it and start reading the actual laws or the results of the various court cases, which we found ourselves doing before we won forgiveness. (As we tried to explain to you when we were your teachers, reading and writing are very important college skills -- more important than knowing how to dart monkeys or electroshock fish! Here's a great example!) But they could have made it easier. The DoE under Betsy DeVos is/was a terrible basket case. FedLoan lost our paperwork several times and gave us several different counts of qualifying payments. Congress really needs to fix this, but a new Secretary of Education will help, one that is actually an educator.
Be patient, be "Zen" and plug away at it. "Keep calm and carry on." Take a break if you need to, and get some rest, then come back to it. There are also counselors and lawyers who are beginning to specialize in PSLF and TEPSLF, but, of course, this "high priced help" comes with a cost.
But email us with any specific questions you may have and we'll try to help.
If all else fails? If you run into trouble with FedLoan, and almost everyone does because they lose paperwork all the time, you can then go to something called the Federal Student Aid Ombudsman and appeal.
It's this last step that worked for us: The Ombudsman will still send you back to FedLoan almost immediately, but you'll be in a different department that works much faster. They'll get back to you very quickly and if you have a good case it will take a month or two more and you'll be done.
This is primarily because of the various lawsuits that have been brought against DeVos, the DoE, and FedLoan. There's a little-known federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA requires all government procedures to be consistent and rational. In particular, a federal agency or contractor (DoE or FedLoan) cannot treat people differently under the law. If one person gets forgiveness, all other people with the same relevant characteristics must also get the same consideration, or they can sue. The Trump Administration fell afoul of this law many, many times during its four years' reign, and DeVos was the very worst offender. They just couldn't get it together to treat people fairly and consistently under just about any law they tinkered with. (Especially if you were poor, of color, or Muslim. But "deplorables," from Mar-a-Largo members to Proud Boys got lots of help and support!)
Keep your bill stubs! I'm a packrat. I have all our paid bills filed for the last twenty years, since I moved to Maine in 2000. It helped enormously that we had nearly a full set of payment stubs for all our loan payments. Each previous payment date and amount, the loan provider, and in most cases the payment plan was documented on the stub. This meant that we could prove if necessary, and in in court if needed, that we had made the payments, putting FedLoan and DoE at risk of an APA lawsuit if they didn't follow the law. This record helped focus the ombudsman on FedLoan's deficiencies, not any of ours. They obviously couldn't pin any deficiency on us because we had such a good paper trail. As the ombudsman process got going, I went through all our saved bills (which are filed chronologically by biweekly pay periods), pulled out the loan payment stubs, made a spreadsheet of each amount, loan provider, and payment plan (when recorded), and also an electronic photocopy of the whole stack. I sent both electronically to the ombudsman. We had changed student loan providers as the government changed the system over the years, and so there were some stubs that didn't give the payment plan, and we had lost four or five monthly stubs, but we had enough to make the Ombudsman force FedLoan to check the records more carefully. So keep your payment stubs. This is usually the top two thirds of each bill, after you rip off the payment slip and send it in with your check. If you pay online, save similar records electronically.
Of course, now Aimee doesn't get to complain about my packrat habits, at least with regard to bill-filing! Car parts, hardware, and nuts and bolts are a different category, though (apparently).
Bottom line: It's a major pain to jump through all the hoops, took us hours of work and frustration, but considering the pay-off ($110K for both of our PhDs), they were well-paid hours in the end!
