The United States President has announced that his Administration is canceling student debt for 160,000 more people, bringing the total number of Americans who have benefitted from the debt relief actions to 4.75 million.
Biden who made the announcement in a statement released by the White House on Wednesday said, each of those borrowers has received an average of over $35,000 in debt cancellation.
According to him, “These 160,000 additional borrowers are people enrolled in Administration’s SAVE Plan; are public service workers like teachers, nurses, or law enforcement officials; or borrowers who were approved for relief because of fixes we made to Income-Driven Repayment.”
The President stated that this announcement comes on top of the significant progress made for students and borrowers over the past three years. “That includes providing the largest increases to the maximum Pell Grant in over a decade; fixing Public Service Loan Forgiveness so teachers, nurses, police officers
“And other public service workers get the relief they are entitled to under the law; and holding colleges accountable for taking advantage of students and families”, while recalled last month, his laying out the Administration’s new plans that would cancel student debt for more than 30 million Americans when combined with everything the administration have done so far.
Biden said, “From day one of my Administration, I promised to fight to ensure higher education is a ticket to middle class, not a barrier to opportunity. I will never stop working to cancel student debt – no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us”.
Biden, keen to shore up waning support among young people ahead of the November presidential election, which he pledged last year to find other avenues for tackling debt relief after the Supreme Court in June blocked his broader plan to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt.
Reuter reports that the issue remains high on the agenda of younger voters, many of whom have concerns about Biden’s foreign policy on the war in Gaza and fault him for not achieving greater debt forgiveness.
It also added that campaign of former President Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican challenger in the White House race, in March criticized the student loan cancellation as a bailout that was done “without a single act of Congress.”
