my pet theory is that the absolute cock up going on at FedLoan (the private company that has the exclusive servicer rights to handle the PSLF program) is a critical factor.
Navient was terrible and got nailed for predatory activity, but FedLoan was home to all the public service try-to-do-the-right-thing people who committed to 10 years of public service. right when the first qualifying borrowers were hitting year 10, there was a wave of complaints of bad faith / incompetence by FedLoan. abysmal record keeping of payments, wildly inaccurate counts, unreachable/incommunicative servicer support. the stats coming out were that 1% of people who qualified were getting loans discharged, the rest being hung out to dry with no justification. by all accounts it was shaping up to be a catastrophic failure of neoliberal policy to actually work for the PMC neoliberals in the public sector.
then the pandemic hit and Trump froze interest/payments. interestingly, this whole time of frozen payments has included a provision for PSLF that each month of $0 payments is counting towards PSLF forgiveness. the forgiveness criteria expanded greatly, FedLoan is being shown the door, and everyone in PSLF will go to MOHEA as their servicer, supposedly on it before end of 2022. but communication has been almost non existent and vague. the guidance is for people in the program to download their own copies of payment history and the transfer was originally supposed to be done a month ago.
I think something extremely rotten happened with FedLoan and emergency containment efforts have failed, so there's some serious can kicking happening because none of the wonks or technocrats have been able to untangle the ball of Christmas lights yet in a way that won't result in a massive class action suit over the government breaking the terms of the promissory notes.
Honestly would love this to be true and see the whole affair go up in flames just as we are also suffering from severe inflation, rising COL and stagnating wages (oh also maybe WWIII or a pseudo shift in global hegemony with China somewhat supporting Russia).
my pet theory is that the absolute cock up going on at FedLoan (the private company that has the exclusive servicer rights to handle the PSLF program) is a critical factor.
Navient was terrible and got nailed for predatory activity, but FedLoan was home to all the public service try-to-do-the-right-thing people who committed to 10 years of public service. right when the first qualifying borrowers were hitting year 10, there was a wave of complaints of bad faith / incompetence by FedLoan. abysmal record keeping of payments, wildly inaccurate counts, unreachable/incommunicative servicer support. the stats coming out were that 1% of people who qualified were getting loans discharged, the rest being hung out to dry with no justification. by all accounts it was shaping up to be a catastrophic failure of neoliberal policy to actually work for the PMC neoliberals in the public sector.
then the pandemic hit and Trump froze interest/payments. interestingly, this whole time of frozen payments has included a provision for PSLF that each month of $0 payments is counting towards PSLF forgiveness. the forgiveness criteria expanded greatly, FedLoan is being shown the door, and everyone in PSLF will go to MOHEA as their servicer, supposedly on it before end of 2022. but communication has been almost non existent and vague. the guidance is for people in the program to download their own copies of payment history and the transfer was originally supposed to be done a month ago.
I think something extremely rotten happened with FedLoan and emergency containment efforts have failed, so there's some serious can kicking happening because none of the wonks or technocrats have been able to untangle the ball of Christmas lights yet in a way that won't result in a massive class action suit over the government breaking the terms of the promissory notes.
Honestly would love this to be true and see the whole affair go up in flames just as we are also suffering from severe inflation, rising COL and stagnating wages (oh also maybe WWIII or a pseudo shift in global hegemony with China somewhat supporting Russia).