- Former Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos criticizedBiden 's student-loan-forgiveness plans. - She said borrowers had plenty of options to pay back their debt without that relief.
A former US secretary of education said she hoped President Joe Biden would halt to his student-loan-forgiveness plans.
Betsy DeVos, the secretary of the
"When we talk about this notion of forgiving
"And so, it's a matter of fairness," DeVos added. "It's not fair to go and just give massive student-loan forgiveness."
The Washington Post reported Biden was considering forgiving $10,000 in student debt for federal borrowers making under $150,000 a year and that the announcement would likely come close to when student-loan payments are set to resume after August 31.
DeVos' remarks on student-loan relief are similar to those of many Republican lawmakers who have slammed broad forgiveness, saying the
DeVos also said that rather than forgiving student debt, "there's a whole bunch of different income-based repayment plans" borrowers could use, along with the college scorecards that show potential costs and earnings for a particular field of study.
"So there's a lot of tools for students to use, and I would encourage all students to do that as they're doing their due diligence," DeVos said.
Income-driven repayment plans, though, have been flawed for decades. While the idea of the plans is to give borrowers affordable monthly payments based on their incomes with the promise of loan forgiveness after at least 20 years of repayment, an NPR investigation found in April that student-loan companies were failing to track payments borrowers made on the plans, which pushed them far off the forgiveness route.
Biden's Education Department has criticized DeVos' handling of the student-loan portfolio, particularly when it comes to targeted student-loan relief for borrowers defrauded by for-profit schools. The relief, known as borrower defense to repayment, was supposed to discharge debt for those borrowers once they submitted a claim, but DeVos ran up a huge backlog of those claims that resulted in a 99% denial rate.
Despite Republican pushback, many Democratic lawmakers are keeping pressure on Biden to go big on student-loan forgiveness to benefit those struggling the most. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wrote on Instagram over the weekend that "an arbitrary number" of relief wouldn't do.
"People get addicted to splitting things down the middle but there are policies where a halfway approach is kind of a waste as it's not much better than nothing, and resources are better spent elsewhere," she said. "We push so that people can actually experience the benefits of a policy."