Nearly half of college students surveyed earlier this year said that they expected to be helped by the federal government’s various student loan forgiveness programs, but new government figures suggest that their hoped-for windfall won’t be that generous, according to a Bloomberg News commentary yesterday. The U.S. Department of the Education projects that borrowers who next year enroll in loan forgiveness programs would, on average, repay every penny they borrowed. Some debtors in the programs, which cap monthly payments relative to earnings and offer the possibility of debt forgiveness, are projected to pay as much as 76 percent more than they borrowed. The forgiven amount would largely be interest that accrued over what could be as long as 25 years of making payments. In fact, the government projects that just 53 percent of debtors who’d enroll in these plans in the 2018 fiscal year would receive any forgiveness at all, according to estimates made public on Wednesday. Even that estimate may be too high, separate government figures suggest. Less than half of all government-owned student debt (by dollar volume) belongs to people enrolled in income-based repayment plans, Education Department data show.
