As employers seek to hire and keep workers in a challenging job market, more are weighing offering help with student debt repayments as a job benefit, the New York Times reported. That’s good news for student loan borrowers because a freeze on federal student loan payments, part of the government’s pandemic relief effort, is scheduled to end on May 1. Millions of borrowers — many of whom haven’t made loan payments in nearly two years — will once again have to start paying their monthly bill. Student debt repayment programs were a hot topic in 2019, but companies’ interest ebbed in the pandemic, said Craig Copeland, senior research associate with the Employee Benefit Research Institute, as the pause on federal student debt payments temporarily took pressure off borrowers. Employers shifted their focus to programs offering more immediate help, like emergency savings and hardship payments. But there are signs of renewed interest among both borrowers and employers as the pause expires and employers seek to hire and hold on to increasingly emboldened workers. The institute’s 2021 survey of employers’ “financial well-being” benefits found that about 17 percent of large employers — those with 500 or more workers — offered some form of student debt assistance. Of those, nearly a third (30 percent) offered direct loan subsidies and an additional 40 percent said they planned to start offering direct help in the next year or two.
