SAN ANTONIO – Federal student loan borrowers will have to resume payments in October, including thousands of San Antonians who applied for student loan debt forgiveness before the Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s initial loan program that would have wiped the slate clean for many borrowers.
Nearly 164,000 people with student loan debt applied for loan forgiveness in San Antonio since Biden announced his initiative last year but the Supreme Court killed the plan earlier this year with a 6-3 decision saying Biden’s administration didn’t have the authority to cancel the debt.
POLITICO previously filed an open records request to determine how many applications were sent to the Biden administration for loan forgiveness in each US ZIP code. KSAT parsed out 64 San Antonio-area ZIP codes and found that 163,798 people applied for student loan forgiveness based on POLITICO’s data set, which was provided by the U.S. Department of Education.
Student loan borrowers in Texas carry the second largest amount of debt in the U.S., behind California, according to a report from Lending Tree.
The digital financial network company analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Education and found that 1,389,100 Texans had already been approved for an estimated $18.1 billion in student debt relief - equating to roughly $13,000 in forgiveness per borrower - prior to the Supreme Court striking down Biden’s forgiveness plan.
An estimated 3,759,300 people in Texas have student loan debt, according to Lending Tree.
Biden’s administration is currently working on a new debt relief program.
According to Forbes, it will not be clear for quite some time exactly when a new program will be finalized and available for borrowers to apply for student loan forgiveness.
It’s not great news for borrowers who were expecting to have their debt wiped out.
The StudentAid.gov website notes that the Biden administration is “developing a new debt relief program through a process called negotiated rulemaking. This process will take time, and you will be required to make payments in the meantime.”
For more information on repaying student loans, visit the facts page on StudentAid.gov.
Editor’s note: The video attached to this article is from a previous report.