U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona hears from loan forgiveness beneficiaries in SC
DENMARK — As a federal appeals court dealt a second blow to the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness efforts, South Carolinians who benefited from the president’s expansions of an existing program talked about being freed from debt they expected to pay on for the rest of their lives.
The action Thursday by the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education plan, which restructures payments based on a borrower’s income and family size, then forgives balances after a certain number of years.
Still, nearly 48,000 South Carolinians have gotten their debts reduced or wiped out through other aid efforts, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Statewide, about 750,000 South Carolinians had some amount of student loan debt in 2021, according to the latest data available from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
At Denmark Technical College, as part of a multi-day U.S. Department of Education tour of historically Black colleges and universities, U.S. Secretary Miguel Cardona and Congressman Jim Clyburn heard from six of them.
No more sleepless nights
Angelia Jackson was studying at Claflin University when she got pregnant with her now-adult daughter, forcing her to drop out and go to work to be able to support her child.
She returned to school years later, first for her bachelor’s degree and then her master’s. She attended Limestone College’s satellite campus in Kingstree while also working for Williamsburg County government.
“So, I was working and going to school at night trying to put my child through school,” Jackson said.
Now, she’s a teacher at Hemingway Elementary. But the education it took to get her there had her taking out $75,000 in student loans.
Jackson’s husband is a country preacher, and money got tight at times. She’d apply for forbearance, putting repayment requirements on pause, but the interest continued to accumulate. Her debt ultimately ballooned to $128,000.
“I kept getting letters in the mail, emails, phone calls at 7 in the morning,” Jackson said.
She owed $1,200 a month.
“How can I pay that and still have a mortgage, a car payment, water bill, light bill, put food on the table, you know, just essentials of life?” Jackson said. “It’s kind of hard sometimes, but anyway, we do what we have to do to make it work.”
Then Jackson got the letter she’d been waiting for. Her loans had been forgiven.
“I started yelling, howling, streaming. I ran around my house six times. My neighbors thought something was wrong with me. Then when I told them, they rejoiced with me,” she said.
“I don’t have to have sleepless nights anymore. I’m not stressed out anymore,” Jackson added.
Finally forgiven
Marlon Fox, a North Charleston chiropractor, and his wife Debbie finished their undergraduate degrees in the mid-1980s debt free. But then it was time for chiropractic school.
The Friday before classes started, Debbie found out she was pregnant. That left just Marlon Fox continuing his education.
He took out $60,000 in student loans over three years, the only debt the couple had. Within six months of graduation, in 1988, he was paying it back — $1,000 a month.
“Then you run into things in life that you don’t expect to happen,” Fox said.
Fox and his wife paid to put their three children through college, taking on their loans as well as his. Then, in 1997, Fox’s father had a stroke. His mother died six years later, and he became his father’s only caregiver.
“In 2000 is when I was falling behind on my school loans,” Fox said. “I was able to keep them up. but a lot of times I was only paying the minimum payment.”
At the same time, the federal government was privatizing student loans. Somehow, he said, records of his earlier payments went missing.
“At that point, I was under such stress, I would have entered into an agreement with the devil,” Fox said. “At times it felt like I did, but I kept trying to do the best I could.”
Because of the lost records, Fox said he isn’t sure how it came to happen, but until October of last year, when his loans were forgiven, he still owed twice the $60,000 he initially borrowed, even after making $200,000 total in payments over more than three decades.
A month later, in November 2023, he received a $56,800 refund, which he used to pay off the remaining $50,000 of his children’s loans and donated the rest to his church.
“All those years, I thought there’s no way I’ll ever be able to retire,” said Fox, now 66. “I probably still won’t but at least I have that opportunity now that I can start saving towards.”
Lawsuits continue
In total, four different debt-relief programs enacted by the Biden Administration have collectively eliminated more than $2.6 billion worth of South Carolinians’ student loans, according to the federal education agency. That’s an average of more than $55,000 per person.
The programs have been the target of lawsuits filed by GOP-led states.
That includes South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who joined with other Republican attorneys general to get the first loan forgiveness program thrown out as an unconstitutional overreach of the president’s authority.
In a June ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the administration’s initial student loan forgiveness plan that would have canceled up to $20,000 in loans for 43 million people total nationwide. The plan was estimated to cost $400 billion, adding to the national deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
A coalition of Republican attorneys general, including Wilson, sued again March 28 to challenge the SAVE program that the appeals court paused Thursday.
“Let these Republicans that are suing me talk to some of these folks that I spoke to today who said their loan payments were $1,000 a month. Because of the SAVE program, it went down to $500 a month,” Cardona told reporters in Denmark. “They could pay their groceries. They’re not going to go into default, and maybe, they have a little bit leftover to help their children go to college.”
Because the court paused the program, those payments will immediately jump back up.
The program that Jackson and Fox benefited from is aimed at public-sector workers, such as teachers, as well as people in the health care industry.
Congress created the program in 2007 but it has been plagued with problems. Before Biden took office, just 7,000 people had received debt relief, according to the White House.
Jackson and Fox are among beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s expansion of that existing program. Increased flexibility included allowing people who had deferred on their loans to still qualify for forgiveness.
The president Thursday announced a second round of loan forgiveness under the program, totaling $1.2 billion for 35,000 people who have made 10 years’ worth of monthly payments on their loans while working in a qualifying public-sector or non-profit job.
Jessica Holdman writes about the economy, workforce and higher education. Before joining the SC Daily Gazette, she was a business reporter for The Post and Courier.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
