Education Next – Alexander Holt and Jason D. Delisle
“Say you’re a 3rd-grade public school teacher with $50,000 in student-loan debt. The federal Stafford Teacher Loan Forgiveness program sounds like a great idea: teach for five years while you make monthly payments right-sized for your income, and the government will forgive $5,000 of what you owe. But then comes the fine print. Accepting the $5,000 resets a different loan-forgiveness clock—the one that would have erased your outstanding debt entirely after 10 years, since you’re a public employee. To access that benefit, now you’re stuck with another decade of payments, or 15 years in all. It’s hard to follow, and would be even if the explanation were not buried in Section 8 of the “Public Service Loan Forgiveness Employment Certification” form in the third paragraph of the subsection titled ‘Other Important Information’.”(more)