More than 800,000 Mass. student loan borrowers eligible for debt relief, White House says
“I was emotional walking through these numbers with my team,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley said.
Some 813,000 Massachusetts residents will be eligible for loan forgiveness under the Biden Administration’s recently announced plan to tackle student debt, and roughly half of them are Pell Grant recipients, meaning they may have a greater share of their debt forgiven, the White House said Tuesday.
The data shed new light on what has become a point of contention surrounding President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive up to $10,000 per person in student debt: Exactly who will, and who won’t, benefit from the relief.
According to the statistics released Tuesday, about 400,000 people who would receive debt relief in Massachusetts would be Pell Grant recipients, people who hailed from low-income backgrounds when they enrolled in college. Under Biden’s plan, Pell Grant recipients are eligible for up to $20,000. Nearly 71 percent of Black undergraduate borrowers and 65 percent of Latino borrowers are Pell Grant recipients. Others with debt — and incomes of less than $125,000, or $250,000 for a married couple — are eligible for up to $10,000 in relief.
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