Elderly student loan borrowers owe $121 billion. They are asking Biden for relief.

As the Biden administration ends, activists are urging the Department of Education to discharge the student debt of older borrowers who they say are unable to repay. They say the department could use a little-known federal law that takes into account a person’s ability to pay within a reasonable time and the government’s inability to collect the entire debt.

There are 2.8 million federal borrowers ages 62 and older with a total debt of $121.5 billion, of whom more than 726,300 are over 71, according to the Department of Education. Older borrowers make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the government’s student loan portfolio, and their Social Security benefits are subject to garnishment.

Activists are making an impassioned appeal to an administration that has fought to ease the burden of student debt, even though those efforts have been thwarted in court by conservatives. President-elect Donald Trump has been hostile to President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness policies, leading activists to believe their best chance for relief lies with Biden.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Education Department only acknowledged receipt of a memo from the Debt Collective, the group organizing the campaign, emphasizing the agency’s power to cancel the debt of older borrowers.

The activist organization said it has been meeting with members of Congress, White House committees and Department of Education officials about the issue since September.

“A lot of these people have been borrowing for 20 or 30 years, with extremely high interest rates. Their balances and the way they have dragged on for decades is just an indictment of the broken system and the failure of past relief efforts,” said Debt Collective organizer Eleni Schirmer.

In Warner’s case, her debt dates back to the 1980s, when she first borrowed to get a law degree at age 30. Although she passed the bar and excelled in her classes, Warner said she was passed over by law firms. She landed a job at Legal Aid – rewarding work but not high paying, she said. Still, his debt was manageable.

Years passed and Warner began working for Washington, D.C. public schools – another rewarding job but one that didn’t pay enough to clear his loans. While there, she enrolled in a master’s in education program at the University of Maryland’s global campus and took online classes at night. She graduated in 2012, although she was fired while earning her degree.

In total, Warner borrowed a total of about $60,000 for his two advanced degrees. The amount seemed reasonable given the career trajectory promised by both degrees, but that path never came to fruition. Working in a series of low-wage jobs, she engaged in forbearance before finally defaulting. The balance has grown to the current total of $268,000 over the years due to recovery costs and capitalization of interest.

“None of the payments I made or the tax refunds they seized have ever dented what I owe,” said Warner, a Virginia resident, adding that she postponed her third surgery. the gallbladder to attend the gathering. “I’ve never made a lot of money in my life, and at this point I’m living on $1,000 a month in Social Security. Every time I turn around, they ask me to pay $1,800 a month on my student loans, which is about $800 more than I have. How am I supposed to live?

According to the think tank New America, the number of Americans nearing retirement age with student loan debt has soared more than 500 percent over the past two decades. Some took out loans to finance their college education, while others took out federal Parent Plus loans or co-signed private loans for their children.

The $230,000 in student debt that Becki Wells, 63, owes comes from having both of her children attend college. Although his son and daughter took out their own loans to attend Howard University and Temple University, respectively, they still needed additional financial support to complete their degrees. Wells said she and her husband had been saving for college since their children were born, but lost it all when the market crashed in 2009. They didn’t have enough time to replenish their savings before their children go off to college.

“I was in a vulnerable position,” Wells said at the end of the rally. “It’s not that I don’t take responsibility… but I need a helping hand. Educating my children was an investment in this country. They are taxpayers. They are productive.

Wells said she has never missed a student loan payment since she started making them in 2015. To keep her monthly payments manageable, she withdrew money from her retirement account to reduce her debt balance. ‘studies. Yet Wells sees no viable way to repay what she owes.

Schirmer of the Debt Collective said older borrowers are in the worst position to repay their loans and face some of the harshest consequences. The federal government will seize up to 15 percent of defaulting borrowers’ Social Security income to recover their student debt, even if it means leaving recipients with benefits below the poverty line.

“There’s a cruel irony to this,” Schirmer said. “The way you pay off student loans is either you take a long time and you pay it back a little bit over time, or you have a lot of money and you pay it off quickly. These people don’t have 25 years to set up a payment plan, nor the money to quickly pay off their balances.

Lack of time and money to repay is at the heart of the Debt Collective’s push for collective discharge for older borrowers. The activist group wrote a memo arguing that the Secretary of Education could forgive the loans using federal debt collection law, which takes into account factors such as the ability to pay within a reasonable time and l inability of the government to recover the full amount within a reasonable time.

Adam Minsky, a lawyer specializing in student debt, said the arguments made in the memo are sound, but suspects that using the law for broad debt cancellation would be subject to legal retaliation, just like others Biden’s loan forgiveness policies. Courts have barred the Department of Education from moving forward with Biden’s student loan repayment plan, Saving on a Valued Education, and his debt relief regulatory proposal, commonly known as the name Plan B.

“The arguments that this falls outside of existing injunctions are well-founded,” Minsky said. “That said, from a practical standpoint, I don’t think judges and courts who have been hostile to massive debt relief would treat this any differently than other programs that have been blocked or canceled.”