Commentary: Legislation Aims to Tackle the Student Loan Crisis in Bankruptcy Court
The American Bankruptcy Institute e-newsletter of 5/16/19 reports that Legislation introduced last week, in the US Congress, seeks to allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy without the difficulty of proving the “undue hardship” standard, according to a Washington Post commentary. The legislation has drawn bipartisan support with two Republican co-sponsors in the House, including Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), who introduced a similar bill in the last session of Congress. It would, as sponsor House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) put it in a statement, “ensure student loan debt is treated like almost every other form of consumer debt.” In the Senate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), along with fellow presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), are all co-sponsoring companion legislation. Americans owe a collective $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, an amount that’s increased from $90 billion over the past two decades, according to the commentary. In 2018, more than two-thirds of college graduates graduated with student loans. The average amount borrowed (from all sources) by a 2018 graduate is just under $30,000. The burden is impacting people from early adulthood to those in retirement: Some senior citizens are using their Social Security checks to pay back student loan bills, according to the commentary. Restoring bankruptcy could protect borrowers in another way, too, by potentially acting as a check on the careless treatment of debtors by student loan servicers, according to the commentary. In 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Navient, claiming that the student loan giant repeatedly did not tell borrowers experiencing financial difficulties about income-based repayment options and instead pushed them into forbearance, a strategy that resulted in further interest charges and increased the amount borrowers owed.
The issue of student loan debt and bankruptcy is the first problem addressed in the Final Report of the ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy.
Comment by attorney Kathleen P. March, Esq: Over the past 10 years, there have been various bills introduced in the US Congress, to make it easier to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. None of those bills have come close to passing. Some of those earlier bills have had “bi-partisan support”. It’s wait and see if this new bill makes any progress toward becoming law.