Who benefits from the $73 billion in loan forgiveness awarded through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program?
Julia Turner, Kathryn Blanchard, and Rajeev Darolia:
In this report, we explore which public sectors are most commonly represented among individuals who have benefitted, or are on track to benefit, from the PSLF program. Specifically, we present new data detailing which sectors borrowers have most commonly worked in to be eligible for PSLF. We show that the most common sector among those who have received forgiveness through PSLF is education, representing 43% of all employers associated with the program. The majority of these employers in the education sector are K-12 education systems, representing 28% of all employer occurrences in the data. Other common employer subsectors among borrowers who have received PSLF are state and local governments and healthcare organizations. Among the most frequent individual employers are those related to military service including the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the branches of the U.S. military.