Loan Cancellation
Dear Betsy,
I saw your column in the 12/27/02 BOSTON METRO and I hope you can answer my question. I am a Massachusetts resident currently re-paying my student loan (for the past 10 years); that I have never defaulted on. I have been a Social Worker for a long time now and have worked for the Commonwealth for over 6 years. I was told that student loans for teachers, social workers and other human service workers could be forgiven.
Unfortunately, no one (employer, loan servicer, state & government websites) “seems” to have information about this process especially pertaining to SOCIAL WORKERS. Do you know anything about this and how I too can have my student loan forgiven?
Thank you,
Autumn
Hi Autumn,
The only federal student loan program that has a forgiveness benefit that may assist social workers is the Perkins loan. The qualification for this benefit includes only loans originated on or after July 23rd, 1992 and is defined as follows:
“According to federal law, a borrower is eligible to receive a child or family services cancellation if they are solely providing or supervising the provision of services to high-risk children who are from low-income communities and the families of these children. You may also be providing these services to adults, but these services must be secondary to the services provided to high-risk children. To qualify for this cancellation, you must provide services only to high-risk children from low-income communities.”
If you do indeed qualify for this cancellation benefit, you can receive up to 15% of your balance cancelled for each the 1st and 2nd years you qualify, 20% each for the 3rd and 4th years and 30% for the 5th year. If this sounds like something you may be qualified for, you should contact your Perkins loan holder (the entity you send your payments to) for information and an application.
You mentioned that your loan servicer doesn’t seem to know anything about this, which leads me to believe that it’s not Perkins loans that you have. If you do indeed have Perkins, and the holder still can’t help you, let me know and I’ll see if I can help them with the information.
Regards,
Betsy
