Savannah Britt owes about $27,000 on loans she took out to attend college at Rutgers University, a debt she was hoping to see reduced by President Joe Biden's student loan debt forgiveness efforts.
Her payments are currently on hold while courts untangle challenges to the debt forgiveness program. But as the weeks tick down on Biden's time in office, she could soon face a monthly payment of up to $250.
"With this new administration, the dream is gone. It's shot," said Britt, 30, who runs her own communications agency. "I was hopeful before (Election Day). I was waiting out the process. Even my mom has a loan that she took out to support me. She owes about $18,000, and she was in the process of it being forgiven, but it's at a standstill."
People demonstrate about student loan debt June 30, 2023, outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington.
President-elect Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have criticized Biden's student loan debt forgiveness efforts, and lawsuits by GOP-led states have held up plans for widespread debt cancellation. Trump has not said what he would do on student debt forgiveness, leaving millions of borrowers facing uncertainty over their personal finances.
The economy was an important issue in the election, helping to propel Trump to victory. But for borrowers, concerns about their finances extend beyond inflation to include their student debt, said Persis Yu, managing counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center.
"That's a big part of what is making life unaffordable for them is this burden of expenses that they can't seem to get out from under," Yu said.
Student loan debt cancellation was not a focus of the campaign for either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, who steered clear of the issue at her political events. The issue came up just once in the September presidential debate, when Trump hammered Harris and Biden for failing to deliver their promise of widespread forgiveness. Trump called it a "total catastrophe" that "taunted young people."
Biden promised the student debt cancellation program during his run for the presidency. From its launch, Biden's debt forgiveness faced relentless pushback from opponents who said it heaped advantage on elites and came at the expense of those who repaid their loans or did not attend college.
Biden's first plan to cancel up to $20,000 for millions of people was blocked by the Supreme Court last year. A second, narrower plan was halted by a federal judge after Republican-led states sued. A separate policy intended to lower loan payments for struggling borrowers was paused by a judge, also after Republican-controlled states challenged it.
Bob Eitel, who served during the first Trump administration as a senior counselor to the education secretary, said he expects the president-elect will move to rescind the loan debt cancellations.
"The Trump administration may pursue different avenues of loan relief, but it will not be the mass blanket types of forgiveness that the current administration has pursued," said Eitel, president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies.
Overall, Biden's efforts were relatively unpopular, even among those with student loans. Three in 10 U.S. adults said they approved of how Biden had handled student loan debt, according to a poll in the spring by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Four in 10 disapproved. The others were neutral or didn't know enough to say.
Project 2025, the blueprint for a hard-right turn in American government that aligns with some Trump priorities, calls for getting the federal government out of the student loan business and doing away with repayment plans that pre-date the Biden administration.
Even without directly addressing student loans, Trump has made promises that would affect them. He has pledged to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which manages the $1.6 trillion federal student loan portfolio. It's unclear which entity would take that responsibility if the department were eliminated, which would require approval from Congress.
"The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver," said Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition.
Yu noted the Biden administration managed to cancel student loan debt for about 5 million borrowers, even though the signature forgiveness effort has been blocked. The administration did it by leaning into loan debt cancellation programs already in effect. For example, an existing student debt forgiveness program for public service workers has granted relief to more than 1 million Americans, up from just 7,000 who were approved before it was updated by the Biden administration two years ago.
"A lot of the cancellation that we saw in the last couple of years was because the Biden administration was committed to making the programs that are actually enshrined in law work for people," Yu said.
