(Excerpts from The New York Times)

• Nearly $10 billion in student loan debt has been wiped away since President Biden took office, the most sweeping attempt to fix badly broken parts of the federal student loan system in at least a decade.
• The beneficiaries include permanently disabled people, those who were defrauded by failed for-profit schools and soldiers deployed to war zones. More than 500,000 borrowers had their loans erased this year, largely through aid programs that all but stopped functioning during the Trump administration.
• Alicia Bradford is one of the recent beneficiaries. A letter last month informed her that the $23,564 she owed for her associate degree in information technology at ITT Technical Institutes, a problem-plagued chain that abruptly closed its doorsin 2016, had been forgiven.
• Bradford was among hundreds of thousands of students who filed forgiveness claims under a program known as borrower defense to repayment, which grants relief to those who were significantly misled by schools that broke consumer-protection laws. But President Donald J. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos — who denounced the initiative as a “free money” giveaway— stymied the program, which has been tied up in years of litigation over her efforts to gut it.
• After Mr. Biden’s pick, Miguel A. Cardona, took over the department in March, he quickly approved thousands of applications that had languished and pledged to fully eliminate the debts of 72,000 defrauded borrowers who had previously been granted only fractional relief. He also cleared bureaucratic obstacles to relief for disabled debtors and military personnel.