No, we're not forgiving your student loan jackass!

You could have pursued a promising career with Vince in the WWF, but instead you wasted a bunch of cash on Whatamatta U.

Linda McMahon: Accountability Returns to Student Loans

We’re ending a Covid-era deferment plan that Biden kept in place far too long.

By Linda McMahon, WSJ

Updated April 21, 2025 4:08 pm ET

President Biden never had the authority to forgive student loans across the board, as the Supreme Court held in 2023. But for political gain, he dangled the carrot of loan forgiveness in front of young voters, among other things by keeping in place a temporary Covid-era deferment program. Thus the Education Department allowed students to rack up a massive debt that is now long past due.

Between 2021 and 2024, federal student-loan debt increased by more than $60 billion a year, while the department manipulated repayment plans and forgiveness policies until only 38% of the student-loan portfolio was in repayment. This is unsustainable for both students and taxpayers.

I am announcing the end of this dishonest and irresponsible policy. We will conform the department’s repayment options to federal court decisions and end the Biden-era practice of zero-interest, zero-accountability forbearances that are pushing borrowers into loan delinquency and default. On May 5, we will begin the process of moving roughly 1.8 million borrowers into repayment plans and restart collections of loans in default. Borrowers who don’t make payments on time will see their credit scores go down, and in some cases their wages automatically garnished.

Why? Not because we want to be unkind to student borrowers. Borrowing money and failing to pay it back isn’t a victimless offense. Debt doesn’t go away; it gets transferred to others. If borrowers don’t pay their debts to the government, taxpayers do.

Student loans must always be paid back because they are unlike other types of consumer loans. If a borrower stops paying a mortgage or a car payment, he will go into foreclosure or find his car repossessed. Student loans have no collateral. It is impossible to repossess a college degree. That’s why they are very rarely discharged even in bankruptcy.

That’s the hard truth for borrowers. But I have another hard truth for the institutions that made empty promises to students while pocketing their loan dollars.

Colleges and universities call themselves nonprofits, but for years they have profited massively off the federal subsidy of loans, hiking tuition and piling up multibillion-dollar endowments while students graduate six figures in the red. A widely cited 2015 study found that for every dollar of increased federal caps on subsidized loans, colleges raised tuition by 60 cents.

Many of the degree-granting programs that qualify for student loans are worthless on the job market, but colleges continue to accept students to these programs and encourage them to borrow to pay for them. Accountability is a two-way street. As we push to hold student borrowers to account, we will also push colleges to be responsible and transparent.

If you are a student borrower with a federal loan balance and haven’t been making payments, you must restart payments now. Our Federal Student Aid office is providing every form of assistance we legally can to ensure that a monthly payment can fit into your budget. We recently extended the FSA call-center operations with weekend hours to ensure that your individual questions can be answered. We are updating the loan simulator to help calculate your easiest repayment plan. We also provide an advanced AI assistant, Aidan, to help pinpoint your best financial strategy.

As we plan for the department’s future, we won’t leave the loan portfolio in disarray. We are committed to ensuring that borrowers are paying back their loans, that they are fully supported in doing so, and that colleges can’t create such a massive liability for students and their families, jeopardizing their ability to achieve the American dream.

Ms. McMahon is U.S. education secretary.