When the Department of Education announced a plan to fix many hellish problems with its Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, hundreds of thousands of beleaguered borrowers held their breath.Since 2007, the program has promised hope for those who pledged to advance the public good. If they made 120 payments on time, their loans would be forgiven. During that time, their balances often grew because of the income-based payments the program required.The devil was in the details, and the devil often won. Borrowers frequently shared their stories of yearslong bureaucratic struggles. The waiver program announced in October, however, promised to yank open some doors — borrowers could seek credit for categories of payments that were previously ineligible.And over the last several weeks, the momentum turned: Exhaling borrowers are running into the light, debt-free. “I’m extremely thankful,” Katherine Ojeda Stewart, a public defender in Los Angeles, told me. “But the emotional capital you had to expend took a lot out of me.”I spoke to six borrowers who, all told, have been freed from more than $800,000 in debt. Their stories chronicle the hope, the disap …
