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How a Daughter Helped Her Mother Get Her Student Loans Forgiven



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“I am going to get my mother’s loans forgiven,” read the email that landed in my inbox 10 months ago. “So if by May, 2023, when I turn 28, you need a success story, feel free to reach out.”In the many years I’ve been chronicling the sorry state of the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, I’ve heard from plenty of student loan debtors in their 20s who couldn’t hack their way through the thicket of complex rules and red tape. Desperate parents write in, too, having taken over the often part-time job of navigating the system for their soldier or public defender or schoolteacher kids working 60- to 80-hours per week.But that email from Arianna Miskin was a first: She was trying to help her mother, Susan Miskin, a retired New York City public-school teacher, get her $92,000 balance canceled. That debt was older than her daughter.What had given her hope was a temporary waiver that the Biden administration had put into place, which altered a number of rules that had stymied her mother.I admired Arianna’s brashness. I was moved by her quest. And I was not at all sure that she would be able to pull it off.So here’s what happened.Susan Miskin first started borrowing in the late 1980s to attend community college and take classes at two colleges in the City University of New York system to get her bachelor’s …

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