Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, The Washington Post:

Sure.

So, since the late 90s, there have been what are known as income-driven repayment programs. These are programs that allow you to pay based on your — a portion of your discretionary earnings. This is supposed to allow you to have more affordable payments, make it easier for folks to manage their loans.

Now, the promise as a part of these programs is, after 20 or 25 years of payments, you can get forgiveness for whatever your balance is on these loans. Unfortunately, the Education Department for many years weren't keeping count of how many people actually were making payments on those loans during that time.

So there were hundreds of thousands of people for whom they'd been in payment for 20, 25, many more years than that and never received this benefit. So, the Biden administration came in and said, we're going to play cleanup, essentially. They extended these initiatives that made it a lot easier for people who had been paying for decades to have their loan forgiveness.

And the news of this today is what we're seeing as a result of this effort.

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