Education Department to notify student loan borrowers of debt relief opportunities

July 31 (UPI) -- The Education Department said Wednesday it will begin emailing people with student loan debt to inform them of opportunities for debt relief.

The department will begin sending out notices on Thursday for borrowers with at least one outstanding federally held student loan to update them on potential avenues for cancelation and inform they have until Aug. 30 to opt out of relief.

The student debt relief rules aren't yet finalized, according to the Education Department, and the emails don't guarantee relief to specific borrowers.

"These latest steps will mark the next milestone in our efforts to help millions of borrowers who've been buried under a mountain of student loan interest, or who took on debt to pay for college programs that left them worse off financially, those who have been paying their loans for twenty or more years, and many others," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

He added that the administration is "one step closer" to keeping the promise it made to "deliver student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible."

President Joe Biden said in a statement that this represents "another major step to cancel student debt for approximately 30 million Americans."

"Despite attempts led by Republican elected officials to block our efforts, we won't stop fighting to provide relief to student loan borrowers , fix the broken student loan system, and help borrowers get out from under the burden of student debt," Biden's statement said.

Biden said significant progress has been made on forgiving loan debt for students and borrowers over the past three years, with student debt for nearly 5 million people canceled through various actions.

When a set of draft rules are finalized the Education Secretary will be authorized to grant student debt relief to tens of millions of borrowers.

According to the Education Department, the rules would allow partial or full debt relief to several classes of federal student loan debt.

They include borrowers who owe more now than they did at the start of their loan repayments, borrowers who have been repaying for decades, those who are otherwise ineligible for debt forgiveness but haven't yet applied and borrowers who enrolled in low-financial value programs.

The Education Department said the Biden-Harris administration so far has delivered student debt relief of $69.2 billion for 946,000 people through reform of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness system.

The delivered student debt relief includes $51 billion for more than a million borrowers through administrative adjustments.

Another $28.7 billion in debt was forgiven for more than 1.6 million borrowers who were cheated by their schools, had their institutions close or who were covered by court settlements.

More than 548,000 borrowers with disabilities had $14.1 billion in debt forgiven. And $5.5 billion in student debt was forgiven for 414,000 borrowers through the SAVE plan, according to the Education Department.