By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Roughly five million student loan borrowers who haven’t paid their loans in over 270 days are officially now in collections. Joining us now to break down what it means is Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter, Jordan Weisman. Jordan, what do we need to know about this?
00:16 Jordan Weisman
So, this is the first time that the government is going to start, uh, collecting student loans that people have been in default involuntarily, uh, in, in about five years since the COVID pause, uh, back in 2020. Um, two things you really need to know about if you happen to be in that situation. I don’t know how many of our viewers have defaulted student loans. My guess is not too many. However, the government can start garnishing your benefits like social security. Um, and later on, it can also start garnishing your paycheck. It has vast legal powers to collect on defaulted loans. Uh, the big concern at the moment is that some people might not realize they still have student loans that are in default. There’s a lot of confusion among this group of about 5.3 million borrowers who aren’t necessarily that on top of their finances, um, and some of them appear to be under the impression that their loans may have been forgiven in all of the sort of chaos of the last few years where Biden was trying to do mass forgiveness and that got held up in court. Um, so I guess the two things to be aware of, a, make sure you’re on top of your debt and B, be aware that the government can come and collect.
02:22 Speaker A
Jordan, you identified a few changes Republicans in Congress are making right now for student loans. What are those anticipated to be?
02:41 Jordan Weisman
So this is a big slightly undercovered story with everything going on in Washington right now. But as part of the very large, you know, sweeping reconciliation bill, the budget and tax bill that Republicans are putting together, uh, they are thinking of making some major changes to the student loan program. One of the biggies, um, is that you are going to potentially see, uh, lower loan limits, especially for, uh, graduate and medical school, graduate and professional school students. Uh, that could mean that, uh, you know, would be, or that could mean that, um, you know, people getting their law degree or their medical degree could be pushed towards borrowing private again. That’s something we haven’t seen much of in the past decade and a half, but we could be seeing the reemergence of, you know, people might need to be going to Sofi or credible or those other sort of private student loan lenders are still kicking around.