Which are the states that made the most applications for Biden’s student debt relief

Student debt forgiveness numbers has been released in a freedom of information request about the number of students that applied for the Biden administration’s debt forgiveness plan. Politico made the request and have released the data publicly.

In total the Education Department received 25,031,094 applications. This does not include those who were automatically enrolled but this data has not been released. The White House anticipated that as many as 40 million people could be eligible to sign up for the programme.

Of these 25 million applicants, 16,485,454 had their requests confirmed meaning around 66% of applications were accepted.

At present not one of these applications has yet led to any debt being forgiven. A legal challenge brought against the plan is to be heard in the Supreme Court this year, halting the plan at present. If the debt forgiveness is deemed to be illegal by the conservative court then one of President Biden’s flagship policies, already watered down, will be a failure.

“This action ... will help ensure that those working- and middle-class borrowers are not made worse off with respect to their loans because of the covid-19 national emergency,” Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, said. “Only because of Republican officials and special interests’ flawed legal campaign, millions of eligible borrowers are being denied the relief that they need.”

Which states made the most applications?

Rather predictably, the most applications came from the largest states. Seven states had more than 1 million applications

Some states had very few applications. Ten states had less than 100,000 applications, with Wyoming the lowest with 26,869.

States with the lowest number of applications

As a percentage of the White House’s eligible student number Wyoming also has the lowest take up by applicants with only 54% of those eligible applying.