On Friday, three days before Memorial Day, attorneys general for 47 states wrote to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asking her to automatically forgive student loans for eligible disabled veterans. The Department of Education has identified more than 42,000 veterans who qualify for a federal program known as Total and Permanent Disability Discharge, or TPD, that offers to relieve borrowers from repaying certain government student loans. These veterans, the letter says, shoulder over $1 billion in education debt that could be forgiven. To get the benefit, veterans must first apply for the program. According to information obtained by the group Veterans Education Success through a Freedom of Information Act request, almost 60 percent of eligible veterans had defaulted on a loan payment as of April 2018. Yet only about 20 percent had applied to the loan forgiveness program. The attorneys general want that to change.
NPR
Mississippi State University research center NSPARC, whose founder calls himself “one of the best data scientists in the world,” manages Mississippi’s public jobs database. But when Mississippi Today requested data for job listings for a six-month period, the center said the request would take 200 hours to fill. It sent a cost estimate Thursday of $27,750 — $138.75 per hour — and refused to further discuss the request Friday. Mississippi Today’s open records request asks for raw data for all job postings — which is available for each posting on the state agency website — to broadly analyze the opportunities of Mississippians.
Mississippi Today
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