Student Loan Repayments Are Being Cancelled In One Canadian Province
Student loans can often be a burden once they have to be paid back. However, one province is helping out with them in a huge way. Nova Scotia student loans are being forgiven, and graduates will be able to save a ton of money.
An August 27 press release from Nova Scotia Labour and Advanced Education states that the province has forgiven roughly $8 million in debt for more than 1,000 graduates.
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People who are eligible for the program can potentially have all of their student debt wiped away (up to five years), depending on when they graduated and how long they were in school.
Anyone who completed their first undergraduate program after August 1, 2019, can have all of their provincial loan debt wiped away.
Even people who didn't complete school recently are able to have some of their loan repayments forgiven.
Graduates who completed their programs before August 1, 2017, are eligible to receive loan forgiveness for their first four years of study.
For pre-2019 graduates to qualify, they must have a combined government student loan debt that is more than $28,560.
People don't even have to apply for this themselves. After they graduate, they are automatically assessed by Student Assistance, who will notify them about their eligibility for loan forgiveness.
Nova Scotia's program is a wide-ranging one. While provinces like British Columbia and Saskatchewan offer student loan forgiveness for people in medical fields, this applies to all undergraduate program students.
"We want to set our young people up to succeed in our province, to set down roots and establish careers here," Labour and Advanced Education Minister Labi Kousoulis said in a statement.
"This program puts money back into their pockets so they can focus on next steps after their post-secondary education."
This also goes much further than the Canada-wide loan assistance introduced this year, which put a six-month freeze on Canada Student Loan repayments.
Some provinces, including B.C. and Ontario, also allowed people to defer payments for a period of time but did not forgive debt entirely.