$55M in student loan debt relief on its way for Pa. nurses

Nurses across Pennsylvania will begin receiving notifications next week about whether they are eligible for a share of the $55 million the state is making available to lower or erase their student loan debt.

The money for Pa. Student Loan Relief for Nurses Program comes out of state’s share of federal American Rescue Plan funds. This one-time offer will relieve selected state-licensed nurses who cared for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic at a Pennsylvania health care facility of up to $7,500 of student loan debt.

“Pennsylvania’s healthcare workforce has been overworked and understaffed for years, creating recruiting and retention problems for medical facilities and quality of care problems for patients,” said Sen. Maria Collett, D-Montgomery County, in an email. Collett, a nurse, brought the nursing loan forgiveness idea to Gov. Tom Wolf last year.

“The program was designed to give a much-needed boost to nurses who have been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic and help Pennsylvania retain and rebuild its nursing workforce,” she said.

Nearly 24,000 nurses applied for this loan forgiveness program by the time the application window closed, according to a spokesman from the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which is administering the program. That number far outstripped the fund’s ability to provide the maximum debt relief to all of who applied.

As a result, the agency devised a selection method to ensure an equitable distribution of the funds by geographic region based on the percentage of eligible applicants from each region. It will then randomly select award recipients in each region.

Once selections are made, PHEAA spokesman Keith New said the agency will notify the award recipients and begin the process of verifying their employment. The plan is for the first payments to go directly to the selected nurses’ student loan servicer in August, he said.

This loan forgiveness program was first announced last fall when Gov. Tom Wolf made $5 million of the federal COVID-19 recovery aid available. The General Assembly, seeing the high level of interest from nurses shortly after the application window opened, in January passed legislation to increase the amount of federal dollars allocated to this program by $15 million.

The 2022-23 budget agreement enacted earlier this month injected another $35 million of the federal COVID-19 recovery aid to this program. Collett said she fought to increase the pot of money in hopes of allowing “more deserving nurses to benefit.”

The program, which pays up to $2,500 a year for up to three years, is limited to registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, certified registered nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists and certified nurse midwives who began working before Dec. 31, 2021, at a Pennsylvania facility that provides nursing care directly to patients.

Given the popularity of this program, Collett said she is hopeful it “can act as a model for other fields that are facing staffing shortages across the commonwealth.”

Jan Murphy may be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy