Each year, millions of young Americans face thousands of dollars of debt when receiving student-loans to attend college. When Joe Biden was elected president, part of his platform focused on student-loan forgiveness, those millions of young Americans had hoped that at least some of their debt would be erased. Now Biden has announced that he will be delaying the repayment of student-loans through Aug. 31, this is the seventh time that the repayment has been delayed or extended.

This extension comes in the midst of a period marked by inflation. Gas prices are currently at an all-time high in connection with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Still, the United States is faced with $1.7 trillion in student-loan debt, with no clear deadline for repayment, via USA Today.

When announcing the delay, Biden released a statement on Twitter saying, “I know folks were hit hard by the pandemic. And although we’ve come a long way in the last year, we are still recovering from the economic crisis it caused.”

The freeze on the repayment has been in effect since the pandemic and was supposed to finally come to and end on May 1. Biden was faced with pressure to extend the deadline for repayment by other democrats due to the large amount of inflation the US is seeing right now. According to CNN, dozens of democratic lawmakers sent letters to Biden, asking him to extend the repayment deadline through all of 2022.

At Sonoma State University, the school year will be coming to an end in about a month and a half. This means thousands of graduating seniors who will need to start making payments on their student-loan debt. According to usnews.com, the typical amount of federal loan debt for a Sonoma State graduate is $17,878. 

“I have some student-loan debt that I will need to start paying off when I graduate at the end of this semester,” said an anonymous SSU student. “It would be nice to know whether the Biden Administration is going to help pay for it or not.”

Millions of students across the nation are wondering the same thing, will the Biden Administration actually be able to cancel all student-loans? In an interview with Fox News, White House Secretary Jen Psaki suggested that Biden will not be able to erase the $1.7 trillion in national student-loan debt during his term as president. She was asked if student-loan borrowers would ever have to make a payment during Biden’s presidency. He response was as follows:

“I suspect at some time you will, but again, we are going to continue to assess every month, every few months, on where things stand, both looking at COVID but also economic data and where we need to continue to help give the American people some breathing room.”

For now all that the millions of people nationwide with student-loan debt can do is wait. The extension has been marked to end on the last day of August. Until the end of August it will most likely continue to be very unclear what the Biden Administration plans to do about the $1.7 trillion and counting of student-loan debt.