Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is Adam Minsky,

a Forbes senior contributor and an attorney who specializes in student loans. Adam, thanks so much for

joining me. Thanks for having me, Brittany. On the 4th of July, President Donald Trump signed his

nearly 1,000-page domestic policy legislation, the big beautiful bill into law. And you wrote for Forbes that in this package, we are seeing an unprecedented student loan overhaul. So it doesn't really sound so beautiful for all of those student loan borrowers out there. So big picture here, what are some of your

takeaways? What exactly does this mean for borrowers? Yeah, so there's a lot of major changes.

You know, we're talking some of the biggest changes to student loan programs that we've seen

in a generation. The bill would limit repayment options, including for current borrowers.

It would repeal several popular, affordable income-driven repayment plans, including the

Pays You Learn Plan and save and limit borrowers to just a few options.

It would also restrict borrowing for new borrowers and new students going forward and provide

even more limited availability of affordable payment plans for new borrowers and new students going forward and provide even more limited availability of

affordable payment plans for new borrowers as well. So big changes both for people already

in repayment and for students who are going back to school in the coming years.

So let's talk about a little bit those changes to income driven repayment plans because they're phasing out

most of the options by, I believe, July of 2026, and they are replacing them. One of the options

introduced in the legislation is called the repayment assistance plan. What is that? How is that

different to other income driven repayment plans that people were using before?

Yeah. So, I mean, all income-driven plans operate at a basic level on a similar way. They use

a formula based on someone's income. Payments are recalculated periodically. And if you don't pay

off your loans in full, you can eventually receive loan forgiveness. But of course, the differences

between all these plans are important. What the bill does is it repeals the save plan, pay as you earn, an ICR, which stands for income contingent repayment. Current borrowers who are in repayment now would still be able to access the income-based repayment plan, but that means that they might have

higher payments than what they were paying under those other plans that are getting appealed.

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