Changes Could Ease Disabled Borrowers' Student-Loan-Forgiveness Hassles

By Kelly Field

A year after The Chronicle published a series of articles that described the loan-discharge process for disabled borrowers as "broken" and "duplicative," the Education Department is taking steps to make it easier for such borrowers to have their student debts forgiven.

At a meeting in Washington Wednesday, department officials proposed streamlining the process so that disabled borrowers with guaranteed loans would have to submit only a single discharge application to the