Student loan payment pause is dead. Bankruptcy protection shouldn’t be.

Like a summer romance, the student loan payment pause has ended as repayments started in October. This issue is particularly relevant to our state; according to the personal finance company WalletHub, Pennsylvania ranks in the top three states with the highest average student debt.

The Biden administration’s Fresh Start program, announced last year, will make all student loans that were delinquent or in default before the pandemic current — and payments aren’t required until October 2024 in this one-time fix. But the true status of re-defaulted or newly defaulted loans won’t be known until 2025, since a default takes at least 270 days to go into effect.

One solution? Restore bankruptcy rights to student loans. It may be half a loaf, but it’s better than none.

Bankruptcy rights are guaranteed in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, but student loans don’t have the same bankruptcy protection as all other consumer debt.

Federal student loans — about 93% of the market — are nearly impossible to discharge. The Biden administration implemented more lenient standards this year, but petitioners still have to file in the right court and get their case before the right judge, while hiring lawyers with little chance of winning. The Duke Law School Journal found in December 2020 that every year, about 250,000 student loan debtors filed for bankruptcy, but fewer than 300 had their loans discharged.

The pandemic probably delayed a wave of student loan-influenced bankruptcies. In a 2018 analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, the Brookings Institute found that cumulative default rates continued to rise between 12 and 20 years after repayment began. The report also suggested that about 38% of borrowers who took out loans during the 2003-04 school year could default by 2023. Defaults can lead to bankruptcies.

Student loans were once permitted in bankruptcy filings. The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, which replaced the Bankruptcy Act of 1898, paved the way for eliminating federal student loans from bankruptcy. The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act marked private student loans as a form of debt that can’t be forgiven.

Robert Lawless, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and a former reporter for the American Bankruptcy Institute’s Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy, explained that legislation that restored bankruptcy rights wouldn’t contravene existing law.

The Higher Education Act of 1965, the student loan mother ship, has not been reauthorized by Congress since 2013 but could be amended to allow student loans in bankruptcy filings. “Any law passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president can amend the Bankruptcy Code,” Lawless told me in an October email exchange.

Congress, not the White House, is the final arbiter. While the president has lots of informal power to persuade Congress to act, only a member of Congress can introduce a bill.

Rising interest rates may create new student loan defaulters — and future bankruptcies.

New rates are tied to the May auction of 10-year Treasury bills. This year’s interest rate will jump to 5.5% on federal student loans, the highest since 2013. Rates on Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS loans, which are cosigned by parents, rose to 8.05% from 7.54%, the highest they’ve been since 2006.

Both Republicans and Democrats have skin in this game, but legislative solutions have not materialized. The 2006 Student Borrower Bill of Rights Act introduced by then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin’s 2010 Fairness for Struggling Students Act, and President Barack Obama’s 2015 Student Aid Bill of Rights all aimed to investigate, reform, or restore bankruptcy rights — but did not pass.

The Discharge Student Loans in Bankruptcy Act of 2019, which would allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcies, didn’t make it out of the House subcommittee on regulatory reform. In January, Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, introduced HR 138, the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy Fairness Act, which, in a peculiar wrinkle, doesn’t include federal loans. The bill hasn’t come to a vote.

Back in 2018, Fed Chair Jerome Powell questioned the wisdom of excluding student loans from bankruptcies when he told the Senate banking committee, “Alone among all kinds of debt, we don’t allow student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy ... I’d be at a loss to explain why that should be the case.”

Pennsylvania has one member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee — Democrat Robert Casey — who joined 27 Senate colleagues in demanding changes to the “undue hardship” standard, but stopped short of advocating full bankruptcy rights.

I contacted the entire Pennsylvania congressional delegation; U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon and Sen. John Fetterman were the lone members willing to address the issue.

“As a result of chronic underfunding of higher education in the Commonwealth, Pennsylvanians bear the crushing weight of the student loan crisis to a greater degree than in most other states,” Scanlon stated in an Oct. 10 email. “That burden is compounded when student loan borrowers are denied access to the critical last resort option that bankruptcy relief offers for almost every other form of consumer debt.”

“I strongly support discharging student loans through bankruptcy,” added Fetterman. “It’s a common sense way for working people to begin building their financial security.”

Resurrecting the right to include student loans in bankruptcy would do more good than harm. If bipartisanship is really the coin of the congressional realm, this is an issue where Democrats and Republicans should be able to find common ground.

John Sandman covered student loans and higher education finance for TheStreet.com from 2013 to 2019.