The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program seemed like a great idea, if we’re going to have a society in which huge numbers of people are saddled with huge amounts of student debt. Unfortunately, the program that was supposed to reward teachers and social workers and nurses and members of the military and more for their service was a giant flop. Now, the Biden administration is offering a temporary fix that will immediately benefit tens of thousands of people.

“Borrowers who devote a decade of their lives to public service should be able to rely on the promise of Public Service Loan Forgiveness,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in a statement. “The system has not delivered on that promise to date, but that is about to change for many borrowers who have served their communities and their country.”

The idea for the program, established by Congress and signed by then-President George W. Bush in 2007, was that people who worked for 10 years in qualifying public service jobs and made regular student loan payments—120 of them—would then have the rest of their loans forgiven. But well over 90% of applicants have been rejected, often because their loan payments were not eligible for the program: Their loans were from the wrong program, or were off by a few cents, or were a few days late. And many people didn’t find that out until they had been paying for a decade in the belief that their loans were going to be forgiven.

That includes San Francisco grade school teacher Kristi Jacobson, who had been paying her loans and submitting paperwork for years, but only learned in June that she’d been paying the wrong kind of loan. She’d need to consolidate her loans into the right kind, and start the 10-year clock all over again, taking her past her planned retirement.

“I don’t think I should get a free ride,” she told The New York Times. “I borrowed this money for my education, and I should pay it back. But to be 54, and to think: Oh, I’ll never buy a house. It’s like being in a Kafkaesque tunnel.”

To this point, just over 16,000 people have gotten relief from the program. That’s about to change.

Through October 2022, borrowers can consolidate all of their loans into eligible ones and submit a form to get their payments to this point—including the ones that would have previously been considered ineligible—to count toward forgiveness. Payments that were a few days late or a few cents off of the right amount will now count. If you were in a qualifying public service job and you made a payment on your loan, it will count.

Active duty service members who have deferred their loans will get credit. Military members and federal workers will have their payments automatically counted through data matching between their jobs and their loans.

“The Department estimates that the limited waiver alone will help over 550,000 borrowers who had previously consolidated their loans see their progress toward PSLF grow automatically, with the average borrower receiving 23 additional payments,” according to a Department of Education fact sheet. “This includes approximately 22,000 borrowers who will be immediately eligible to have their federal student loans discharged without further action on their part, totaling $1.74 billion in forgiveness. Another 27,000 borrowers could potentially qualify for $2.82 billion in forgiveness if they certify additional periods of employment.”

So the number of people who will benefit right away is significantly larger than the number of people who have ever benefited. And half a million people will get an average of nearly two years closer to the goal line. This is big and it is good.

But. People do still have to fill out the paperwork to make this a reality for themselves. That deadline is Oct. 31, 2022. A number of loan servicers are getting out of the student loan business, which means that 16 million people are going to be moved to new loan servicers, creating the conditions for a whole lot of hassles and screw-ups. And the Education Department is working on a longer-term fix, the details of which aren’t yet known.

An even bigger but: This is a few billion dollars to add onto the Biden administration’s $10 billion in loan forgiveness so far. There’s a total of $1.6 trillion in student debt out there, keeping people from having families and buying homes and leaving crappy jobs to try something new and planning for retirement. President Biden could and should do much more.