What Happened To My Loan Forgiveness Program?

My two best friends from college are pursuing careers as a public school principal and a public interest lawyer. Both are relying on loan forgiveness programs.
Now these programs, which were supposed to encourage people to enter essential public service occupations, are imperiled by the economy.

Loan forgiveness programs across the country , whether sponsored by states or private organizations, are reneging on millions of dollars in promises and leaving young workers in the lurch. Ron Lieber writes, in an important scoop,
"There are no guarantees that financing for the loan forgiveness programs will survive the next state legislative session (or that the economy will improve enough for them to find other ways of financing the forgiveness). We found this so disturbing that we decided to call up every single entity, state or federal, that we could find that offered loan forgiveness programs. Then, we asked them point-blank if they would like to offer an absolute promise to borrowers or potential borrowers that the loan forgiveness programs would not go away while the borrowers were still using them." The answer, often, was no. You can visit the New York Times website where they are building a database of the fates of various programs nationwide.

There is no way this can stand. It just isn't feasible, long term, to have people incur tens of thousands of dollars in debt to pursue basic middle class jobs.