Giving Compass' Take:
- Nadra Nittle explains how the student loan system is harming millions of teachers, nurses, and other public service workers, a population disproportionately made up of women.
- What systems change would be required to free working women from the financial constraints imposed by confusion around student loan debt and the possibility of wage garnishment?
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Mary Modica tried to do everything right. When a rise in digital music signaled she should reconsider a radio career, Modica decided to become a teacher — with the understanding that after she made a decade of payments, the Department of Education would discharge any outstanding student debt she owed through its Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. The student loan system, however, has broken this promise.
After teaching English learners in New York’s Hudson Valley for 12 years, Modica still has $102,000 in student debt. With her monthly payment rising more than 71 percent to $875 during President Donald Trump’s second term, she can’t afford to heat her house above 60 degrees. She’s also stopped physical therapy because she can’t cover the co-pays.
“I broke down three times today,” Modica, 41, said. “I have a disease that will inevitably make me completely disabled, and I can’t afford the treatment because I’m hemorrhaging money to a 20-year-old debt.”
The Department of Education hasn’t forgiven her loans, she said, because it is excluding two full years of her public service, a period when she taught full time but enrolled in a teacher training program at night, kicking her loans into deferment. Accordingly, her payments then don’t count toward the 120 payments required to earn public service loan forgiveness. And that’s not Modica’s only problem: Some of her pre-pandemic payment history, she said, no longer shows up in federal databases.
Over the past year, millions of borrowers have run into similar difficulties trying to navigate a student loan system that has grown more confusing and chaotic during President Donald Trump’s second term. He may have campaigned on “affordability,” but his administration has systematically stripped borrowers of protections, threatened to garnish their wages and raised their monthly payments — all while promising to forgive the student debt of immigration enforcement agents. Experts say these policy shifts have broken a student loan system that was already in shambles, leaving nearly 45 million borrowers, disproportionately women, in financial and emotional distress.
Read the full article about how the student loan system harms working women by Nadra Nittle at The 19th.