Forgiveness? Part Five of My Debts
After twenty years, would the student debt industrial complex finally let me out of its grasp? Or would I get so worked up that I’d write 50,000 words about it?
We’ve come to the heart of the matter: forgiveness for student debt.
As I finally finished school in 2011, I had the incredible good fortune of finding a good job in the field that my student-debt-financed education explicitly prepared me for. I majored in sociology in college, and I got a Ph.D. in sociology in graduate school. Within a relatively short time after I graduated, I was gainfully employed as a tenure-track professor of sociology. It’s hard to imagine a much better outcome for me, and it is, honestly, as good as it gets for the student debt industrial complex. “See!” you can almost hear the complex say, “The system works!”
Sure. And yet—repaying these loans has deeply affected my life and my community in ways that I still, after more than twenty years of living with them, barely understand.
Of course, most people who go into student debt in America don’t have an excellent outcome, like I did. I’ve been very lucky. I have been able to afford my student debt bills since 2011. Millions of Americans cannot afford their monthly student debt bills, and many of them end up carrying the burden of student debt well into their 50s and 60s.
Obviously, all of these debts should be cancelled. Americans today have suffered enough for the bad choices made by the previous generations, which set up the student debt system as a way to finance education, instead of providing enough support to enable Americans to get an education without debt. For more on the history and the challenges posed by the student debt system, go listen to this excellent conversation between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Louise Seamster.
The story I’m going to tell right now is about how, even though I’ve been fortunate enough to have the ability to pay $400 per month for most of the past decade to pay down my student debt—it’s still been a struggle for me, and my family.
My Second Repayment Era
After graduating with my Ph.D. in 2011, I started paying around $400 per month to repay my debt, which at that time stood at about $35,000 (in inflation-adjusted, 2022 dollars). This was actually my second repayment era. I had previously started making payments on my debt from undergrad ten years earlier, in 2001. I had to defer repayment while I lived with a limited income during graduate school (more on that whole story in parts three and four of this whole thing).
Let me tell you, even with a good job, repayment is no picnic. I could afford $400 per month (although I would have liked to have turned that into retirement savings instead, but that’s another storyv).
There are constant challenges with staying on top of student debt repayment. For one thing: they keep changing the rules of the game on you! My loans were moved from one servicing company to another no fewer than four times in the past ten years. At any given moment, I’ve had two servicing companies to deal with: one for my undergraduate debts, and another one for my grad school debts. For example, for the last five years, I’ve dealt with Navient and Fedloan. Before that, it was Sallie Mae and Great Lakes. I understand that later this year, Navient will cease to exist, and will become “Maximus” (sounds great). Cool.
For each of these companies, I’ve had to check to make sure each and every payment gets posted properly and on time, each month. More than once, I’ve seen a payment fail to post for some reason (computer glitch, banking system hiccup, clerical error, problem with transition from one servicing company to another, and on and on). So, for each payment, I’ve logged in and double checked—that’s two payments per month (one per servicing company), twelve months per year, for more than ten years. If even one of these payments is late, remember, my credit score might take a hit that could take me years to recover from. (They scared me real good back in 2001!) Meanwhile, the servicers change their websites all the time, taking options away, moving things around, and generally making even routine things a little extra challenging. And, every time I’ve moved to a new home or made any changes to my bank accounts, I had to notify my servicing company of the changes. So fun!
Perhaps you can see why I’ve had constant questions and anxieties while managing all of this. Just some of the questions I’ve continually asked myself: Should I "consolidate" (everyone was doing it)? What is "consolidate?" Why do people do that? What are the downsides? Is someone trying to sell me something, instead of actually help me out? How does PSLF loan forgiveness actually work? What paperwork do I need to update this month? What are my current interest rates? What is my total balance? Can I afford to pay any extra toward my loans this month, to pay off the loans faster? Even if I can, SHOULD I pay down my loans faster, or am I better off putting those extra dollars somewhere else? Actually, should I pay LESS so I can afford to save up for a house or retirement or my health savings account or whatever? Wait--did my payment actually go through last month or did something go wrong with the bank again?
You get the picture. Repeat those questions to yourself, again and again, month after month, for a decade, and you can get a sense of what it's like to be in repayment--even when you're lucky enough (like me) to have a stable income high enough to actually afford repayment.
I cannot even begin to tell you the number of emails, phone calls, and customer service chats I’ve had with these loan servicing companies over the years. Hours and hours of my life have been spent, just keeping up with basic paperwork. And—again—I was actually fortunate enough to have the money to pay these people! Even with that… this has been just a constant headache for me. I honestly cannot imagine how stressful it must be for the many student debtors that deal with all this mess and also struggle to find the money to pay the bills.
In fact, in part because I know how relatively fortunate I’ve been, I felt like I couldn’t really talk to anyone about my debts.
The Shame
Who can I talk to about my debts? I didn't really want to talk to my parents about these loans, because I didn't want them to feel responsible or guilty in any way for not having tens of thousands of dollars in extra money to pay for my education. If I brought up my anxieties and all the details about my debts to them, even though they’d understand and be supportive, they'd inevitably start to feel guilty. So, I couldn’t really talk to them about this.
My friends? I didn't want to ask my friends about their financial situations. I mean, aside from general social taboos about talking about finances, I also didn't want to put anyone on blast just for being either wealthier than me, or for being less wealthy than me. So… I just didn't talk about debt with my friends very much.
My partner? I have a great spouse who has always been willing to talk with me about finances (even though most of the time we’ve talked finances, it’s been mainly about managing my anxieties). She's been cool with the fact that my debt has made me really careful with money, to the point where we have delayed major milestones (kids, house, retirement savings), and we’ve been really frugal in general. She's the best. But, still, I didn't want to just put all of this debt anxiety on to her. I felt like I should just handle my debts, and just be all cool about it, and not bring up the stress of repayment too often. I'm not sure if that was the best approach, but we are happily married now so maybe my strategy worked? In any case, I am once again shown to be the luckiest guy ever.
So it’s been lonely as I’ve tried to stay on top of not only my current debt situation, but to anticipate possible complications that might come up years down the road. After all, I was on a long and variable repayment schedule, so even if things went well… I'd have to anticipate changes that might show up in the next five, ten, or fifteen years.
The Registrar Strikes Back
As part of staying on top of my debt, one day in 2013, I double-checked my current debt status at www.studentaid.gov. I just wanted to see if the records there matched what I was seeing at the servicing companies I had at the time: Sallie Mae and Great Lakes.
I discovered, to my surprise, that the federal Department of Education’s official record showed that I had not graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Instead, the studentaid.gov website showed me as having “left school,” without graduating.
In reality, the diploma that hung on my wall, and my official transcript from UCSB both correctly showed that I did, indeed, graduate with a Ph.D. in sociology in 2011. But somehow, the student debt industrial complex thought I left school without graduating.
None of this had any immediate effects on my actual debt repayment. Still, this error worried me. What if, I thought, some new debt forgiveness program were created in the coming years that required you to have graduated to be eligible? Even worse: what if someone decided to question my credentials, and they uncovered these erroneous records at the Department of Education? They could try to damage my reputation, or just cause me grief. The only reason these records existed, by the way, is because I used debt to finance my education—anyone without student debt doesn’t have a record at studentaid.gov.
I decided to get the error corrected. I figured that the longer I waited, the harder it would be to get UCSB to care enough to take action. In 2013, when I discovered this problem, I had only “just” graduated two years earlier. How hard could this be?
Yeah, so it took over three months and something like twenty phone calls and emails to get this problem fixed. I had to go back and forth between UCSB's administration (thanks again, UCSB!) and the federal student loan administration (you all are so thoughtful!). Finally, this little problem was fixed, after I spoke directly with the actual UCSB Registrar herself on two occasions. Now, everyone in the federal government is on notice that I do, in fact, have a Ph.D. Did that make it any easier to get my debt forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program?
No Forgiveness
I first applied for PSLF when I first became theoretically eligible, in 2017. The program started in 2007. It required debtors to complete ten years’ worth of payments to have eligibility to have their remaining debt wiped away.
So, in 2017, I registered for PSLF, asking whether I could expect forgiveness (of my roughly $10,000 in debt that remained) sometime in the near future.
PSLF registration required me to ask my employer to fill out a form, verifying my employment at a non-profit, public-serving institution. Since I was among the first to ask my employer to do this, it took a little extra time. After several weeks, I then learned that my existing loan service provider could not handle PSLF applications. Instead, I’d need to have my loans transferred to a different service provider (FedLoan), which coincidentally, is headquartered in Harrisburg, PA—just down the street from where I live. How about that. I was a pro at service provider switches by now, so no big deal. (Sign up for a new account, bank account transfers, verify identity, etc.)
Honestly, given the number of hours I’ve spent trying to get forgiveness under PSLF, if I were approved at this point, I think I’d have “earned” about $10 per hour toward my loans. Better than minimum wage in Pennsylvania!
After waiting some time (months) for Fedloan to process my application, at long last, I finally learned that I would never qualify for forgiveness under PSLF. That’s right. They told me that I would not get any of my debt forgiven.
The reason for this denial was, stated simply, that I had spent many years in the “wrong” kind of repayment plan. As you’ll recall, debtors have to make ten years’ worth of payments in order to qualify under PSLF. Well, you can’t make just any payment! You have to make a qualifying payment! The great folks at Fedloan had determined that I had made only about 30 monthly payments that qualified as PSLF-eligible, meaning I had more than 90 months to go… I was scheduled to have completely paid off my loans before that. So, no PSLF for me!
Now, in the previous six years (2011 through 2016), no one in the student debt industrial complex had ever explained to me that some of my payments were not PSLF-eligible payments. This means that, for years, I had been making payments that didn’t really count toward forgiveness. As you’ll recall, I was rather fastidious about my loan payments. But I didn’t catch this problem until it was too late. You won’t be surprised to learn that I wasn’t alone. PSLF has been a dismal failure.
In a laughable effort to make me feel better, Fedloan offered to switch my payment plan, in 2017, to a PSLF-eligible plan. But, even in the best case scenario, I would not make enough payments to get to 120 months until after I’d already paid back all of the debt that I owed. In other words, I had run out of time.
Twenty-Two Years
In the end, I all but gave up on PSLF. I just kept making payments on my debt. Finally, just as I turned forty years old, about twenty-two years after I first took on my student debt, I paid off my undergraduate loans in 2019. This portion of my debt had enabled me to “graduate well” from Albion College, where I was from 1997 until 2001. Finally, in 2019, I had repaid that original debt.
I still, to this day, in 2022, carry debt from my graduate school education. I am fortunate that the amount that I still owe is relatively small: less than $5000. But, I’ve been dealing with repayment of my debts for over two decades now. And I’m still not done. The pandemic “forbearance” has been helpful, but like most of my fellow debtors, I still have not qualified for any debt forgiveness.
Almost Done
In the next and final issue of My Debts, part six, I’ll wrap this series up by saying a bit about how students should not have to use debt to finance their education—the United States can do better than this. I’ll also say a bit more about the tremendous impact these two decades of student debt anxiety have had on myself and my family, even amidst the “reprieve” offered to all student debtors (including me) during the ongoing pandemic. And, once again, I’ll call on President Biden to stop listening to the banks and start listening to Senator Elizabeth Warren and millions of others who have demanded that he cancel all of these student debts with a stroke of his pen.
Thanks again for reading, and please do let me know what you think about this series and the Love Letter in general. I really appreicate you spending this time with me.