Amid sweeping changes in federal student aid, student debt is harder to pay off than ever | The Boston Globe
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/Globe Staff; Wesley Lapointe/For The Washington Post, Gerald Herbert/Associated Press, Doug Mills/The New York Times
Published October 14, 2025
By Mara Kardas-Nelson and Diti Kohli
This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston.
Jackie Daniels did what she could to keep the cost of college low. The child of two Postal Service workers, she chose a state college in Connecticut over a private university and worked as a resident assistant throughout to keep room and board costs down.
To cover the balance, she took out $40,000 in federal student loans, money that she’s been trying to repay since she graduated in 2020. But understanding how to do so hasn’t been easy.
Federal loan repayments were paused during the pandemic and restarted in an era of high inflation and economic uncertainty. Then President Joe Biden’s SAVE Plan lowered her monthly payments. But that was challenged in court.
Now, under President Trump, the program ends in 2028, with interest accruals already resumed. For all borrowers, the number of repayment options has been limited.
After years of policy whiplash under the Biden and Trump administrations, Daniels and millions of other student loan borrowers have been left reeling, unsure of what repayment plan they should enroll in, what their monthly bills will be, whether loan dismissal or cancellation is available, and whom to ask for help.
“Being fiscally responsible is dependent on what choice the administration is going to make, what the Department of Education is going to do,” Daniels said. “I hear people comment, ‘You just have to pay off your debt.’ That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
It all adds up to the most tumultuous time for student borrowing in American history, experts said.
More than a million borrowers are waiting to hear whether they’ve been enrolled in income-based repayment plans, and roughly a third of the country’s 45 million student loan borrowers are now in late-stage delinquency, or more than 90 days past due on payments, the highest share ever recorded.
“The wheels are falling off,” said Eileen Connor, executive director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, based in Jamaica Plain. “Problems are going to be widespread across the system in a way we haven’t dealt with before.”
Hundreds of people from around the country responded to a Globe survey about their experience with student debt. Many complained that federal income-based repayment plans chipped away only at the loan principal and not the interest, which ballooned loans up to several hundred thousand dollars even as borrowers made monthly payments.
Several others said they had applied for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a federal program that allows for debt forgiveness for some student borrowers, only to learn that some of their payments did not count. Some waited months, sometimes years, to hear if their PSLF application was approved.
Daniels applied for PSLF, since she works for the gun violence prevention nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise. She now wonders whether PSLF will survive the Trump administration, which has proposed rules to significantly narrow eligibility.
In the meantime, she feels stuck in a holding pattern.
“I live with my parents right now. I want to rent or move out, but I don’t think that’s going to happen soon. I’d love to go to grad school for it but I’m making the decision not to do that now, because I don’t want to rack up more debt,” she said.
As loan servicers are overwhelmed and as the Department of Education faces cuts, many borrowers have reported being unable to get information on how fast-paced, see-sawing policy changes will impact them. Trump’s Department of Education hasn’t contracted with a company to work with the millions of borrowers in default.
“Even people who have the money can’t figure out how to make a payment,” said Connor, who has heard of several borrowers having their loan repayments bounced back for no reason.
Significant staffing cuts at the Department of Education and Federal Student Aid Office mean borrowers have few places to go for answers, and cuts at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau mean they don’t have a place to go if their loan servicer isn’t responsive.
Adam Minsky, a New England lawyer focusing on student debt, said the situation is dystopian.
“It feels like [the federal government] is doing everything they can to stop people from accessing the information and services they need,” he said.
Many other borrowers said they were waiting for approval of loan discharge, to be granted in light of deceptive tactics used by their school.
Laura Strong of Crystal Lake, Ill., said she received notice from the federal government that her debt may be forgiven as part of an ongoing lawsuit against Argosy University, a now-closed for-profit institution where she attended graduate school. Students allege that Argosy misrepresented its educational offerings, the cost of school, and post-graduation employment rates and career opportunities.
Even though Strong is eligible for cancellation because of a previous court ruling, her cancellation hasn’t been processed. While she’s waiting, she said, a nearly 7 percent interest rate has pushed her debt up from $200,000 to $270,000.
“Watching the interest accrue at alarming rates is making me extremely worried about my future,” she said. “It makes no sense to me why they are accruing interest when there is an ongoing court case about fraud.”
Michelle Reed of Dacula, Ga., said she believes, based on paperwork from the school she attended, that her account was accidentally merged with another student’s, ballooning her debt from $32,000 to $87,000. She’s never been able to get a hold of someone at Navient, her loan servicer, to discuss the issue.
Reed filed for loan discharge in 2022 as part of a larger class action lawsuit that claims her school, the Art Institute, used deceptive, fraudulent practices. She was told by a staffer at Federal Student Aid, an arm of the Department of Education, that if her loans are cleared, it likely won’t happen before 2027.
The root of the problem is an increasingly bloated federal loan system.
Trump’s budget bill ultimately seeks to limit student borrowing, a “tacit acknowledgment,” Connor said, of a “predatory system,” where students, encouraged by their schools and the federal government, routinely take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and pay sometimes double digits in interest, even for problematic for-profit schools that inflate educational and career outcomes.
But that acknowledgment comes alongside changes that “strip options from people who have already incurred debts,” Connor said.
For these borrowers, nonpayment of debt can hurt their credit scores, and the federal government is allowed to garnish up to 15 percent of their paychecks to collect the debt without going to court.
“You can’t get anybody on the phone, you can’t send a letter, the only part of the system that’s potentially working is the part that’s punitive. The part that will make it impossible for you to find a place to live, or have an automobile, or get a job,” Connors said.
Based on federal data analyzed by the Project on Predatory Student Lending, hundreds of thousands of people who have been told by the Department of Education that their loans will be discharged because of their school’s fraudulent practices still have not received final approval, a process that can take years. In the meantime, they still get monthly bills, which are reflected on their credit reports.
Dave Parisi, of Lowell, attended the New England Institute of Art from 2009 to 2012. The school partnered with Navient, one of the country’s largest student loan providers, which offered him both federally backed and private loans to cover tuition and the cost of living. Parisi was drawn by the school’s intimate feel and a job placement rate that he later learned was artificially inflated.
In 2024, the federal government issued a “group discharge,” paving the way for Navient to cancel loans for students who attended the Art Institute. Based on the federal government’s actions, Parisi has applied for forgiveness five times. He has been denied every time, without explanation. In the meantime, he said, his debt has nearly doubled from $51,000 to $90,000 due to interest.
“I’ve been diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression, which has been directly linked to this experience,” he said. With his nearly $1,000-a-month student debt payments, “I live paycheck-to-paycheck now.”
He’s just submitted his sixth application. “But honestly, at this point, I have very little faith in the system.”
