Since I've already started beating the student loan drum this morning, here's an anecdote.

After struggling with how to repay and grappling with Navient about eligibility for some years, I found a way to get a job in public service to qualify for the PSLF program. I'm about six years into it now.

The PSLF pitch is that you get into public service, take a position that is ostensibly lower paying than private industry but has value as public service with a 5013c corp, diligently make your payments, and the balance will be forgiven after ten years.

OF COURSE it will be more bureaucratic than this and there will be fine print about how to make qualified payments that count toward the program, what kinds of jobs will qualify, etc., but unless you're in the program you have no idea how difficult it is to thread the needle.

Social media has facilitated support groups for people in PSLF to crowdsource how to navigate this nearly impossible to understand program, governed by rules that are so arbitrary that it FEELS LIKE the government is trying to keep people bound in systems of ursury.

For example. What does it mean to have an on time payment? It's not enough to set up automatic monthly payments.

Check this out. Another person notes that she makes payments on time every month against two loans but one of them is counting six less payments than the other and can't find out why. Seems unfair!

Story after story after story of this. All people who are respectably working, trying in good faith to make payments toward a government program designed for them, and it's a black hole. So anyway. Everything is fucked.

The thing about the PSLF/IBR payments is that you sign up for the program anticipating ten years of lower paying work and thus making lower student loan payments. So your balance grows and grows and grows.

So if the program rejects your payments, if you change jobs, if anything about this arrangement goes sideways (and it does!) you're left with an exponentially larger sum owed than when you started.

Anyway, imagine all these people in good faith trying to navigate this with the facilitators of both the loans and the forgiveness program for those loans eluding them with no accountability.