Americans over 60 are the fastest growing demographic of student debtors. I should know. I’m one of them. I’m 77 years old and today I owe $549,497.20 in student loan debt. As seniors stretch limited incomes across rent payments and medical bills, groceries and gas, student loan payments often end up getting paid last – if at all. Decades of broken student relief programs, corrupt loan servicers and government neglect now force millions of older Americans to drag decades-old student debts into their retirement. Without swift, bold policy change and clear political leadership, this crisis will only deepen. The debtors will get older, the debts will get bigger.
That’s why this Thursday 12 September I am traveling from my home in Atlanta, Georgia, to Washington DC with the Debt Collective’s caucus of older student debtors. Together, we are demanding the White House and the US Department of Education finally take responsibility for the mess they have made and clear the loans burdening myself and millions of older Americans. This will be the first time in history that elders lead the charge for student debt cancellation – for older debtors and for everyone.
Despite the far right’s ongoing attempts to block student loan relief, canceling student loans remains perfectly legal and urgently necessary. And fortunately, there are tools the education department can still use to quickly deliver relief to those who need it most. Federal regulations specifically enable the education department to discharge student loans based on the age of a debtor. The Biden-Harris administration must use this provision to liberate older debtors without delay. If they don’t, millions of us will take these unpayable debts to the grave.
Like so many others, I took on student debt in order to make my life better for myself and my family. As a single parent, nothing was more important to me than caring for my children – feeding them, clothing them, offering them extracurricular activities. I wanted to take care of my family and contribute to my community. So I got a master’s in English education and became a teacher. For twenty years, I worked in low-performing schools within communities of color like the ones I grew up in in the Bronx. I loved teaching but mostly I loved my students. I traveled to watch them play football, perform in the band. I went to their college graduations. Every now and then, I sent them a few dollars or a care package or called their parents to say hello. Working as a teacher were the best years of my life. But the work didn’t pay.
After 20 years I retired from teaching, but I couldn’t afford to retire from working. So at age 65 I went back to school to get a master’s degree in pastoral counseling. As a leader in the church and as a survivor of sexual abuse, I wanted to learn how to facilitate healing conversation that could help my community. And my community was hurting: a number of older women in my church had been silent on their experiences of sexual abuse as children. These women would leave my office feeling a sense of release and courage with which to address this nightmare, and maybe share it with others. This work also deepened my advocacy work around sexual assault, including my efforts to track down details of my own rapist and my rape kit, abandoned for decades. A law-expanding rape kit tracking system in Florida is now named after me.
As my advocacy and counseling has taught me, due to inadequate political leadership, injustice festers while victims suffer in shame – even though they have done nothing wrong. This knowledge fuels my commitment to fighting for student loan relief today.
We all know people are shamed for being poor in this country, when the real problem is an economic system stacked in favor of the rich. As a single mother with multiple jobs, making payments on my loans was extremely difficult, even with an income-driven repayment plan. Each time I received a notice from the loan servicer, my blood pressure would rise and anxiety and depression would set in.
I rarely opened those envelopes, allowing them to pile up until I occasionally worked up the courage to open and shred them. After all, I knew what they said. And I knew I did not have the money. The sum was so overwhelming you’d think I had a medical degree, juris doctor degree and a doctoral degree – and a seven-figure salary, too. As I watched the interest compound, I felt trapped.
Now I know that there is a clear exit from this nightmare: the Biden-Harris administration can cancel our student loans using the clear authority they possess.
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Until the president and the education department take responsibility for canceling these old, unpayable and unjust debts, this crisis will continue to fester across generations. Today’s young debtors are tomorrow’s older debtors. For decades, millions of older debtors have crouched in shame, imagining ourselves as failures when in reality the system has failed us. But we will no longer be duped into suffering alone.
Older student debtors are going to Washington DC to demand our student loan debt gets canceled in our lifetime – not at our funerals. We can’t afford to wait. And with an election looming, the Democrats cannot afford to continue to let millions of people suffer. The White House has the power to set us free. Will they use it?
