This article does a good job showing just how crippling student debt has become. And it brings home what an utter failure of moral governance it is that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has denied over 98% of the people who have put in ten years of public service and requested the loan forgiveness they were promised.

There’s a reason our current debt situation has been dubbed a “student loan crisis”: It foreshadows radical shifts in the way millions of Americans, most of them still in early adulthood, will be able to participate in the economy, in society, in the workplace. For many of us, student debt means delaying — if not entirely forgoing — homeownership, marriage, and parenthood. This new form of social stratification — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — will have ramifications for generations to come.

I think of a 28-year-old, now in her first year in the PSLF program, with $110,000 in graduate school debt. Her health insurance with a public service employer doesn’t cover specialist visits to the doctor — so she goes without, because she uses her extra income toward covering her student loans. “I basically can’t have children until I’m at least 38, and who knows if my eggs will be dead by then,” she told me. “I have pretty abysmal views that I’ll save much money at all in the next ten, twenty, THIRTY years.”

And if hundreds of thousands of people aren’t even saving for themselves, we’re certainly not saving for our kids’ college tuition, effectively ensuring their future monumental student debt. It’s a slow-motion emergency, but because it is built on two cherished components of the contemporary American dream — the necessity of both debt and education — almost no one has heeded the calls for help.

You might not have student loans. You might not be in a student loan forgiveness program — and, as such, might think that the problems plaguing the thousands who are struggling with their debt have nothing to do with you. You’re wrong. The experience of student debt is isolating, lonely, and often dismissed as the result of individual choices — but its ramifications span generations and demographics. To actually address those ramifications, however, means looking to the larger, societal issues underpinning student loans in general: how we, as a country, came to frame college and “credentialing” as essential and how we shifted from one paradigm of funding college to another. Because the only way to actually fix a problem of this magnitude is to really, clearly, see it: what created it, what continues to fuel it, and who profits from it.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/student-debt-college-public-service-loan-forgiveness