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Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

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Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

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Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

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“The cruelty is just the point”: A broken student loan system has women at the center

Confusion, litigation and the threat of wage garnishment have left millions with few options and little hope

Published March 17, 2026 6:00AM (EDT)

This story was originally published by The 19th.

This story was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of The 19th. Meet Nadra and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Mary Modica tried to do everything right. When a rise in digital music signaled she should reconsider a radio career, Modica decided to become a teacher — with the understanding that after she made a decade of payments, the Department of Education would discharge any outstanding student debt she owed through its Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.

But after teaching English learners in New York’s Hudson Valley for 12 years, Modica still has $102,000 in student debt. With her monthly payment rising more than 71 percent to $875 during President Donald Trump’s second term, she can’t afford to heat her house above 60 degrees. She’s also stopped physical therapy because she can’t cover the co-pays.

“I broke down three times today,” Modica, 41, said. “I have a disease that will inevitably make me completely disabled, and I can’t afford the treatment because I’m hemorrhaging money to a 20-year-old debt.”

The Department of Education hasn’t forgiven her loans, she said, because it is excluding two full years of her public service, a period when she taught full time but enrolled in a teacher training program at night, kicking her loans into deferment. Accordingly, her payments then don’t count toward the 120 payments required to earn public service loan forgiveness. And that’s not Modica’s only problem: Some of her pre-pandemic payment history, she said, no longer shows up in federal databases.

Over the past year, millions of borrowers have run into similar difficulties trying to navigate a student loan system that has grown more confusing and chaotic during President Donald Trump’s second term. He may have campaigned on “affordability,” but his administration has systematically stripped borrowers of protections, threatened to garnish their wages and raised their monthly payments — all while promising to forgive the student debt of immigration enforcement agents. Experts say these policy shifts have broken a student loan system that was already in shambles, leaving nearly 45 million borrowers, disproportionately women, in financial and emotional distress.

Older borrowers, in particular, have felt the quakes in the student loan landscape since the interest on their debt has had more time — often, decades — to accrue. Black women, who rely more on student loans than other demographics, are grappling with student debt at the same time they have been pushed out of the public service sector due to waves of government cuts during the second Trump administration.

Rep. Ayanna........

© Salon