By 2015, Lauren Quinn had borrowed $49,996 in federal student loans to pursue a master’s degree in education at UCLA. But after almost five years of making monthly repayments tied to her income level, she is confronted with a total balance of $56, – about $6,500 more than the original amount due to compounding interest.
“It’s just another day older, deeper in debt is how I feel,” said Quinn, a public high school teacher in Los Angeles. “It just feels like quicksand. It feels like this huge thing I’ll never get out from under.”
She has paid a total of $9, since 2016, but only $ of that has been applied to her principal balance.
Quinn is among the 42.9 million Americans who had federal student loans as of last year, according to the National Student Loan Data System. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Board statistics show outstanding student loans overall have swelled to payday loans Cleveland $1.7 trillion, surpassing the nation’s auto loans and credit card debt.
Seth Frotman, executive director of the non-profit advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center, characterized the current state of student loans as a “quiet crisis.”
“Maybe unlike the mortgage crisis where you could see down the street there used to be a house owned by your neighbor that’s now owned by the bank, there isn’t this visual, tangible thing you could see when your neighbor defaults on a loan or your neighbor’s struggling to save for retirement because their student loan bill just never seems to go away. And I think that has also hampered our ability as a country to actually tackle both the root causes of this crisis and the fallout it’s had on American families,” Frotman said. Continue reading “Student debt “feels like quicksand.” Is loan forgiveness the answer?”
