Constance Jordan’s debt burden began as $186,000 in federal loans. She used the money to attend undergraduate and graduate school, and became a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Now she is 70 years old, and, despite her making payments since 1998, her debt burden stands at $435,000.

Until two years ago, Jordan was making those payments as part of the most affordable plan in history: Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE). The Biden-era loan repayment plan reduced monthly loan payments, sometimes to as low as $0, and allowed borrowers to receive forgiveness after 10 or 25 years of making payments. According to the Biden administration, borrowers would see lifetime payments per dollar fall by 40 percent on average.

Under SAVE, Jordan paid $800 per month, an amount she found reasonable given her salary. “I never skipped a payment,” she told me.

Then, several Republican-led states filed two lawsuits arguing that the Biden administration lacked the authority to create SAVE and that it was a backhanded way to implement mass debt cancellations. After a court ruling in June 2024 placed an injunction on key features of the plan, the Biden administration placed all borrowers in SAVE in an administrative forbearance while the administration continued to “defend” the repayment plan in court.

Since then, borrowers in SAVE have not had to make payments, but on July 1, they began receiving notifications that they would need to switch to a new repayment plan within 90 days, or the Department of Education would do it for them—enrolling them in the Standard Plan, which is the most expensive. The new repayment plans often come with monthly bills that are two to three times higher.

Jordan’s best option among new plans is the Income-Contingent Repayment, and under this plan, her new monthly payment is $3,900, almost five times the original amount. “There’s no way on God’s green Earth I can afford that payment,” she said. That amount does not feel income-contingent to her. While she no longer sees patients, she does some work for extra money, such as administering disability exams, and she receives Social Security. The combined income will not be enough to cover her new loan bill.

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“What does one do?” she asked me, holding a stack of correspondences from her servicer.

Franco Vitella manages a branch library in Toledo, Ohio. It’s what he went to school for, and he’s good at it. His debt burden began at $50,000 in federal loans, most of which he took out for an undergraduate degree he completed in 2009. He became a librarian with the understanding that his career choice would allow him to pursue Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), a program that forgives all federal loans for public service workers who make 120 payments in a qualifying repayment plan.

He looked at the repayment plans available in 2016 and believed he’d be able to afford the payments, which was true at first. Under his first plan, REPAYE, he paid $120 a month, and then SAVE offered something even better: $0 payments. With this in mind, he and his wife decided to have a second child.

“Everything costs more than it did just a few years ago,” he said. “While I have a good job, my pay has not matched the rate of inflation.”

The plan he chose after leaving SAVE, Income-Based Repayment, costs him $221, though that amount has not been confirmed in the communications he’s had with his loan servicer, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA). Like other borrowers across the country, he was mistakenly given a quote of $50 a month for his new plan, and he applied to it believing that would be his payment.

A week later, he received notice that his new payment would be $0, which was confirmed on his first billing statement. Then, the next day, he received a new notice, saying that his plan was approved and his payment would be $745, which MOHELA eventually acknowledged was an error after he spent hours on the phone with them.

But even today, when he uses the Federal Student Aid repayment simulator—a calculator that shows payment amounts under different plans based on loan burdens, interest rates, and family size—he receives a number lower than his current bill of $221. And just recently, he was inexplicably asked to apply for his plan again, despite his already having made payments in it. “It’s awful and insulting,” he said about the contradictory information he receives from his insurer.

Vitella’s new bill means that he’ll “think twice” before going to the doctor. “The increased payments will reduce my ability to save for almost anything and put me in a position where I need to take on debt for emergencies,” he said. It also means that his wife, who homeschools their two children, may be pushed back into the workforce. This means their kids will likely have to enroll in public school.

“I worry what that means for my oldest daughter, who may not excel in a public school environment,” Vitella said. “She has Level 1 autism, and benefits from the supports my wife can offer.”

Constance and Vitella are two of the nearly 8 million people enrolled in SAVE, all of whom are being forced out of the plan, nearly simultaneously. “We’re talking about nearly a fourth of the federal student loan portfolio, which is one of the reasons the process of transfer has been so devastating,” said Braxton Brewington, press secretary for the Debt Collective, a national union of debtors. According to Brewington, the effects of this mass transfer have come with “errors, missteps, mistakes, and illegalities.”

One such issue is borrowers’ ability to receive credit for their qualifying payments toward relief. Borrowers have transferred plans because new ones are introduced or shuttered, and now their past payments are lost. Shayla Perry, a 46-year-old program manager for a tech company based in Georgia, said that MOHELA has no record of five years of payments she made years earlier. At the time, she was making payments on a Federal Family Education Loan, a guaranteed loan that was a federal-private partnership and which no longer exists. She was told when she consolidated her loan to enroll in SAVE that her payment history would come with her, but it did not.

MOHELA representatives told her that while she might have made payments, they cannot confirm them and that there was nothing she could do about it because “those two systems don’t talk.” Perry has submitted a complaint, as instructed, but no one has responded. She struggles to get someone on the phone when she calls, and when she can, according to Perry, the people she talks to seem to know less than she does. For example, one representative didn’t understand that under Trump’s new repayment plan, the Repayment Assistance Plan, her repayment timeline would be extended.

Today, her debt burden is $238,745, and though her monthly payments under SAVE were $273, her new options range from $998 to $1,167. If Perry’s five years of qualifying payments are never located, she will pay an additional $60,000 before she is eligible to receive relief. “I want to ask our public officials, ‘Do you see this?’” Perry said. “’Do you see what’s happening? Why is this allowed to happen?’”

Over the weekend of August 1, many borrowers in SAVE received shocking news: Their loans, which they had been told were in forbearance, were now, according to MOHELA, in default. It seemed as if their loans were being transferred to a collections company and their default status reported to credit bureaus. To be back in good standing, they’d need to make one large bulk payment.

“The last e-mail I’d received from them was in June,” said Daniela Perez, a 28-year-old nonprofit worker living in Miami. “Then I woke up to multiple e-mails saying my account was in default status, and I owed $11,000,” she said. “I don’t have $11,000 to dish out to settle this debt, and it wouldn’t let you pay your monthly amount.”

When she called MOHELA at 8 am on Monday morning, it was the first time the representative had heard of what happened. After speaking with dozens of other borrowers online who received the same notice, Perez determined that it was probably an error and that the months in forbearance were being counted as missed payments. Her credit was not harmed, but other borrowers have reported to the Debt Collective that their credit reports still reflect the false delinquencies.

“We never got an apology for what happened,” Perez said. It had been for her and other borrowers, terrifying.

“Default is such a shameful topic,” according to Sabrina Ashley Cereceres, executive director of the Student Debt Crisis Center, a nonprofit organization advocating on behalf of 2 million borrowers. When borrowers enter that status, or are told falsely they are in that status, she said, they “tend to check out.” Cereceres had heard from dozens of borrowers over the weekend getting this same error. “It is going to cause extra stress and discouragement, in addition to confusion,” she said.

This stress is well-documented. Nearly a fifth of surveyed borrowers reported suicidal ideation associated with their loan payments, according to Dan Collier, professor and research fellow at Princeton’s Debt Collection Lab.

In addition to the historic transfer of repayment plans, Cereceres cites the gutting of the Department of Education as a factor in the ongoing problems harming borrowers. Brewington agrees. “The Department of Education is incompetent and fueling much of this disaster. They have made decisions to move forward based on squeezing as much money as they can get out of people, whether it’s legal or not,” he said.

“They are supposed to be servicers, not banks,” Jordan, the semiretired nurse practitioner, told me.

On August 5, the Student Debt Crisis Center and the Debt Collective issued a joint press release demanding a national pause on all federal loan payments and interest. “A pause isn’t just reasonable, it’s necessary,” according to the statement, which includes a petition for a pause signed by over 130k borrowers. Borrowers have told SDCC that a payment pause “would offer relief from impossible bills, prevent ballooning balances, and provide breathing room amid a volatile repayment system.” The Trump administration is currently facing a pending legal challenge filed by borrowers over federal loan changes.

“One thing a debtor can do is complain, complain, complain,” said Brewington. “The CFPB should hear your complaint. The Department of Education should hear your complaint. Your state’s attorney general should hear your complaint. Your member of Congress and your two senators should hear your complaint. Your local representatives should hear your complaint. Your student loan servicers should hear your complaint,” he said. Cereceres agreed, also recommending that frustrated borrowers add their name to the petition.

On Monday, August 10, the two groups started their National Week of Action, calling attention to the “real, immediate, and irreparable harm to millions of student debtors” along with demanding a federal pause.

Borrowers and advocacy groups are sounding the alarm on a problem that, according to them, is getting larger, not smaller. Today, one in five borrowers is in default, half a million borrowers await approval for the income-driven repayment plans they applied to, and another 100,000 PSLF buy-back applications remain pending, on top of the SAVE transfer.

If nothing is done, according to Brewington, “We will have the worst student loan default crisis in the history of the country.”

Jordan, Vitella, Perry, and Perez all shared that they went to school so that they could get a good job and have a good life. But their loan payments are making that difficult. “I would like to be able to buy a house someday,” said Perez, who shared that she is an immigrant and a first-generation college student. She feels extra pressure to do well, “but I have a $100,00 debt I have to settle first.”

Jordan recently filed for forbearance under her new income-driven repayment plan because she could not make the nearly $4,000 payments. The forbearance process, like everything else, was confusing. Reading from notes she recorded this spring, she cited a day in which she called her servicer, Nelnet, seven times and after a series of disconnections, strange messages, and wrong numbers, gave up.

A week later, when she was finally able to connect, an automated voice said there was no record of her in their accounts. So overwhelmed was she that she gave up entirely, questions unanswered, and did her best to navigate her request for forbearance alone.

Jordan might remain in forbearance until next year, as one letter from Nelnet told her, or she might need to recertify in November, which she was told in a different letter. She doesn’t know. Like everyone else, she’s in limbo.