After nearly two decades of paying student loans, Angela Carpio, 40, thought the finish line was in sight.
But now she’s in the middle of a political tug-of-war over a $1.74 trillion mountain of student debt held by 45 million Americans, most of it owed to the federal government.
For borrowers like Angela, a mother of two and software developer who lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota, the logjam has upended family budgets and made it difficult to plan.
The November elections, in which two candidates with completely different views on dealing with the debt are running neck and neck, only add to the feeling of uncertainty.
Angela took out her first student loan in 2001 and ultimately borrowed about $25,000 while attending the profitable DeVry University in Florida before earning an associate degree from Valencia College.
Despite making regular payments, her balance is still stuck at over $20,000 while interest rates rise.
“I’m just in limbo,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen and it scares me.”
Since the 1990s, the US has allowed some borrowers to repay student loans through a process similar to that in Britain, where bills are based on a portion of the borrower’s income and debt after 25 years is written off.
But participation in the U.S. repayment plan remained low, partly due to limited awareness.
President Joe Biden, initially skeptic of loan forgiveness, made it a signature policy of his administration, aiming to shore up support among younger voters, who are most likely to be in debt and view the issue as important.
Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, has vowed to continue his efforts.
Under Biden, the government has forgiven more than $168 billion in debt for more than 4.7 million borrowers, including more than a million lower-income Americans. That’s more loan forgiveness than any other president.
But the U.S. Supreme Court last year rejected the White House’s most sweeping proposal — to forgive $400 billion in student loans for 16 million borrowers — ruling it was an illegal use of executive power.
A second Biden plan called Save (Saving on a Valuable Education) — which offered lower monthly loan payments — has been put on hold pending a federal court review.
Republican officials have led the legal challenges, arguing that debt forgiveness is unfair to the vast majority of Americans who don’t have student loans.
But supporters of the White House policy say they are merely trying to fix problems that they say have unfairly deprived borrowers of relief.
Meanwhile, the court’s setbacks have created staggering bureaucratic headaches for the very ones Biden was trying to help.
Angela had signed up for Biden’s Save payment plan, which promised to roughly halve the roughly $400 she owed each month and cancel her debt after 20 years.
Although the legal challenge has halted her payments for now, she said the temporary reprieve has only fueled her worries about what comes next.
“It’s just a mess,” she said. “It’s very confusing and very difficult to plan when the most concrete things are no longer there.”
The US has suspended student loan payments during the pandemic. As of January, a few months after payments resumed, only half of debtors were current on their bills.
Veronica Williams, a 32-year-old from Sacramento, California, has $127,000 in student debt after earning a college and a master’s degree.
But the lawsuits also leave her loan up in the air, and she says she can’t even get answers about what she owes for her monthly payment.
Veronica, who works for the Department of Veterans Affairs, endorsed Biden in 2020 but said she was still waiting to decide whether to back Democrats again.
“There is no clear understanding of what to do,” she said of her borrowing situation.
“It’s disheartening because it feels like it confuses me and my friends and colleagues about what the future… will be for us.”
During the campaign, while Harris pledged support for forgiveness, he did not press the issue.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has argued that Democrats have “taunted” borrowers with hope while failing to deliver on their promises.
At the same time, the Republican presidential candidate has condemned student debt forgiveness as “despicable.”
For Republicans, who have seen college-educated and younger voters shift decisively to Democrats in recent years, the risks of opposing cancellation are minimal, said Anthony Fowler, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.
For Democrats, it remains to be seen whether student loan forgiveness will help or hurt.
A June UChicago Harris/AP-NORC poll found that only 30% of Americans approved of Biden’s handling of the issue, although Republicans and the Supreme Court fared even worse.
Professor Fowler said he thought embracing debt forgiveness could backfire for Democrats. He noted that fewer than 40% of American adults over the age of 25 have a college degree and research has shown that deep forgiveness would benefit households with above-average incomes.
“The politics of asking your plumber to pay for your children’s fancy liberal arts degrees — this makes no sense,” he said.
But Mallory SoRelle, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, noted that an estimated one-third of Americans with student debt have not graduated and that polls show significant support among Democrats and independents for his least some relief.
“If (Biden’s plans) had actually been implemented on time, I think we would see a much bigger boost for Democrats, but this is an issue that voters still say they care about,” she said.
Robert Henley, a 68-year-old public sector retiree from Tallahassee, Florida, voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
He said he opposed debt forgiveness because it was too expensive for the government and unfair to taxpayers like him and his wife, who had sacrificed to save for their children’s education.
But he said he still expected to vote for Harris in November, citing other concerns such as his distrust of Trump.
“As a country we cannot afford to give away money, but more importantly, from my point of view it is unfair,” he said. “It is clear that as a voter you cannot have every single issue turn out the way you want.”
