I can never go too long without a little bit of activism.
This time, it doesn’t start actually with my student loans. At least it’s not how it plays out in my head. It starts with the last morning my senior dog spent on this earth, when my husband and I cried over our 17-year-old rat terrier as he fell asleep forever. It was the same day that $10,000 in loan forgiveness was announced, and the same day that I verified that I had just under $10,000 in federal student loans. Or so I thought.
There would be no silver lining that day, not even with the news of debt forgiveness. But it was the start of an ongoing saga for which I have no predictions as it stands today.
A little over a month later, I woke up to a notification stating that some student loan borrowers were being excluded from Biden’s loan forgiveness plan. Something about the way the headlines were phrased gave me pause and I knew almost immediately that my loans subject to this. Or at least some of them were; I knew for a fact that one of my loans was definitively private, but that another was not paused during the pandemic and that something was odd about that loan. What was odd about that loan is that it was of the last FFELP loans; the Federal Family Education Loan Program, backed by the government but held by private lenders. I was never given a choice of what sorts of loans to take when these became part of my cadre of student loans; not until I had to finish school and haphazardly take out one small private loan did I ever subject myself to non-federal loans. But this program, discontinued in 2010, were always billed as federal and treated as such. Until the lenders played their game and managed to undermine the benefits that used to come with student loans that were billed as ‘federal’.
So, yes. I cried a little. And then I got angry. And then I started a petition.
That petition took off. Slightly. But not as much as the press for the petition, which was kind of the point more than anything else:
- Borrowers who were cut out of student loan relief describe ‘a gut punch’ (NPR) (transcript)
- China Announces Its Priorities, Debates in Hot Senate Races, Student Debt Forgiveness (NPR)
- All Your Questions About Applying for Student Loan Forgiveness Answered (TIME)
I’ve since connected other borrowers with other journalists and managed to become the admin of a Facebook group dedicated to advocating for inclusion of the FFEL(P) loans.
We also created a website, forgiveffelp.com, where we’re slowly building resources and coverage links. (Hey, we’re essentially volunteers! It takes effort and time!)
While I hope we make an impact, I’m also hoping that it’s my last big of activism for a while. It’s harder work than I’d like it to be, but it’s not supposed to be easy work. I’m hoping we can declare victory on our petition at some point, but for now the whole loan forgiveness program is in jeopardy thanks to GOP challenges. I can’t predict what it will look like months or even a week from now, or if we’ll ever get forgiveness. But I’ll stick with it as long as I possibly can.
