ABA Journal, Ballooning Student Loans Become an Albatross; ex-NYU Law Student, 91, Owes $329K on Initial $29K Loan:

Some older Americans who took out relatively modest student loans are finding themselves saddled with ballooning loan balances that can result in garnishment of tax refunds, wages and Social Security payments.

The New Yorker has a story on the issue that includes interviews with older people whose debt is emblematic of the problem. One person struggling with student debt is identified only as Betty Ann. She enrolled at the New York University School of Law at age 52 in 1983. …

In 1983, at the age of fifty-two, Betty Ann enrolled in New York University’s law school. As a middle-aged Black woman, she wasn’t exactly the typical N.Y.U. law student. Her white male classmates would slyly elbow her books off the long library tables, and once, while standing at her locker, a classmate waved a ten-thousand-dollar tuition check, signed by his father, in her face. Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old.

Although her mother had no money, Betty Ann was a strong student and earned enough scholarships to receive a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education. In the next few decades, she worked as a public-school teacher in Pittsburgh and Harlem, in addition to raising two children as a single mother. But she grew increasingly frustrated by the marks of educational inequity—moldy lunches, low-grade reading materials—that plagued her classrooms. “I thought the only way that I could change things was to have a higher degree,” she told me.