In the months before the pandemic pause on student-loans payments, interest and collections, Jennifer Booth regularly received unpleasant phone calls from her student-loan debt collector that fueled anxiety and doubt. They’d ask her questions like, “Why would you go to school at all?” Booth recalled in an interview.
Outside of those phone calls, Booth felt she could answer that question. She sees the time she spent in college as connected to teaching, a job that filled her with purpose and fulfillment. “I felt so lucky that every day I woke up, I looked forward to going to work,” the 74-year-old said recently. “I actually can’t stay out of the classroom even now.” She’s technically retired, but Booth still goes into school to teach third graders a couple of times a week. Still, in some ways, those calls from the debt collector questioning why she went to school “were reflecting my own feelings,” Booth said. That’s because her student loans became so unmanageable that at one point they threatened her livelihood. The $10,750 she borrowed in 2007 at the age of 57 to study for an undergraduate teaching degree at a public college ballooned to $27,924 by 2020. At …
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