I did everything right.

Thirteen years ago, I walked across a stage for the second time, accepted a diploma, and immediately began the long road to paying back what I owed — loans I had signed for as an eighteen-year-old. No grace period squandered, no deferment taken out of convenience.

I enrolled in income-driven repayment because the alternative was choosing between groceries and loan payments. I filed my paperwork. I tracked my qualifying payments. I kept my eye on Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the program that was supposed to be the reward for exactly the kind of career I had chosen.

Serve your community for ten years, make your payments faithfully, and the remainder of your federal student debt will be forgiven, they said. Every modest paycheck, every year I watched peers in the private sector pull ahead financially, I reminded myself — ten years. My qualifying payments haven’t always been continuous. Life in public service rarely is — grants end, positions change, lenders transfer your loans between servicers without warning. Life happens. Each transition has come with its own administrative nightmare: payments miscounted, paperwork lost, the exhausting process of proving, again, that yes, I was employed here, yes, this position qualifies, yes, I am still the same person who has been faithfully paying since the beginning.

Never delinquent — I have been fortunate there, and not everyone is. The burden of proof never seems to shift off my shoulders.
And now, the SAVE plan has been thrown into legal limbo. My loans are currently in forbearance while the courts sort out what comes next. Those months in forbearance don’t count toward forgiveness. But what worries me more than the pause is what replaces it. Every alternative on the table comes with a higher monthly payment — and a balance that will keep growing

I have never owned my own home. I have never bought a new car — mine is nearly twenty years old. And here is the number that keeps me up at night: I owe more than I borrowed. After years of payments — real payments, consistent payments, payments made in good faith — the balance has grown.

I have over fifteen years of experience working with international and exchange students. Nine years of professional experience in international education. It has changed my life. I have helped low-income, underserved students on F-1 and J-1 visas from around the globe pursue their journey into the American education system — coordinating student programming, managing exchange visitor programs with the Department of State, working in international admissions, recruitment, credit evaluation, transfer pathways, and more. I have spent my career building bridges to education. Fostering growth through cultural understanding. Leaving things better than I found them. And after all of it, my salary would surprise most people.

Interest does not care about any of that. It accrues regardless. Public servants are not a liability to be managed. We are educators, teachers, social workers, librarians, public health employees — the connective tissue of a functioning society. PSLF exists because Congress recognized that this work has value even when the market doesn’t compensate it accordingly. That recognition is not charity. It is an acknowledgment of a real and documented dynamic: that some of the most essential work in this country pays the least.

I am less afraid of losing the promise of forgiveness than I am of losing the path to get there. Without an affordable repayment plan, the finish line doesn’t disappear — it just becomes unreachable. What good is a ten-year promise if the monthly payment is impossible to make?

I still believe in what I do. I wouldn’t trade my education for anything — and nobody can take it away from me. Those student loans made it possible. Without financial aid, the door to that stage simply would not have opened. They are the reason I was able to leave my hometown, see the world, develop new ways of thinking, and build the kind of compassion and empathy that has defined my career. That education should never have cost this much in the first place. But the debt was worth it.

I did everything right.

I just need the system to do the same.