They're in their 60s and still paying off student loans. College debt in America now lasts a lifetime.

By Jillian Berman

'I just keep hoping that it will just magically go away or I'll just die': A growing feature of the nation's $1.7 trillion student-debt crisis is Americans living with student loans for their entire adult lives

Tammy Sabens (left) and Tala Henry-Halab have had their student loans for decades. Borrowers like them are becoming a growing feature of the $1.7 trillion student-debt crisis.

Tala Henry-Halabi has been repaying her student loans for some 40 years. She graduated from the University of South Florida in 1985 owing $9,924; now, at age 62, she owes more than she borrowed in the first place to attend a four-year public state university.

"I've been working my whole life and I still owe $11,700," said Henry-Halabi. "My whole life has been a comedy of this going through the cracks no matter what I do, no matter how much I try."

In 1986 - the same year that "Top Gun" was released in movie theatres and the New York Mets last won the World Series - Henry-Halabi started to try to repay her student loans. She put what she could toward the debt, but struggled to find enough money between rent, car payments and healthcare to stay current on the loans, even while working three jobs.

She married, had children and for many years worked as a librarian in a public library in upstate New York. Finding the resources to manage the debt remained a challenge. At one point, Henry-Halabi received calls from a collection agency that she says came without a warning from her loan holder. Henry-Halabi agreed to pay $400 a month, forking over essentially all of the money she was making at the time. Still, the payments didn't appear to make a dent in her loan balance, she said.

Later, the U.S. government garnished money from the wages Henry-Halabi earned working as a public librarian to repay her loans. That lasted for about 10 years until the pandemic paused student-loan collection activity. Earlier this year, Henry-Halabi's grown children told her they'd like to help her pay off her student loans. The offer made her cry, both because it was so kind and because she felt it was the wrong order of things.

Now, Henry-Halabi's best hope is to continue working as a children's librarian for another four years. If she makes it until 2030, her debt will be canceled under Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a program where borrowers can have their federal student loans wiped out after 10 years of working for the government or certain nonprofits. She struggled to navigate the program's requirements in the past. Her husband, a cancer survivor, wants to move to Florida to be closer to their adult children - but Henry-Halabi is hesitant to make any moves in part because of the loans.

"I'm like, I don't know if I'll be alive in 2030," she said.

A growing feature of the nation's $1.7 trillion student-loan crisis is that some Americans are now living with student loans for their entire adult lives. It's hard to know how many people have been saddled with this lifetime burden.

Those who, like Henry-Halabi, have had their student loans for at least two decades make up 5% of borrowers, or nearly 2 million people, according to credit data analyzed by the California Policy Lab at the University of California. That's up from 1% of borrowers in 2015. But the data likely underestimate the scope of the issue because, for borrowers who consolidated their debt, the credit data show the consolidation date as a loan's origination date - rather than the date when the borrower originally took out the loan, which could have been years earlier.

Regardless, the existence of these lifetime borrowers exemplifies a broken system that's meant to use a combination of government and individual funding to kickstart a successful life. There's evidence throughout the student-loan program that policymakers never intended for borrowers to be dogged by a student loan for their whole lives. The standard term for repaying a student loan is 10 years - a reasonable amount of time for someone to establish their career after college. Under alternative repayment plans, borrowers are supposed to have the debt wiped out after at least 20 or 25 years of payments.

At the same time, those provisions do not align with other features of the student-loan system that can allow the debt to fester for decades. These conflicting provisions are aimed at ensuring borrowers don't avoid their responsibilities to taxpayers and the government.

The repayment structure can be challenging for borrowers to navigate and, unlike most consumer debt, there's no statute of limitations on a student loan, meaning the government can pursue a borrower for their entire life. Student loans are famously difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. The government also has extraordinary power to collect on the loans, including by taking borrowers' Social Security benefits, tax refunds and wages - but borrowers may not experience those consequences until they're actually making enough money for the government to claw away.

The result is that, according to the California Policy Lab, 40% of borrowers have had at least one loan for more than a decade - the standard repayment term - up from 22% a decade ago.

'That damn loan - it weighs on me so heavy, I just cry'

Tammy Sabens is 65 years old, but retirement is far from her mind - in large part because of her student debt. Instead, she's considering taking on more jobs to help pay it down.

"That damn loan - it weighs on me so heavy, I just cry," she said. "There just doesn't seem any way out. It just keeps magically growing like 'Jack and the Giant Beanstalk.'"

Sabens took on the loans in 2002 to become a nurse. At the time, she was 46 and a single mom, and she thought switching careers would help provide economic stability for herself and her kids. But in the years since, Sabens has struggled to make meaningful progress toward repaying the debt. She originally borrowed nearly $25,000, but the loans have now ballooned to more than $50,000.

Now she's worried that changes coming to the student-loan program as a result of this year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will make the debt more difficult to pay off. Sabens has already felt the impact of the politics surrounding the student-loan program. She had tried to switch to a more affordable repayment plan during a period when the Trump administration had stopped processing applications. The pause in processing was related to litigation surrounding SAVE, a Biden-era repayment program. The experience left Sabens in limbo for months.

She's now looking at fewer repayment options thanks to changes to the student-loan program from the Republican megabill and the Trump administration's decision to officially end SAVE. "They keep changing the game, they keep changing the rules," Sabens said. "That is so unfair - we're just at their mercy."

Meanwhile, Sabens, who lives in Kentucky, is balancing budgeting for her loan payments with other expenses. In 2022, she was pinched financially, so she sold her house to have some extra funds. But now, she's contending with high rent. Sabens said she's worried about how long she'll be able to continue working full time because of her health, and she doesn't have any money saved in a retirement account because she had to cash out her savings at one point when she lost her job.

"I just keep hoping that it will just magically go away or I'll just die," Sabens said of her student debt.

There are plans that borrowers can use to manage their student loans long term. Policymakers began developing those programs decades ago when they started to realize that many borrowers were buckling under the 10-year standard repayment timeline, said David Bergeron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Bergeron, who worked at the U.S. Education Department for more than 30 years, described these plans that extend the repayment horizon for 20 or 25 years as "technocratic solutions to the problem of college costing too much."

"Those were Band-Aids to recognize that the original idea of people being able to pay off their educational debt in 10 years wasn't living up to the reality that so many borrowers were facing," he said.

But these programs can be challenging to navigate. Borrowers who have their student loans for decades have often cycled in and out of repayment - putting money toward the loan when they can afford it or when there aren't other pressing bills - and in some cases have experienced periods of debt-collection activity. Many of these borrowers have paid back their original balance and then some, experts note.

"Whether they paid voluntarily or through collections, most Americans would probably agree that if you've paid back what you've owed, you've paid enough," said Rich Williams, the chief customer officer at Summer, a company that works with employers and cities to connect people with student-loan benefits. "But the system is not built that way."

As borrowers get older, the challenges of repayment become even more acute, added Williams. That's both because older Americans tend to have more limited income and because they're more likely to be dealing with health conditions that come with old age - for example, weak eyesight or cognitive decline - that can make it challenging to navigate student-loan repayment programs. In 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that nearly 40% of student-loan borrowers over the age of 65 were in default.

"The quantity of those borrowers who are in default is really alarming," said Williams, who served as deputy assistant secretary of planning, policy and innovation at the Education Department during the Biden administration.

Part of the reason why student loans can hang on for so long is because borrowers get discouraged and are occupied by other, more imminent needs.

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12-19-25 1401ET