Our Student Loan Questions Live: Part One

Death, Sex & Money

• Episode: Our Student Loan Questions Live: Part One
• Website: Death, Sex & Money
• Feed URL: http://feeds.wnyc.org/deathsexmoney
• Duration: 00:56:21
• Published: 2017-09-13 06:00

After we released our two-part series on student loan debt earlier this summer, we got a lot of emails from you. In addition to your stories, you also had questions about your loans: about what concrete steps you can take to pay them off smartly, and if you're not in school yet, about whether it's worth it to go into debt for college in the first place. One listener wrote in about his shared debt with his wife: "We are continually putting off having children because we realize we really can't afford it. We are concerned about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program still existing by the time we can have our loans forgiven. We found ourselves unable to be approved for a loan to buy a home because of our extreme debt. The situation is so overwhelming to us."

So this week, we're gathering several student debt experts to take your calls live, and help you sort through some of the big questions that you have about loans. In this first of two live call-in shows, we're joined by Rohit Chopra, a Senior Fellow at the Consumer Federation of America; Tressie McMillan Cottom, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy; and Anya Kamenetz, lead education blogger at NPR and the author of Generation Debt. And we talk about the changing face of student loans under the Trump administration, about the communities hardest hit by the student loan crisis, and about how to decide if going into debt is the right choice for parents and kids. 

After listening to this episode, listen to part two of our student loan call-in series. 

Looking for the website that Rohit Chopra mentioned about help with public service loan forgiveness? It's here: http://forgivemystudentdebt.org/.