Abstract
The coronavirus pandemic drastically reshaped how much of society functioned. Most of these changes were unfortunate in some way, but one change welcomed by many was the student loan repayment pause. This pause was enacted as relief given the pandemic’s effects on the economy and people’s financial standing. Approximately 35 million borrowers qualified and received, at least temporarily, not only some financial but also emotional respite from the heavy burden of debt. How was the repayment pause received emotionally by Latinx millennial borrowers? How did these borrowers feel before and then during the pause? Drawing on interviews from two waves of data collection—one in 2018 and another in 2022—the authors found an increased sense of agency among borrowers as well as an expanded spectrum of emotions, ranging from positive feelings of optimism to a more critical analysis of the student loan system during the repayment pause.
In March 2020, the president of the United States announced the student loan repayment pause, which was intended to give borrowers reprieve from monthly payments given the severe financial consequences of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. An estimated 35 million Americans qualified for this relief from payments. The idea of student loan forgiveness was hardly new or uncontroversial, to be sure, and public debates about whose loans should be forgiven and how much should be forgiven intensified following the announcement. Repayments restarted in October 2023, with the estimated average monthly payment between $210 and $314—what journalist Joe Pinsker (2023) wrote felt like a 5 percent monthly cut to the monthly earnings of those making the median household income. The reinstatement of repayments actively affected borrowers’ monthly savings and spending. The Federal Reserve of New York estimates that borrowers saved about $195 monthly from March 2020 to April 2022 (Pinsker 2023).
Just as there are racial wealth gaps in this country, racial differences also exist in both loan balances and repayment progress (Chan et al. 2019; Charron-Chenier et al. 2020). There is important research documenting the wealth gaps and student loan balance inequities between White and Black borrowers (Kuperberg 2023). However, we know less about Latinx borrower experiences, whose numbers are growing, as 28 percent of Latinx people older than 25 years now hold associate’s degrees or higher (Excelencia in Education 2020). We also know that significant wealth gaps remain between White and Latinx Americans: the average wealth of White families in 2022 was more than $1 million compared with $227,544 for Latinx families (Kochhar and Fry 2014; Urban Institute 2024). Given that Latinx individuals have less familial wealth to cushion life during and after college than White borrowers, the former are likely to struggle more to make ends meet in the postcollege transitions that affect repayment. For example, whereas the median White borrower still carries 65 percent of their original loan balance 12 years after graduation, the median Latinx borrower still owes more than 80 percent (Ortiz 2020). Additionally, Latinx borrowers are more likely than White borrowers to default on their loans, as the national default rates for each group are 35 percent and 20 percent, respectively (Santiago and Martinez 2021).
It is also clear that debt load can significantly affect life choices; for example, among Latinx borrowers nationally, 33 percent self-report putting off marriage, and 37 percent self-report delaying having children because of student loan payments (Flores 2022). In California, 51 percent of Latinx borrowers stated that their student debt was preventing them from saving for retirement, while 45 percent stated that it was preventing them from purchasing a home (Santiago and Martinez 2021). As these findings suggest, the burden of debt not only causes objective financial difficulties but can may also influence people’s decisions and feelings about some of the most meaningful milestones in their lives. Little research, however, has examined the full range of emotional responses to student loan debt, let alone how these responses manifest across particular racial/ethnic groups, or how these responses were affected by the 2020–2023 repayment pause. Emotions are significant, as well-established research has measured the effects of economic standing on individuals’ emotional worlds and looked at how individuals exercise agency in this arena (Silva 2013).
This research draws on a unique dataset that captures how student loan borrowers experienced a student loan debt-free life, even if only temporarily. On the based on interviews with 41 millennial 1 Latinx borrowers (all graduates) before and during the student loan repayment pause, our findings reveal an increased sense of agency and an expanded spectrum of emotions regarding the student loan system in general as a result of the student loan repayment pause. We use Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) definition of agency: “a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). (p. 963)”.
Agency is a time-bounded sense that can affect one’s life circumstances. Our findings reflect four emotional responses resulting from the loan repayment pause among Latinx borrowers. First, all respondents in 2022 expressed an agentic sense of relief because of the pause. Emotionally, this relief is experienced as a cessation of the low-level stress that functions as a “background hum” contouring all of an indebted person’s life choices (Dawney, Kirwan, and Walker 2020). The pause temporally shut off the stress of repayment and ignited borrowers’ agency to make different choices, which included growing savings accounts, paying down consumer debts, meeting milestones like getting married, buying a home, and/or having children. Second, whereas feelings of despair and shame were predominant in 2018, no respondents expressed those feelings in 2022. Third, in some cases, not having to make payments enabled respondents to feel more optimistic about their financial future and to express hope, an emotion completely absent from the 2018 interviews. Finally, the temporary relief afforded borrowers the space to become more critical about the fairness and legitimacy of the student loan system itself.
These emotional responses are all linked to agency and were a direct result of the repayment pause, which served as an “emergent event” and necessitated “continual refocusing of past and future . . . the capacity to be both temporally and relationally in a variety of systems at once” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998:968). The data in this study capture Latinx borrowers as they reflect and live through changing financial dynamics. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) argued that agency can be “captured in its full complexity . . . [only] if it is analytically situated within the flow of time” (p. 968). Borrowers’ reflections on student loans before and during the repayment pause provides a unique window into the agentic and emotional processes set in motion by a change in policy.
Our findings contribute to the literature on people’s subjective experiences of student loan debt and captures agentic processes related to such burdens. This work is situated within economic sociology, where scholars have long established the relationships between emotions and economy (Bandelj and Kim 2023). Our research is also increasingly relevant and timely, as Latinx college enrollment and borrowing continues to grow. Just over half (51 percent) of all Latinx students who started college in 2012 took out student loans (Santiago and Martinez 2021), and during the 2021–2022 academic year, 310,958 Latinx graduates earned bachelor’s degrees (Excelencia in Education 2024). With more and more Latinx college graduates than ever before, an unprecedented number are now transitioning to their working lives and reckoning with the long-term financial and emotional effects of loan repayment. Their stories and experiences of debt are relevant for our understanding of the emerging Latinx middle class (Vallejo and Vasquez-Tokos 2024).
Literature Review
The Student Loan Story
Student loans affect household economic stability and mobility as the burden of debt brings with it a variety of hardships and impedes asset accumulation (Jabbari et al. 2023). Adult households headed by someone younger than 40 years without student debt have approximately 7 times more net worth than those with student debt (Kochhar and Fry 2014). The average millennial borrower has a staggering $33,000 in student debt, whereas the average college-graduate baby boomer graduated with only $2,300 in student debt (Filipovic 2020). 2 Chen and Munnell (2021) found that older millennials (those born between 1981 and 1991) are worse off in terms of wealth accumulation than baby boomers and members of generation X 3 because of student debt burdens. Their analysis was focused on each generation when they were between 28 and 38 years of age and demonstrated that millennials are on par in terms of wealth/income ratios with the previous generations only when student debt is removed. Millennials as a whole are more likely to carry student debt and be worse off economically than previous generations in terms of income (adjusted for 2020 dollars), wealth, and homeownership rates, and we also know that the average Latinx millennial is worse off than the average White millennial on all counts. Student debt has increased the challenges associated with the transition to adulthood for millennials in particular, and led many to delay starting independent households, getting married, and having children (Nau, Dwyer, and Hodson 2015). Houle and Berger (2015) found a significant negative association between student loan debt and homeownership status.
A great deal has been published about student loans including their associated unequal racialized burden (Addo, Houle, and Simon 2016; Dwyer 2018; Dwyer, McCloud, and Hodson 2012; Houle and Addo 2019, 2022; Pyne and Grodsky 2020), as we know that racial wealth gaps shape student loan burdens (Seamster 2019; Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017). It is also a well-established fact that Black borrowers are the most burdened (Houle and Addo 2022; Houle and Warner 2017; Kim and Chatterjee 2019; Kuperberg 2023; Kuperberg, Williams, and Mazelis 2024; Walsemann, Ailshire, and Gee 2016). These racialized inequities manifest in health outcomes: Walsemann et al. (2016), for example, found that Black young adults with student debt had shorter sleep durations compared with other racial counterparts. Houle and Warner (2017) found that Black young adults have a higher association between student debt and boomeranging, (i.e., returning home after residential independence) than their White counterparts because of racial discrimination and inequalities in credit, college experience, and labor markets.
We know less about Latinx borrowers, who may be more debt averse than other groups (Unidos US 2020; Zerquera, McGowan, and Ferguson 2016) as they tend to borrow less than they may need per their financial aid calculations (Ellengold et al. 2020; Phillips 2021). This Latinx debt aversion may be related to cultural ideas about debt based on real experiences with predatory lending in ethnic communities within the United States and in countries of origin for immigrant families (Phillips 2021). However, Latinx borrowers have also been shown to have higher debt-to-income ratios than White borrowers (Baker 2019).
Others have written about the subjective effects of student loan borrowing and repayment (Cottom 2017; Goldrick-Rab 2016; Zaloom 2018), the effects debt burdens have on relationships (Strivers and Berman 2020), and the psychological distress debt burdens cause (Bridges and Disney 2010; Cooke et al. 2004; Morra, Regehr, and Ginsburg 2008; Walsemann et al. 2016; Walsemann, Gee, and Gentile 2015). Student loan burdens are associated with stress and depressive symptoms (Walsemann et al. 2015). Dawney et al. (2020) theorized that student loan burdens show up as a “background hum” of stress that “might barely register” but nonetheless provides “a background structuring condition for the ways in which lives in the present are lived out” (p. 7). Deckard, Goosby, and Cheadle (2022) found that debt burdens among Black and Latinx students are related to negative feelings of fatigue, guilt, and sadness that do not improve over time. Dwyer et al. (2012) defined self-concept as self-esteem and a sense of mastery or control and found that education debt affects this adversely. They noted, moreover, that “challenges to [young adults’] self-concept arise as they move through the life course with significant financial liabilities” (p. 735). The perceptions borrowers have of their debts also affect other points of their lives as they experience increased stress regarding their current and anticipated debt (Cooke et al. 2004; Kuperberg et al. 2024; Morra et al. 2008; Ross, Cleland, and Macleod 2006). Kuperberg et al. (2024) emphasized the pressure borrowers feel when they are expected to manage their finances in ways that prioritize loan repayments by limiting other aspects of their lives.
Journalist Anne Helen Peterson (2021) offered a useful analogy for thinking about the trajectory of student loans and how they affect people over time, namely, by theorizing first, second, and third “acts” to the student loan story. In the first act, the student takes out the loan(s). In the second act, they try to find a job and possibly go to graduate school. It is only in the third act—somewhere between 2 and 10 years after graduation—that the reality of the loan sets in, with devastating effects on borrowers’ stress. We build on Peterson’s analogy by conceptualizing the 2020–2023 repayment pause as an intermission and examine its impact on Latinx graduates in particular, specifically related to their emotional states. In our sample, respondents in their third act were between 6 and 10 years after graduation, and during the intermission, were between 9 and 13 years after graduation.
In the third act of the student loan story, borrowers are processing and navigating the burden of repayment. Their context, including their social networks, shapes how they come to understand their debt. Bryer (2022) studied how some borrowers are enmeshed in debt-dense networks that normalize and facilitate evaluative comparisons. In Bryer’s study, some master’s-level borrowers made upward-unfavorable comparisons with peers. Noting a comparative disadvantage, they pointed to peers who were better off financially before graduation and consequently accumulated less or no debt for graduate school. For Latinx borrowers, many of whom are first-generation college-going, their peer networks are composed of peers with similar debt loads and familial wealth profiles. They are unlikely to have peers in their networks over whom they have comparative advantage, but outside of their networks, the dominant college graduate population, White people, still looms as a comparative benchmark.
Strivers and Berman (2020) examined relational work, defined as the “process by which people create, maintain, negotiate, or sometimes dissolve their social-economic relations by searching for appropriate matches among distinctive categories of social ties, economic transactions, and media of exchange” (p. 1). They demonstrated how student loan borrowing and repayment affects families across family transitions: “at time of borrowing (with parents, when negotiating mutual obligations to debt (with [potential] partners), and when children come into the picture (internally, in light of one’s social tie with one’s children, and with partners)” (p. 10). Notably, one common dimension of relational work for Latinx children of immigrants is financial transfers from children to parents, as they are the most likely group to engage in this (Lanuza 2020).
On Economy, Emotions, and the Latinx Middle Class
Given the negative effect of debt on mental health, we focus on the affective spectrum related to indebtedness among Latinx borrowers before and after the repayment pause. In this era of capitalism, the construction of the self and emotions is often one of the only dimensions of life over which people with little material resources have some degree of agency (Illouz 2008; Silva 2013). Silva (2013:21) argued that, unlike previous generations who garnered their sense of meaning and dignity from hard work and family, millennials draw on self-transformations and emotional management for a sense of meaning and dignity as they craft their adult identities. Additionally, structural changes in the economy such as the loss of social safety nets, neoliberal policies, and deindustrialization have led to the prominence of self-therapeutic models of meaning-making (Silva 2013:13). Latinx borrowers, many hailing from working-class origins, use their personal and emotive experiences with debt to craft their stories—stories that are likewise affected when the timeline and burden debt repayments shift.
A well-established subfield of sociology has long pointed to the connections between the emotive and the economic (Bandelj 2009; Bandelj and Kim 2023). Classical sociologists have always been concerned with questions of economy but also emotion, according to Bandelj and Kim (2023). Their reviews of the sociological canon argue that each theorist has a place for the affective in their political and economic analysis. This can be seen in Durkheim’s concept of anomie and Marx’s concept of alienation: both tackle the relationship of an emotional state and the economy (Bandelj and Kim 2023:2). In their discussion of economist Martijn Konings’s (2015) book The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, Bandelj and Kim (2023) wrote that “capitalism actually brings to light affective and emotional networks and discourses of desire and fulfillment” (p. 5). It is clear that examining people’s feelings regarding an economic policy is of sociological interest.
Considering the emotions of an emerging Latinx middle class in relation to the loan repayment pause, in particular, gives insight to a group that is “distinctive from other middle-class formations,” as Vallejo and Vasquez-Tokos (2024:3) argued that racialization processes, class heterogeneity in their kinship, and legal status vulnerabilities make them unique. Furthermore, Vallejo and Vasquez-Tokos urged scholars to study Latinx middle class aspirants as they work to better their lives. We heed their call.
Data and Methods
We examine the subjective experience of indebtedness among Latinx borrowers before and after the student loan repayment pause. The primary data are in-depth interviews with 41 Latinx loan borrowers who are alumni of three institutions of higher education in California—a public research university, a regional public university, and a private liberal arts college. California is a useful site in which to study Latinx student loan burdens, as Latinx individuals constitute more than 39 percent of California’s population—the largest proportion of any state in the country. These borrowers are all graduates and were recruited from the respondent pool of a comparative institutional ethnography of Latinx student life that Reyes conducted from 2008 to 2010 (wave 1). This research draws on two additional waves of data collection gathered through follow-up interviews with some of the respondents from wave 1.
For wave 2, Reyes contacted all possible alumni from wave 1 (i.e., those whose contact information was still current), and then used snowball sampling techniques to expand the sample across each of the three campuses to include Latinx alumni who attended the schools during the same time period (between 2008 and 2012) to ensure overlap with the original respondents. Reyes obtained institutional review board approval to maintain the contact information of the original sample, which included each respondent’s consent. Approximately 73 percent of respondents in wave 2 were participants of the original study, which included ethnographic observations and interviews. Thanks to the rapport Reyes developed previously with participants, returning respondents were not only very willing to participate again themselves, but also offered to connect Reyes with their peers.
Wave 2 interviews were conducted between July 2018 to December 2019, approximately 6 to 10 years after respondents’ graduation. They took place at locations suggested by respondents, most often coffee shops or restaurants but also some homes and workplaces. Respondents first signed a consent form then filled out a questionnaire that asked for demographic information such as gender, age, racial/ethnic background, nativity, parental nativity, parental educational attainment, parental occupation, year of graduation, academic major, highest terminal degree, income, student debt, consumer debt, savings, whether they owned a home or rented, and how much they paid to do either (i.e., as mortgage or rent). Reyes used these questionnaires to inform the in-depth interviews that followed a semistructured format and were audio-recorded with respondents’ consent. All interviews were conducted in English, although most also had Spanish interspersed. Every respondent received a $50 stipend for their participation in interviews that ran an average of 60 minutes.
During interviews, Reyes glanced at relevant information on the questionnaire to contextualize the conversation, being careful not to force the respondent to disclose their income or student debt load out loud if they did not wish to (given the public setting of most interviews). Reyes asked respondents to speak about their lives since graduation. The qualitative interviews allowed individuals to reflect in depth on and speak about a range of issues.
Wave 3 interviews took place in 2022 via Zoom given the COVID-19 pandemic. Reyes reached out to all 61 participants from wave 2 and conducted 51 interviews. Of these, only 41 respondents were carrying student loan debt. In these interviews, respondents provided updates on their pandemic, personal, and financial experiences.
Sample
Wave 3 consists of interviews with 51 respondents, all 21 respondents from the research university, 18 alumni from the liberal arts college, and 12 alumni from the regional public university. Of those respondents, only 19 from the research university, 15 from the liberal arts college, and 7 from the research public university carried student debt. Only those carrying debt are included in this study. This research draws on two interviews with each of those 41 respondents, they carried debt at the time of the 2022 interviews.
Respondents are almost all of Mexican origin. This was not by design but emerged after using the wave 1 sample and snowball sampling; it is also reflective of the region. A few respondents who were of Mexican origin also had a parent of another national origin or race. Respondents’ ages ranged from 31 to 38 years at the time of wave 3 data collection. The sample included 5 immigrants, 30 second-generation individuals, and 6 third-generation or beyond individuals. Eighty-five percent of respondents were the first in their family to attend and graduate from college. In wave 3, 8 are men and 33 are women. This reflects national trends of Latinas overrepresenting Latinos in college attainment: 13 percent and 10.2 percent hold bachelor’s degrees, respectively (Marshall et al., 2021).
Ninety percent of the sample hold more than a bachelor’s degree, including advanced degrees. Seventeen respondents have master’s degrees in mental health and behavioral sciences, 6 hold juris doctor degrees, and the remaining respondents have master’s degrees in fields such as business, urban planning, and ethnic studies. Most are carrying debt loads beyond $50,000, which includes undergraduate and graduate debt. See Table 1 for more information. All names in this article are pseudonyms.
Summary of Respondent Characteristics.
Data Analysis
There were several phases of data analysis. First, Reyes typed up field notes after every interview in wave 2 and wave 3, and each interview was transcribed by a professional transcriptionist. Reyes created a spreadsheet of attributional information such as age, college-going generation, immigrant generation, income, student debt, consumer debt, savings, marital status, housing type, and so on. Reyes initially kept this file separate from all other data. Then, they began coding in-depth interviews inductively, listening to each interview and following along with the interview transcription. During this phase, Reyes verified transcriptions were accurate and wrote an analytic memo for each case that included a summary, keywords, and emergent analytic questions.
In the next phase, Reyes looked for emerging concepts using all 41 analytic memos from wave 2, looking specifically at text related to student loan indebtedness; they used NVivo during this phase. Reyes used “flexible coding” and developed a list of index codes (i.e., large chunks of text that can later be reduced) using keywords and questions from the previous stage (Deterding and Waters 2018). Along with wave 3 data, Reyes reread the student loan indebtedness codes from wave 2 then consulted each interview in wave 3 looking for discussion of student loan indebtedness. The analysis of wave 3 interviews during student loan repayment pause generated several categories of index codes, such as student loan relief, debt acceptance, resignation to debt, hope with the pause, etc. They kept a catalog of all subcodes within each category and their definitions.
The next phase of analysis consisted of line-by-line coding using index codes developed with Garcia-Galvez and Quesada, and which built on Reyes’s initial coding. Throughout, all three authors met and continued to refine the codes. They then coded all 41 interviews one more time using the refined codebook, which consisted of emotions about student loans, obstacles faced related to loans, and experiences with the student loan pause. In a final wave of coding, Reyes used the final fine-tuned codebook of emotional states and experiences related to student loan burdens to code each respondents’ narratives about student loans during the 2018 and 2022 interviews. It was during this phase that they identified the emotional spectrum presented next. Emotions are not mutually exclusive. All coding of wave 3 data was done manually, using Excel workbooks.
Findings
Our analysis of Latinx borrowers’ reflections on their student loan burdens both in 2018–2019 before the pandemic and in 2022 during the student loan repayment pause provide insight regarding the third act and an intermission in the student loan story. We find four emotional responses as the repayment pause enabled an array of opportunities not previously available to borrowers during repayment. The first response, a sense of relief, is the cessation of the low-level stress that functions as a “background hum” contouring all of the indebted person’s life choices (Dawney et al. 2020). By temporarily shutting off the stress of repayment, the repayment pause enabled borrowers to make different choices, from saving more money to being able to pay down consumer debts, to finally being able to take milestone steps like getting married, buying a home, and/or having children. Second, whereas feelings of despair and shame were predominant in 2018, no respondents expressed those feelings in 2022. Third, in some cases, not having to make payments enabled respondents to feel more optimistic about their financial future, and even to express hope—an emotion not at all present during the 2018 interviews. Finally, the temporary relief afforded some borrowers the space to become more critical about the fairness and legitimacy of the student loan system itself.
No More Shame and Despair, and the Emergence of Hope
In Act Three of the student loan story, which takes place between 2018–2019 and 6 to 10 years after graduation, Reyes met with Latinx borrowers, many of whom expressed feelings of despair and shame when it came to the status of their student loans. After he attended a private liberal arts college for his undergraduate degree and then a highly ranked graduate program in educational counseling, Tomas had accrued a significant amount of student and consumer debt. In 2018, he made $65,000 as a college counselor but owed $140,000 in student loans while also having $30,000 in credit card debt. Soon after he finished his undergraduate degree, his parents, both blue-collar workers, divorced, and his mother also became unemployed and sick. Needing to house and support both himself and his mother, Tomas immediately got a full-time salaried job in college admissions, a job he held while also getting his master’s degree. In 2018, he talked about feeling a great deal of shame and pressure. Even talking to his family about his debt was difficult, as he explained,
Within my family we could all, like, pinpoint: “Oh, we have our own, you know, financial situation to deal with.” But, like, specifically talking about it, in detail. Like, “this is how much debt I have and there’s so much student loans.” Not really. I always wanted to . . . I don’t know if it was about, making my parents believe that I was, like, OK. I didn’t want them to worry.
He admitted to trying to mask his struggle from his parents, both of whom struggled financially, and instead portraying himself as leading a life of ease. In 2018, he was actively working on talking about his student debt burden and had just disclosed his balance to his partner. When we reconnected in 2022, Tomas had received a pay bump to $92,000 and expressed relief in response to the student loan pause: “I’m enjoying it at the moment, while also just, you know, utilizing the additional funds to, you know, pay off, you know, small debt here and there and just trying to save.” He was able to reduce his credit card debt to $15,000 and save $5,000. Talking about his student loan burden in 2022, Tomas did not express shame and had a notably more lighthearted tone than the heavy shame he expressed in 2018. He talked optimistically about his aspiration to purchase a home with his partner.
Gilma is the child of Mexican immigrants, and was a married mother of two children when we spoke in 2022. At that time, her family was renting a one-bedroom apartment and her husband, who works in the film industry, was laid off during the pandemic and remained unemployed. When we last spoke in 2018, she was earning $33,000 annually; by 2022, she was happy to update me that she had a better paid position as a case manager making $54,000. Gilma estimated that she owed $70,000 in student loans for her bachelor’s degree from a regional public university, although she remembers borrowing only around $40,000. When we spoke in 2018, Gilma had stopped making student loan payments. She explained,
I was paying it monthly but at some point I couldn’t. I just couldn’t . . . I stopped paying it. . . . I started looking at my account and it said “closed.” I’m, like “what does that mean?” ’Cause I know that they will never forgive your loans, right? I need to call them and just get over the fear. And be, like “OK, let me make some kind of monthly payments.”
Gilma was confused about the status of her loans; she knew she stopped paying but it was not clear to her what “closed” meant on the online portal for making payments. In addition to feeling confused, she expressed significant fear and shame regarding her inability to make payments.
Four years later, when asked about the loan repayment pause, Gilma said, “It did help me a lot.” Before the pause, she explained, her wages were being garnished, which began following our 2018 interview. In 2022, she was eager to get on a repayment plan once payments resumed. She said, “Now is a good opportunity for me to call them, and tell them, like: ‘I’m going to pay, even though I don’t have to pay,’ so after a few months, my record will be better.” She was eager to be in good standing. As she put it, “It was stressful, because it’s something that, unconsciously, is, like, stress, you know? You know, they’re garnishing my wages, like, I can’t . . . you know? Like, I need to get out of this!” Gilma expressed exasperation before the pause and a sense of relief following its enactment. As her feeling of shame and despair dissipated, her focus then was being in good financial standing and paying her debts.
Fabiola had similar experiences. She graduated from a research university and then went on to earn a master’s degree in ethnic studies from a regional public university. When we met in 2018, she was pregnant with her second child, earning $25,000 working in the nonprofit sector, and had defaulted on her loans as she carried a balance of $170,000. She was emotionally distraught during our conversation. She shared,
I’m not successful in the sense that, financially, I owe a shit ton of money to loans. And, because of those loans, I can’t buy a house. Because I defaulted on my loans because I had no money and I have the food stamps application to prove it. . . . Because I ended up on default, it’s a laughing matter when I try to go in to, like, you know, a lender, like, and apply for a home. They’re just going to be . . . I would describe [my feelings] as frustration.
She began to cry and continued,
[I’m] just feeling really devalued as, an educated person, right? Because we think that we’re going to go to school and right after you graduate you’re going to have, this successful journey and a successful path. But it’s totally not like that. Or at least it wasn’t like that for me. So just feeling, defeated, feeling, like I’m, swimming upriver when I’m educated. Like, how does it happen that I feel so, like, defeated or I feel so unsuccessful?
She sobbed as she described this.
In 2018, Fabiola’s sense of self was wrought with the negative weight of indebtedness and precarity. She felt disappointed and ashamed. When we reconnected in 2022, Fabiola was living with her two children, parents, adult brother, and sister-in-law. She had received a promotion at work and was now earning $46,000 a year. The pause allowed her to release the feeling of shame and instead tackle how to fix her credit by spending a significant amount of time looking into her repayment options once when repayments resumed. Whereas she had only $200 in her savings account in 2018, by 2022, she proudly shared, “I have a lovely almost $7,000.” She felt proud of her accomplishment and was looking optimistically at her future.
Like Fabiola, more borrowers communicated optimism and hope after the repayment pause. When I met Mireya, a graduate of a public research university, at a coffee shop in 2018, she was expecting her second child and working in mental health care. She was earning $50,000 and owed $40,000 in student loans. She said,
I’m going to pay my . . . I’m going to be paying my school loans forever, probably. I mean, I don’t even know how to start a process for loan forgiveness. I . . . I haven’t . . . I feel like I’m still . . . I’m barely, getting into it. Because I didn’t have to start paying it until six months after I graduated from my master’s degree.
She had been repaying her loans for a couple of years, but did not know if she qualified for forgiveness under the Public Loan Service Forgiveness program. In 2022, she was earning $61,000 and said,
I would hope that I can pay the minimum because I’ve already paid back like seven or six years of them, so I’m, like, “well, with the 10 years, um, in public service, then I only have, technically, like 3 years. If that’s still going to happen.”
The distant idea of forgiveness had become a reality Mireya now expected.
Paloma works at a university as a counselor; in 2018, she was earning $70,000, carried about $80,000 in loans and had $15,000 in savings. In 2022, she was earning the same and still owed about the same. She had relocated to Europe and was now working remotely for the same university. The loan pause, along with the possibility of working remotely and the difference in cost of living, had allowed her to save more, so that she now had $60,000 in savings. Her feelings about repayment had also shifted. In 2018, she was critical of the system, arguing against “the need for me . . . to be in debt almost $80,000 to get a piece of paper to validate me getting a job.” She was frustrated that her education cost was so high. She was feeling quite different in 2022:
I am not too worried, given that I’d be paying a lot less, going abroad. I am still holding out hope that, by then, at least $50,000 gets forgiven? I’m only three years shy forgiveness working in a nonprofit, so at some point of my life, I see myself maybe gravitating toward a different job.
Paloma had decreased her monthly living cost by moving abroad while the pause gave her time and space to save. She was now focused on her loans being discharged and excited about the freedom that would give her to change employment. Although she was enrolled in the public service loan forgiveness plan in 2018, she had not heard much from others receiving this forgiveness. Her sense of hope emerged in 2022 when the public conversations about loan forgiveness had become mainstream and there were more cases of loans being discharged.
Relief and Its Tangible Effects on Life Choices
Relief from repayment operated as a pause in the constant stress of indebtedness, affording borrowers both the material resources and the mental space to carve out new plans and orientations. Selena, the child of Mexican immigrants, attended a private liberal arts college for her undergraduate degree and then a private elite master’s program in public policy. When we spoke in 2018, she was carrying more than $20,000 in student loans and making $75,000 a year. She was quite devastated about her student loans then. She lamented that, unlike her more affluent peers, after graduation she could not:
do whatever I want, like, an unpaid internship or a lower paid starting position. Knowing that within six months, my student loan grace period would end and I was responsible for paying back all of this money, really severely, it just, made me really anxious and it made me feel like my opportunities were vastly more limited and so there was that. And, at the same time, this realization of sort of generational privilege, I did not have.
Having attended an affluent college, Selena interacted with peers who were quite different from her, and she was fixated on the inequities between their ease after college and her challenges.
When we reconnected in 2022, Selena was making $130,000 and had paid off her federal student loans thanks to the interest accumulation pause. As she explained, “for so long, I had just been making, minimum payments. And so, the pause in payments and interest rates just, really gave me the opportunity to, like, pay those off.” She added, “It feels great.” Although she still owed about $8,000 in loans to her undergraduate institution, these had a 0 percent interest rate. By 2022, Selena had been able to accumulate $20,000 in savings. Although her salary raises clearly contributed to this, she also credited the repayment pause for keeping her loan interest steady and allowing her to gain some financial momentum.
Deidra is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, a first-generation college graduate who attended a research university in California for her undergraduate degree. She then earned a master’s in counseling from a public research university in the Midwest. When we spoke in 2018, she was earning $53,000 a year, carried $75,000 in student debt, and had $3,500 in savings. She was living with her parents along with her two adult siblings. At the time, she was also paying her student loans along with her parents’ “parental PLUS” loans, 4 which included debt they accrued to pay for Deidra’s and her younger sister’s education. Her sister had also graduated and now needed to repay her own loans, but had not yet secured a job. Deidra was making $900 loan payments monthly. She cried as we talked about the debt and the challenges it placed on her long-term relationship. She said, “I am emotionally ready for marriage but not financially.” Four years later, in 2022, Deidra had recently married and was now earning $65,000 a year. She and her husband were living on a college campus where he worked in residential life, so they were able to save on rent, which had also been helpful. She said that the $900 a month previously going to loan payments was now going into savings. She had already saved more than $30,000 and had been able to have a wedding without accruing debt. Although $30,000 is still far from what they would need for a down payment on a home in southern California, Deidra said she felt like she was in better financial standing now than at any other time in her life.
Corina migrated from Mexico as a child with her parents, and was an undocumented student while she attended a research university. She was able to fund much of her undergraduate education through grants and was able to fix her status before applying to law school. When we spoke in 2018, she was earning $70,000 as an attorney for a government agency and had $263,000 in student loans. Additionally, she owed more than $10,000 in credit card debt. Reflecting on her journey as a formerly undocumented student, Corina said “I feel very proud to be where I am today.” But she added:
I wouldn’t say that it was extremely easy or smooth. I mean, there were definitely a lot of periods of self-doubt. And that still continue to exist now. One of my most primary goals for a year out is to be at least credit card debt free. Financial stability, I think, is something that I really feel like is impeding me from, like, fully focusing on my career aspirations. I would like to, um, stop renting at one point. Especially here, but it’s extremely, extremely expensive. I think that also comes into play in terms of family planning and where do I see that fall into my career plans. And the financial piece is really important to them both.
By 2022, Corina had paid off all her credit card debt and managed to put $5,000 away in savings. Her salary rose to $100,000, but her student debt was now closer to $300,000, because of interest. When asked if she had benefited from the loan repayment pause, she said,
I think that the pause has really allowed me to actually take advantage of my salary increases over the years. . . . Like, I’m not losing $400 every month on that right now. I am credit card debt free. So, that’s been a huge relief. It’s been a huge . . . probably the most significant financial moments, overcoming and being really . . . being able to benefit from the salary increase without the credit card debt.
Corina’s financial portfolio had shifted in a more positive direction following the eradication of her credit card debt. She felt relief thinking about a future that included living with her partner and possibly being caregivers to their parents, which would not have been a feasible financial option when we spoke in 2018.
Righteous Anger and Critiques of the Student Loan System
For some borrowers in 2022, the intermission in the student loan story enabled them to express righteous anger about their own financial situation, particularly as it was projected to change once the pause ended, and about the inequities related to the student loan system and financial inequities in general. Such critique was new among these borrowers. For example, Carlos, a first-generation college graduate, whose parents are both blue-collar workers and the children of Mexican immigrants, experienced relief from the pause, but also found that it afforded him the time and mental space to become more critical. When we spoke in 2018, he had finished a master’s in social work at a prestigious private research university on the east coast after attaining a bachelor’s degree at a research university. At that time, he was earning $30,000, had $110,000 in student loan debt and only $500 in savings. By 2022, he was still carrying approximately $110,000 in student debt, but at a new agency, he was earning $75,000, and thanks to the pause, he had managed to save $15,000, pay off his car, and find a new place to live. As he recounted, the pause gave him the “opportunity to save and think about what I want. I had not had room in my brain to pay off my car or find a new living situation.” Here, Carlos describes the “background hum” of indebtedness that prevents borrowers from even thinking about getting themselves out of financial obstacles or meeting other financial goals. With the space of the pause, he was able to funnel his material and mental energies to pay off his car and move into a safer apartment.
Faced with the prospect of his repayments resuming, Carlos said,
I feel a lot of relief whenever I have a chance to pay something off, I will. But this is something that I never will. I feel like it’s unfair. I feel like the whole student loan thing . . . it’s just messy and it doesn’t make sense . . . putting a lot of people in debt.
He reflected on the idea that going to college is so important and beneficial, but noted that, for him:
things didn’t turn out so perfectly. I think it’s unfair just in the bigger picture scheme, it’s not necessarily, creating equity. I still feel like I haven’t really moved too far out of my social class, which is something that we all want to do, and we want to be able to do. . . . I’m kind of in the same place.
The space and time of the repayment pause also granted him time to reflect on inequities within college debt.
Karla, the child of immigrants, graduated from a private liberal arts college for her undergraduate degree, most of which was funded through grants. It wasn’t until her master’s in industrial engineering that she accrued the bulk of her $109,000 student loan balance. By 2022, she was earning $89,000 a year and had $20,000 in savings. Her father, who is now deceased, had received a settlement for a workplace injury in the garment industry and with that money, Karla, her partner, her sister, her brother-in-law, and her mother were able to purchase a home. They were all living together in a single-family home, along with her younger brother. The pause enabled her to use the money previously spent on repayments to support her intergenerational household and to put some in savings. In 2022, she talked about how disheartening the conversation about student loan forgiveness was for her to hear. Looking ahead to her payments resuming, she said,
my salary can take it but it doesn’t make sense, in my head, to, like, pay all of this interest rate for student loans and, like, to continue to pay for it for years. And even after you’ve already made, you know. . . . You’ve essentially paid off whatever you borrowed, you still have almost, like, double the amount in interest payments.
She continued,
I think the conversation around who’s deserving of it, of forgiveness, is really tough to hear, um, especially when I hear, you know, the government officials and Biden talking about it, like, “Well, you could’ve chosen a different college.” It’s like “you don’t understand what it’s like to be a first-gen Latina and have to choose, like, what colleges to go to.” It’s not just “oh, it’s the cheapest.” It’s “do you have support from the staff? Is there diversity?” It’s . . . There’s so many things how, you know . . . that inform our decision on what college to go to. Basing, you know, like, not wanting to give forgiveness because we could’ve gone to the cheapest college, you know, available and, like, we should’ve been financially savvy and all that stuff, it just. . . . It doesn’t make sense to me. And, when you think about, like, the amount of people that take out student loans because they can’t afford it, like, at the end of the day, most of the demographic is, like, you know, Black and Brown kids who take out these student loans because they couldn’t afford it. They didn’t have that financial stability to afford their own grad school or undergrad.
For Karla, the pause and debates about student loan forgiveness brought forth conversations and thoughts about economic inequities in general, the cost of college, student loan debts and their disparate effects on certain racial groups.
Sonia too was more critical in 2022. After earning a bachelor’s degree from a public research university, Sonia began working as a social worker. When we first connected in 2018, she had recently moved away to one of the most expensive zip codes in California. Her parents had divorced during her last year in college and her childhood home was lost during the Great Recession. Soon after college, Sonia found a one-bedroom apartment to rent with her mother and the teenage brother she sustained financially until he graduated from high school. In 2018, Sonia was earning $71,000 and owed $40,000 in student loans. She was making her $300 monthly payments then and said:
I’m paying it monthly. And whatever extra I have, I put. It is going down. It’s not going down as fast. I look at that . . . and I’m just like, “why did it only go 29 bucks down?” Like “where the hell is it going?”
We can read in Sonia’s words her exasperation at the interest accumulation.
The repayment pause afforded some relief, but it also shifted her thinking about her loans. She explained in 2022,
Honestly, with my loans, since it’s so bad, I’m not even dealing with that. Once, Biden got elected, I’m, like: “Robinette
5
needs to take care of that. That’s between Robinette and God. I am not addressing that. I’m not going to deal with it.” It sounds so bad, but I’m not dealing with that. I have to focus on other things. I have to focus on paying off my car. I have to focus on, you know, like, making my monthly payments for other bills. My school loans? That’s between Robinette and God.
Asked what she planned to do when the pause ended—specifically, whether she would resume repayments—she replied,
I don’t know yet. That’s where I’m . . . That’s where I’m at. And I’ve had discussions with my friends about it too. And my friends are just like, “Yeah. I don’t . . . I don’t know. We’re not dealing with it.” And when like [someone says] “we should deal with this,” it’s like, “Yeah, once it’s time.”
During the pause, Sonia decided she was not even sure she would comply and pay her loans back, she instead asserted that other things were more important, and that government leadership needed to come up with a solution. She no longer believe the burden should rest on her individual shoulders.
Discussion and Conclusion
This work demonstrates the emotional shifts Latinx millennials experienced as a result of the student loan repayment pause. We illuminate a new intermission in the student loan story, one in which graduates have been able to experience, even if only temporarily, what their lives could be like without the burden of loans. The pause allowed many borrowers to invest back into themselves and their families in ways not possible before. For many, this was the first time since completing their degrees that they felt a sense of relief. We offer a theorization of relief in relation to Dawney et al.’s (2020) “background hum” of student loan burdens, a “low-level effect” that normally rings constantly, but which was temporarily silenced during the repayment pause, affording borrowers more material resources and mental space. The pause also increased borrowers’ sense of agency in their lives, expanding their worlds both tangibly and emotionally. As seen in their interviews, the student loan repayment pause along with the tailwind of increased wages over time for the college-educated cohort worked in their financial favor.
We highlight the emotional shift from Act Three of the student loan story, when the full significance of the student loan burden first sets in, to an intermission when borrowers received a (temporary) reprieve. Previous research has not focused on the transition between different time frames of the student loan burden, specifically in terms of the evolution of emotions that occurs in that process. Our project illustrates the emotional complexities that Latinx millennials grapple with regarding their student loan burden. Consistent with prior research on mental health and student loan debt, our respondents experienced despair and shame in 2018 but this was gone in 2022. Hope regarding their debt and finances in general was virtually absent before the pause, but newly found and expressed by borrowers in 2022. Notably, we saw this hope rise during a global pandemic, which was filled with all types of stressors. On top of hope, the pause allowed participants the space to cope with the stressors associated with student debt. More respondents also expressed righteous anger about the student loan system and were critical of the multiple inequalities they faced, the current administration, and the discussions around deservingness and forgiveness. Of note, emotional reactions did not map onto any other characteristics such as gender, immigrant generation or institution attended.
Our findings demonstrate that the repayment pause enabled our participants to improve not only their financial health—with the ability to pay off some of their debts and increase their savings—but also their emotional well-being. These benefits have likely been shared by borrowers of other racial and ethnic groups may well have experienced similar benefits, but given that Latinx children of immigrants are more likely than any other group to provide financial transfers to their parents, their relief had particular intergenerational reach (Reyes 2025).
We bridge a gap in the current research on mental health and student loan burdens by examining the emotions experienced between the “third act” and an intermission in the student loan story. As conversations continue around loan forgiveness policies in the United States, future research should examine how student loan burden and temporary loan pauses can affect mental health, as well as the emotions experienced when shifting through the student loan trajectory.
The student loan repayment pause has had significant effects on the lives of borrowers. A recent analysis showed that because of the pause, debts grew at a much slower pace “the total debt for the first quarter of 2023 was 6.2% higher than the first quarter of 2020, compared to a 16.1% increase during the previous three-year period” (Luthi, Pentis, and Lowery 2024). Indeed, sociologist Louise Seamster argues that if policymakers were to focus on student loan forgiveness, they could restore the financial stability and wealth-building function of higher education (Peterson 2021).
As repayment has since resumed, many of the graduates interviewed have likely returned to living constrained and limited lives, unable to complete significant turning points in the life course, whether moving out of their parents’ homes, purchasing their own home, having children, or getting married. Without a comprehensive student loan forgiveness program from the current administration, individuals’ emotional health may continue to suffer.
There are political implications to how working-class people feel about government policies, particularly those with tangible financial outcomes. How Latinx borrowers feel about the student loan repayment pause gives us a window onto the emotional effects of policies. We have seen working-class resentment mobilized successfully in our electoral politics by the right since 2016. If a Latinx middle class is to truly emerge, their fate hinges on whether and how successfully this mostly first-generation cohort of college graduates is able to benefit from their degrees—and how they feel about it. Student loan forgiveness is a significant part of this.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the University of Connecticut’s Research Excellence Program.
1
We focus on individuals born between 1981 and 1996 who attended college between 2008 and 2012.
2
Millennials are individuals born between 1981 and 1996. Baby boomers are individuals born between 1946 and 1964.
3
Generation X consists of individuals born between 1965 and 1980.
4
Parental PLUS loans are loans that parents of an undergraduate dependent can take out to pay for their dependent’s college tuition and other college-related costs, such as housing and books.
5
She is referring to President Joe Robinette Biden here.