But the credit rating system doesn’t just have the power to ruin individuals’ lives — it can also impact how institutions and entire cities are run. This is where municipal debt comes in. Cities rely on municipal bonds — debt securities issued by public and private entities — to fund infrastructure and public services. Like individuals, they, too, are “rated” and penalized through credit rating systems that benefit investors over the working class. For example, credit rating agency Moody’s recently moved New York City’s outlook from stable to negative.

This rating is laughably premature, and yet they’ve done it despite the budget being months away from completion. Even though this rating depends entirely on what happens in Albany, which is flush with cash, the credit raters can’t help butting in and ringing alarm bells to undermine an administration trying to serve the working class. Crucially, these agencies disagree with Mamdani on how to use reserves to help the poor and working class. While Mamdani says that the city might need to dip into them to help people out in a difficult time, the rating agencies say that if he does, he will face consequences. Even finance guys agree that the outlook announcement is political in nature.

“Just How Things Work”

When credit-rating agencies like Moody’s send a warning signal, it impacts everything in the city budget, which then impacts everything in the city. Specifically, the threat of a negative outlook or even a downgrade makes it more expensive for NYC to borrow, taking away money from working-class programs and forcing it over to the bondholder class. It’s basically a hidden Wall Street tax.

Cities have to borrow money to pay for things, just like you and me. They have to borrow at punitive rates on complex schedules and be subject to forces of interest rates, market fluctuations and racial capitalist flights of fancy. The municipal bond market is an extractive regime that in principle is supposed to provide the public with liquidity for infrastructure using the magic of market efficiency, but in practice is just a sprawling way to blame victims of the system and make tax free-interest payments in the process. The credit rating is at the center of it all.

This is all well-documented. Michel Feher has written about how governments have to subordinate themselves to credit raters. Alberta Sbragia writes how the municipal money chase leads to a debt wish. Eleni Schirmer has called bonds the great unequalizer of public education, while Muntaner and Wozniak say they harmfully indebt children. Destin Jenkins calls them bonds of inequality. Claire Cahen recently noted the disciplinary force credit ratings have. The CCI has called it all unhealthy. I’ve called it a straight jacket that socialists in municipal power have to put on.

The impact of the credit rating shouldn’t be underestimated, even if it feels hard to understand for most of us. For those few in the know, debt service is a quantitatively small part of operating expenditures that, to most wonks running budget offices, is “just how things work.”

Jim Lebenthal, the municipal bond evangelist famous for his shlocky commercials, said in one spot that “you can’t take a shower, take the subway, go to school…without a municipal bond touching your life.” It’s true, though like most ruling-class capitalists of that (and any) era, he probably never considered the notion of unwanted touching.

Everyone in the budget office and in the municipal government lives in fear of the credit rating. Any expenditure that goes too high, any slight transformation, or any sudden fiscal move could cause the credit raters to ding you. It could be a report that moves your outlook to negative. It could be a downgrade. It could be the rumor of a possible downgrade coursing through the chats and emails where the credit raters work. It’s like a gun to your head — the shot could come at any moment.

When that happens, it’s like a sickness that comes over the municipality’s material conditions, making everything more difficult. In financial terms, more money must be paid in order to get the money needed to pay for things, all of which ultimately will have to be paid back with interest. But in cultural and political terms, public confidence wanes. The administration is seen as irresponsible, and its critics run story after story like an acidic drip of budgetary insults which have the sound and feel of truth, because who really knows how all this works? We have to trust the experts! And the credit raters are just a neutral, technocratic temperature taker, right? They’re “agencies” for god’s sake, impartial watchdogs for upstanding fiscal and monetary health!

No. They’re businesses too. They hold public governments to the same standards as private companies. They punitively rate. They take at least 1% of the principal just on school bonds. They were a key node in crashing the economy in 2008.

Public Policy Made by Private Enterprise

Even if the Mamdani administration thinks that Moody’s rating was unfair, there’s not much they can do about it. The credit raters can do what they like with impunity. In a 2018 article, Roger Biles recounts the power of ratings agencies over local governments:

When a Denver school district disputed the ratings it had received from Moody’s and stopped paying fees for the service, the agency relied on information available in the public domain and issued unsolicited ratings that continued to be available publicly. The school district filed a lawsuit against Moody’s but lost when a federal court upheld the agency’s right to publish its ratings publicly. Concurring with Moody’s characterization of its ratings as “opinions,” the court grounded its ruling in the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.

Moody’s put out hurtful analyses against the wishes of the public school district who paid for the service. The schools sued them. The courts decided the credit raters could publish the reports because they’re “opinions,” and preventing them from doing so would violate their free speech rights. Biles continues:

Armed with such legal protection, the ratings agencies have continued to issue unsolicited credit ratings and bill the cities for the service; fearing the consequences they might suffer for future solicited ratings, cities have usually paid for services they failed to request.

Biles’s thesis is that private financial firms basically run local governments that are supposed to be public. Their laws are “public policy made by private enterprise,” and it’s been this way since long before the rise of neoliberalism! What Lebenthal said is true — cities and states and localities of every kind have to sell themselves as commodities on Wall Street to get the money they need for infrastructure. There’s no other way to do it.

Investing in the Common Good

The municipal bond regime and its credit rating apparatus is deeply rooted in the United States, but there are alternatives. These policies and practices were begun and maintained, so they can be weakened and ended. The first step, as always, is knowing that you have a problem and understanding practices like bonding, credit ratings, and municipal debt. Learning about these systems is best done in groups: if you’re a teacher or professor, join the Debt Collective’s Educator Debt Cancellation Caucus. You can also refer to resources like our Back to School Finance workshops and the Healthy School Finance worksheet.

In this process of understanding the regime, alternatives pop up on the horizon. A great report from 2024 lays out the histories and possibilities for investing in the common good. I chart a number of them in my new book As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools, such as Minnesota’s tax base sharing programs, Vermont’s Act 60 from 1998, Richard Nixon’s abandoned value-added tax for public education, a national investment authority, a Green New Deal, strategies to invest for the common good like fiscal mutualism, and following up on some of the destroyed promise of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Working-class people can build solidarity and push back against the whole structure that makes the credit rating a threat to delivering for a city’s diverse working class. There are new energies out there to do people’s credit ratings, bonding for the common good, public banks, and cooperative public finance banks. So, before you let a credit score define you — or the city you love — follow the money and ask yourself what’s behind the headlines.

David I. Backer (@schooldaves) is an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University whose research, organizing, and teaching focus on finance and ideology. He is the author of the recent book As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (New Press), and writes a weekly newsletter called Schooling in Socialist America.

— Verónica Gago and Lucí Cavallero, A Feminist Reading of Debt

If you’re feeling confused and disoriented by the many recent changes to the student loan system, you’re not alone. To distract from their costly and unprovoked attacks on Iran, Trump and his administration have been flooding the zone with unlawful efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, leaving student debtors holding the bag.

On the heels of killing the SAVE repayment plan through a dubious judicial process, the Department of Education recently announced a blatantly illegal scheme to transfer a portion of the 1.7 trillion dollar student debt portfolio to the Treasury. This transfer could lead to unprecedented data security risks, legal violations, and additional junk fees to cover the cost of debt collection — all while raising student debtors’ monthly payments by hundreds or even thousands of dollars annually.

While gas, utilities, and healthcare costs continue to skyrocket, more than 45 million student debtors — many of whom are already struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living — will be expected to pay the price for the Trump administration’s incompetence. We won’t stand for it.

That’s why we’re calling on the Trump administration to implement a one-year pause on federal student loan debt repayment and collections services for all federal student debtors. The first Trump administration paused payments during the COVID-19 pandemic — there’s no reason why they can’t do it again. Will you join us?

Read on for the latest on our lawsuit to reinstate SAVE, our campaign to abolish rent debt in California, and how you can plug in.

Higher Education

From organizing Debt Collective members to challenge the court decision that killed SAVE to navigating the impacts of the student debt loan portfolio transfer, it’s been a busy month for our team!

On the former, please join us tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT for an update on our work to defend the SAVE Plan and how you can get involved. On the latter, we encourage all federal student debtors to open up a case file with your House Representative’s constituent services and request a copy of all of your entire payment history, including payment amount and repayment status details for each month. Even though some of this information is available on StudentAid.gov, many debtors are unable to piece together the various files to access their own loan information. A complete history will allow you to document errors on your accounts, get a record of your loans to document errors that could occur in the future, and disrupt business as usual for Republican lawmakers. Use this tool to look up and contact your Representative.

Not all hope is lost on the student debt cancellation front. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Department of Education’s stay request in an ongoing class action lawsuit, meaning that more than 200,000 borrowers will receive full debt cancellation within the next year! We are also continuing the fight for College for All through our Jubilee School event series. Join us tonight at 5pm ET / 2pm PT to learn from former Department of Justice Deputy Attorney General Doha Mekki about the ways that colleges and universities might be violating antitrust laws through tuition pricing, and sign up for our upcoming sessions!

Healthcare

As we build an organized response to the implementation of Trump’s devastating cuts to Medicaid and other programs millions across the country rely on to survive, we’re looking to the state of Nebraska first. New Medicaid work requirements which are specifically designed to kick people off their healthcare won’t take effect in most states until January 1 of next year — but in Nebraska, these devastating policies will be in place starting May 1.

That’s why we’re planning a series of Nebraska Health-Watch events and Debtors’ Assemblies with partners across the state in late April, where we’ll discuss how to navigate these new requirements, why they’re happening, and how we can most strategically organize right now to fight for our healthcare and each other. On the ground in Nebraska and want to know more? Fill out this form and we’ll follow up with dates and locations!

If you don’t live in Nebraska but want to get involved, join us virtually next Tuesday at 7pm ET / 4pm ET for Power Mapping the Healthcare System in 2026. We’ll discuss what’s changed in the fight to abolish medical debt under Trump, what hasn’t, and opportunities to build power toward the healthcare system we want and deserve. We know that public healthcare in this country would be cheaper, safer, and more sensible for everyone than the system we have now. Instead, the few public programs we have are being ripped away. We’re not giving them up without a fight.

Housing

Since January 5th, we’ve seen a 20% increase in use of the Tenant Power Toolkit in California due to its inclusion in a study trial! Our Toolkit is helping tenants in California avoid default judgments in their eviction trials — an important first step in buying tenants time to fight their cases.

In response to rampant tenant exploitation by corporate landlords like Equity Residential, we’ve launched the Landlord Reporting Tool to help current and former tenants fight their rent debt charges and document the abusive business practices they’ve experienced in buildings owned by Equity Residential. Our ultimate goal is to build a compelling case for the California Attorney General to enforce existing regulations that would curb these predatory practices and abolish rent debt altogether. If you’re a current or former tenant of an Equity Residential Building, please fill out the Landlord Reporting Tool and we’ll get in touch with you!

Upcoming Events

College for All Jubilee School: Tuition Pricing & Antitrust Law

Thursday, March 26th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Join guest speaker Doha Mekki, formerly the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s antitrust division, to learn how corporate consolidation in education drives up tuition and how antitrust enforcement can help protect affordability.

Rapid Response: SAVE Plan Update

Thursday, March 26th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

We’re organizing debtors to demand that the Trump administration protect and fully implement SAVE, deliver cancellation to qualified debtors, and restore access to SAVE repayment benefits like lower monthly payments. Join us and our partners at Student Debt Crisis Center and Public Goods Practice to discuss next steps for debtors and for the movement.

Final Friday Flow

Friday, March 27th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Friday, April 24th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

Power Mapping the Healthcare System in 2026

Tuesday, March 31st 7pm ET / 4pm PT

We know the U.S. healthcare system isn’t working for us — so why is it so difficult to change, and why does it keep getting worse? Join us as we resume our Power Mapping the Healthcare System series to discuss what’s changed under Trump, what hasn’t, and where we can build power in this moment of crisis to fight for the healthcare system and the world we want.

New Member Call

Wednesday, April 1st 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in. We’ll cover what the Debt Collective is and how we organize, the campaigns we’re running, and ways for members to get involved.

Office Hours: Student Loans & Filing Your Taxes

Monday, April 6th 12pm ET / 9am PT

This session will cover some Frequently Asked Questions related to tax filing and student loans, and will also provide information about free tax filing resources from GetYour Refund.

Movement Monday

Monday, April 6th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the first Monday of each month, these gatherings invite us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with our bodies as a vital part of organizing for debt abolition and collective care. We’ll check in with ourselves and each other through accessible, grounding somatic practices that support nervous system regulation, accountability, and mutual support.

PSLF Action Call

Tuesday, April 7th at 7pm ET / 5pm PT

Please join us as we discuss upcoming action items related to securing and defending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

Office Hours: Debtors in Default

Wednesday, April 8th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Tuesday, April 21th 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Join us as we discuss options for debtors with federal student loans in default. We will cover options that require repayment, like rehabilitation and consolidation, as well as options that do not, like loan cancellation. We will also provide information about free tax filing resources from GetYourRefund.

College for All Jubilee School: An Abolitionist History of the University

Thursday, April 16th 5pm ET/ 2pm PT

Abolitionist University Studies authors Eli Meyerhoff, Abbie Boggs, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz will provide an overview of what abolitionist perspectives provide for thinking about the university in our moment of fascist authoritarianism and war. Together, we’ll explore questions of debt and capture to make sense of the perceived inevitability of capitalism and expand our imaginative horizons to see the world from the perspectives of those who have resisted debt and capture.

Office Hours: Parent PLUS Loans

Thursday, April 16th 6pm ET / 3pm PT

If you have Parent PLUS loans, you may need to take steps well before July 1, 2026 to make sure your loans qualify for lower payments and cancellation. Come to these office hours to learn about the situation facing PLUS borrowers and take the first steps together to consolidate.

50 Over 50 Monthly Call

Thursday, April 16th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Are you 50 years old or older? Do you have student loan debt? Join our 50/50 meeting for student debtors aged fifty and above to discuss action steps, organizing plans, and build solidarity. Newcomers are welcome!

Antifascist Organizing Against Attacks on Professors, Speech, & Curriculum with CAHE

Friday, April 17th 2pm ET / 11am PT

On National Day of Action, higher education leaders will share their firsthand experiences organizing campaigns, mobilizing communities, and defending academic freedom under increasingly hostile conditions. This panel was organized by Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE)’s anti-fascism caucus and will be co-facilitated by Debt Collective Visionary Escalator Dr. Shamell Bell.

College for All Jubilee School: The Erosion of Academic Labor with HELU

Thursday, April 23 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Colleges and universities are core to our communities and economy. How do we grow the higher ed labor movement while building consciousness of ourselves as workers? Join speakers from Higher Education Labor United (HELU) to explore strategies for building connections and trust between different kinds of workers so that we can move in coordinated action in the future.

Borrower Defense: The Landscape, Updates & Workshop

Tuesday, April 28th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Our Monthly Borrower Defense Calls are designed for borrowers navigating fraud, misconduct, and student loan injustice. Each call provides timely updates on the Borrower Defense landscape, current litigation, and policy developments alongside practical guidance on asserting your rights and filing claims.

Sound familiar?

For the one in four Americans trying to keep track of their student debt, let alone figure out how to get the debt canceled, this kind of confusion is their daily life.

Loan servicers lose track of how much debtors owe, keeping people on hold for hours. Private lenders deny cancellation even when they’re legally required to discharge debts. The news is full of flood-the-zone-like headlines and social media influencers giving unclear advice. Policies shift, lawsuits unfold, and debtors are left trying to piece together what it all means.

If you felt whiplash just trying to keep up last week, last month or last year — you’re not alone. You’re not a loan.

As debtors and our allies sift through the chaos, it’s critical not to lose sight of the bigger picture: this system is not normal. We’ve been taught to accept student debt as a fact of life, but in many industrialized nations, higher education doesn’t require taking on a lifetime of debt. The power to cancel federal student debt already exists. What’s missing isn’t legal authority; it’s political will. And in the meantime, the student loan system continues to fail borrowers at every turn. The Trump administration’s efforts to roll back oversight and expand predatory, for-profit institutions is only deepening the crisis, putting millions more at risk.

This is why Debt Collective matters. A debtors’ union can provide solidarity, support, clarity and power. We have our eyes on the prize: full cancellation and fully funded public universities where no one is forced into debt for an education!

While we organize for these real solutions, we help each other survive the kafkaesque nightmare we’re currently in. Whether you’re trying to navigate programs like Public Service Loan Forgiveness, make sense of your repayment options, or simply find a space to share your story without shame, organizing with other debtors can change the equation. It reminds us that this isn’t an individual failure, it’s a structural one. And structures can be changed.

Please join us for our upcoming calls at debtcollective.org/events.

In the meantime, we’re happy to share some important, recent updates below.

We promise — although this post is longer than most— it is well worth the read. It is full of helpful and clarifying details. Take the information in strides. Spread the word. Stay informed.

Things will undoubtedly continue to shift but we encourage you to keep in mind: you’re not living beyond your means, you’ve been denied the means to live!

If you have Parent PLUS loans, get out now!

If you have Parent PLUS loans there is something you need to do right now.

Consolidate all of your Parent PLUS loans into a federal direct loan. You can do that here. Make sure you choose every single Parent PLUS loan that you have to consolidate them. Do it today, it only takes a few minutes. But no matter what, do it before the end of March.

Why? If you still have Parent PLUS loans after July 1 you will be trapped in higher monthly payments and excluded from cancellation thanks to Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” And because the Department of Education says it can take up to 90 days to process an application for consolidation, that means you need to start the process right now. If you wait, then the process is out of our hands, and if it isn’t completed by July 1 you are out of luck. Thanks Trump!

This is only for people with Parent PLUS loans. If you don’t have Parent PLUS loans Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” makes consolidation riskier depending on your situation.

Destroying Everything About Education Except the Debt

The Department of Education announced that they are moving federal student loans to the Treasury. You can read the inter-agency agreement here.

The plan has three phases.

Phase one: Treasury will assume responsibility for servicing defaulted student loans. The way things currently work is that once a student loan defaults, it gets transferred from your normal servicer to something called the Default Resolution Group which only services defaulted loans. If you thought dealing with Nelnet or MOHELA was hell, the Default Resolution Group is even worse, more impossible to reach or deal with, hold times and doom loops that are even worse. Is the plan to fix any of this? No. Are they going to get rid of the Default Resolution Group? No. They are just going to move its supervision to the Treasury.

Phase two: Treasury will take over non-defaulted loans “to the extent practicable” (spoiler alert: none of this is going to be practicable!)

Phase three: Treasury will take over the FAFSA as well as eligibility & enforcement of universities. They are saying the quiet part out loud here. Your school will be supervised by a bank.

There are many things to say about this but we’ll focus on just a few of them:

1. They are going to mess up your account during this transfer

Years ago the CFPB did a study of the errors that made to people’s accounts when 2.5 million were transferred between servicers one out of every five accounts had serious errors introduced. These were not minor errors. It included things like an incorrect payment balance, or missing payments. This happened when a mere 2.5 million accounts were transferred between servicers.

What Trump and McMahon are talking about is transferring over 40 million between government agencies! The errors are going to be much, much worse.

Just this month the Government Accountability Office released a report detailing how many accounts already have gross errors in them, and nobody is auditing them to try to catch and fix these errors. It’s hard to stress just how devastating these errors can be to someone’s financial life. You can spend decades of your life repaying a loan and the government can just… lose all record of these payments and put them back on your balance. Or they can just get your balance wrong in the first place. Or your monthly payment amount is wrong. A transfer of all 40+ million student loan accounts to the Treasury is going to create many more errors.

This is why we are recommending the one practical step people can take is to get their student loan documents to document these errors when they happen. Contact your member of Congress’s website and open up a “case file” with their constituent services office. Do it ASAP.

Here is a very detailed guide on how to do that. They are going to mess up your account. Let’s shut down Congress by forcing every office to un-mess-up your account.

2. Linda McMahon and Trump own the default crisis

There is a tension between Linda McMahon and Trump right now. McMahon wants to restart the brutal debt collection machine and take as much money out of student debtors pockets as possible. Trump’s political instincts understand that this is bad for him. Here’s why: “affordability” is an empty buzzword to most politicians, but they are all pretending to care about it and Trump understands that being the debt collector in chief is bad for him.

There was also a debate as to where to move federal student loans. Trump had previously floated the idea of moving it to the Small Business Administration (SBA), the agency that discharged hundreds of billions of dollars of PPP loans to businesses during the early stages of COVID.

But Linda McMahon (who was the head of the SBA during Trump’s first term) opposed that idea and fought for moving loans to the Treasury instead. It looks like Trump is losing his battles with McMahon. Including the battle of “affordability.” McMahon’s brutal debt collection agenda is winning. McMahon understands that debt is a form of social control. They want to ruin your life.

The real story of “Phase One” of this plan is that we have never seen so many people default on their student loans as we are right now. They are defaulting because people simply do not have the money to pay, and the government is hiking these payments.

See that red line! McMahon and Trump did that!

There is nothing ‘gradual’ about “Phase One.” Defaulted loans make up a massive chunk of the overall student loan portfolio, and it is growing at a rapid pace. They are starting with one of the largest segments of student debt, one of the most difficult to administer, targeting the most vulnerable people who literally don’t have the money to make a payment even if they wanted to.

Treasury has zero experience administering actual loans to people

This deep dive from Protect Borrowers from last year is worth revisiting.

One of the most hilarious phrases in the inter-agency agreement is “to the extent practicable.” None of this is going to be “practicable.” None of this is going to work. The Treasury is about to learn that student debt cannot be made to work no matter how hard they try.

Meanwhile, Democrats are defending a status quo that everyone hates without offering the bold solutions that people are demanding.

Under Biden, the Democrats were cautious and cowardly about acting within the law to cancel student loans. When the people finally forced them to act, they sabotaged the effort by doing it in a half-hearted way that unnecessarily gave the right wing courts a chance to kill cancellation. They didn’t have to do that. An administration that actually wanted to cancel student debt and was willing to be bold within the law could have done so swiftly, without giving the Republican Supreme Court justices a chance to stop them.

You almost have to admire Linda McMahon. Fortune favors the bold, and she is boldly ignoring the law to shut down the Department of Education and the Democrats aren’t lifting a finger to stop her.

The responses from the Democrats mirror their response to the war in Iran. A combination of “but this is illegal!” and “Trump needs to answer questions about how they are going to implement this.” They can’t even muster a strongly worded letter, just statements like this one.

You also have to admire the way that McMahon has trapped the Democrats into defending an indefeasibly cruel status quo. Are the Democrats going to insist that it is very important that the Department of Education is the agency that runs the brutal debt collection machine destroying working class families?

Policy experts underestimate just how much people hate the Department of Education because the Department of Education is the agency that is there to steal every extra dollar you make if you are lucky enough to make a few extra dollars. While the Department of Education is being dismantled it’s no secret that 40+ million Americans aren’t eager to save the agency responsible for acting like a predatory lender..

We do need a Department of Education, but one that actually invests in and supports education. We have never actually had a Department of Education like that, instead we’ve had a department of debt collection.

There are real solutions to our problems. Full cancellation and College For All. Fortune favors the bold, and it is time for us to organize to win these solutions. We are holding a political education series on College For All as a part of our Jubilee School. Register now.

What is going on with the SAVE plan?

If you want to actually understand what is happening, cancel your New York Times subscription and subscribe to the American Prospect. This week David Dayen has a report about the latest developments with the SAVE plan.

We used to be a free country, right?

The latest Academic Freedom Index has just been published. What is shocking is just how quickly American universities shifted from places where you could more or less have the freedom to think and research, to places where you must self-censor even when you haven’t been officially censored by administrators, which is also happening! In some universities it’s not possible to teach Plato. Wouldn’t want to corrupt the youth.

But the other thing worth noting is that although the US fall has been dramatic, it is part of a worldwide trend. The whole world is becoming less free.

Trump’s project to re-segregate America hurts everyone

The Century Foundation has a new report about how the changes to student loans in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will mean fewer students can afford to go attend HBCU medical schools. This doesn’t just mean fewer Black doctors. One thing the Century Foundation report highlights is the way that HBCU medical schools prioritize the public good in ways that other medical schools do not. It means fewer rural doctors. It means fewer primary care doctors. As an aging boomer generation needs more doctors, they just won’t be there. For those who do attend HBCU medical schools it will mean more private loans, which are already racist-ly designed to offer higher interest rates and fewer approvals to Black students. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” introduces multiple factors that all reinforce each other.

The Department of Education is behind on its homework

Have you been waiting for the Department of Education to process your application for a new payment plan or Public Service Loan Forgiveness? You are not alone! The Department is behind on its homework to the tune of 576,000 applications. That is going to get much MUCH worse if over seven million people in the SAVE forbearance are expected to switch payment plans at some point.

Freedom to think or a place to live?

We all deserve to reach our full potential, to take time to study and figure out who we are, what we care about, what we are curious about. And we deserve a safe place to live. In America all of our basic needs are weaponized against us to force us into debt.

Fortune reports that many parents would rather help their kids pay a downpayment on a house than go to college. Of course only parents with means can do either.

“Twenty-nine percent of parents think helping their kid buy a home is more important than helping them pay for college, and more than half (55%) say it’s a toss-up for either one.”

As housing and education both become increasingly impossible to finance, people are picking and choosing between their basic needs. Which one would you rather do without? This is the richest country in the history of the world. Working class people deserve better.

If you haven’t yet found an organizing home, join Debt Collective, attend our upcoming calls, and organize with us.

“The message that some people don’t deserve debt relief is a politics of grievance. If you cannot craft a political message that acknowledges that we turned the greatest vehicle of social mobility into a debt machine, then you are not good at messaging. This is the right message: We messed up. Our bad. Make it right. Cancel the debt.”

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My name is Maddy, and I’m the creative media strategist for the Debt Collective. Although my background is as an artist whose mediums primarily deal with words and performance, writing hasn’t always come easy to me. There’s no shortage of catastrophes going on in the world. How does one speak truth to power, let alone amplify an issue above all the noise? Well, I love to start with memory.

One of my fondest memories of my father comes from when we went to see a movie together when I was about fifteen. Does anybody else’s parents talk during movies? Well, to my embarrassment, my dad didn’t just talk during the film — he literally yelled at the screen.

The movie we were watching was Life and Debt, a documentary about austerity measures imposed by the IMF and World Bank on Jamaica. Jamaica is where my dad was born and spent most of his life. Between his bombaclots and throwing popcorn at the screen, I realized something: unjust debt enraged him. Before that moment, I thought about debt in terms of numbers. But watching my dad react to the film, I began to understand that debt is more than math. It’s a psychological exchange between borrower and creditor.

After my father passed away when I was sixteen, I began traveling to Jamaica often and eventually obtained dual citizenship. During those visits, I saw the consequences of Jamaica’s national debt crisis etched across my family members’ faces. I heard about the sacrifices they made crossing borders for better wages. And I kept asking myself: why? Why did the descendants of people who survived the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade — whose unpaid labor built the British Empire — owe billions to their former colonizers? The question didn’t stop with Jamaica. I began to see similar moral-financial hypocrisies in the history of Haiti and in the experiences of Black Americans in the United States. Who owed whom?

You see, too often we dismiss righteous anger and miss how it can help reveal imbalances of power. Anger is rarely a solo emotion. It carries with it companions like grief, confusion, heartache, and the unruly desire to get free. It is a discerning emotion. When we use anger precisely — without letting it destroy us or others — it can become a kind of compass.

For debtors and our allies, anger is often the beginning of political clarity.

Now, I have a question for you. Have you ever tried to tell your debt story but weren’t sure where to start?

Try these next exercises. I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised where they take you.

Writing About Unjust Debt

One great place to begin is with sentence starters. You’ll see examples below each sentence starter, but you can choose to focus on any and all debt types. The trick is to let the words flow freely, to be compassionate instead of critical, to trust the dream-side of your mind. You can edit later. Right now, you want to get words on the page.

Finish these lines without judgement. Think of this exercise as a brainstorm:

• I took out a loan because…

Example: I love to learn. Plus, everyone told me knowledge is power, and that higher education was my ticket to better wages and a meaningful career.

• Being in debt makes me feel (use specific emotions)…

Constrained, anxious, angry, and heartbroken. My student debt shapes my life choices. It has caused me to delay marriage, starting a family, and saving for retirement. I feel scammed.

• Being in debt impacts my community because…

All my friends — mostly women-identified — owe student debt and many of us suffer in silence. We’re told we should have been “more financially savvy,” as if financial literacy could solve a systemic crisis.

• My debt politicized me because…

I realized college should never be a debt sentence. College was free in California in the 1950s, and it can be free again. Education shouldn’t be reduced to a “return on investment.”

Take a look at what you’ve written. Did anything surprise you? Do you notice any patterns? What about moments from the past that might pack meaning. What are you more curious about?

Now, Go Deeper

Figurative language is powerful because it pulls the reader in, taking them to a place where logic and statistics can’t take them. Use poetry and metaphor to describe debt in detail. First, read the poem below to help inspire you.

What lines stick out to you? How did the poet, Tim Seibles, incorporate sensory detail, repetition and more? How does his poem both travel to different places while also describing his body and the bodies of other characters?

The Debt

By Tim Seibles

I have the blood of the conquerors in my veins

and the blood of the enslaved and the slaughtered,

so where shall I rest with this

mixed river of blood painting my heart—what city

wants me, which woman will touch my neck?

Nigeria is sleeping in the angles of my skull

and maybe two small French towns—

one in each leg—are also sleeping, and of course,

the first people in this land, with their long

black, black hair, seven of them

are napping along my ribs

             And with all these people

adrift my body, I am asleep as well—

dreaming their good wishes, their strained whispers,

sleepwalking all over America.

But it’s alright, in my country,

everyone is asleep: at the wheel, on the job, even

with their fingers on the trigger, asleep

with their distant continents, the glittering

silence of their shattered histories

and the long pull of a thousand

thousand moons inside them.

             They don’t remember

how once we swam inside our mothers, that

once our mothers floated inside their mothers,

just as their mothers once waited inside those

before them and before that it was the same—

all the way back to the first mother

in Africa,

     that slim, short, quick-tempered woman

whose children crawled all over the planet,

then got big and started

hurting each other—with the conquerors

in their bright armor, trying to finish everything.

I know where the blame falls. I know

I could twist my brown skin, my mixed nations,

my kinky hair into a fist. I know.  I know.

But I hear a stranger music in my bones—

the windy shimmer of long fields, a quiet of birds

stunned by dusk, the singular tree of all blood

rising, the future awake singing from these wounds

and what is the lesson of history, if not

that we owe each other more bread, more

friendship, fewer lies,

less cruelty.

The Art of Words

Now, either build upon your previous sentence starters or go in a completely new direction with these, more poetic, prompts. Try to write for at least ten minutes straight. You might even want to set a timer.

New sentence starters inspired by The Debt poem:

• The true lesson of history is…

• We owe each other…

Here are some other options:

• Describe the “cost of living.”

  Capitalism is cruel. What does the cost of living feel like in your body and your environment? Use sensory details — sight, taste, touch, sound, and smell.

• Create five metaphors or similes for the debt you owe.
  Debt is my sister’s anchor. She’s floating but unmoved, just above the waves.
  Debt is as haunting as a ghost in my house of flesh and bone.

How did that feel? Did you write anything interesting?

Share in the comments. And remember: you are not a loan.

As we continue to witness the fascist reshaping of the state through attacks on public education, healthcare budget cuts, and ICE’s ongoing assault on immigrants, it’s natural to feel hopeless or overwhelmed. But history reminds us that we are not without guidance. Black and Indigenous communities have long struggled against authoritarian systems and have led powerful social movements to resist them.

This Black History Month, we’re committed to studying the Black radical tradition to understand how the U.S. continually fails to live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all — and how we can organize for a better future. Writers and activists like Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett have fought on the front lines and shared valuable insight that can prepare us to meet our current moment.

Join us this Friday for “Black Antifascism: Lessons from the Past for the Current Moment & Beyond,” a panel facilitated by Debt Collective organizer Dr. Shamell Bell in conversation with scholar-activists Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jeanelle K. Hope. Together, we’ll explore the connections between anti-Blackness, fascism, and state repression and how to bring these lessons into our social movements.

Read on for more of what we’ve been up to over the last month and how you can get involved.

Higher Education

The higher ed team has been sounding the alarm that people with Parent PLUS loans should consider consolidating before April 1 to avoid having Trump hike their payments. Get the word out to everyone in your life who has Parent PLUS loans, and join us on March 2nd for Parent PLUS office hours to learn more.

Next week, we’re kicking off a new semester of Jubilee School that’s all about College for All. We’ll be joined by experts in higher education, finance, abolition, and more to unpack the roots of the student debt crisis and explore solutions that can move us towards free college and debt cancellation. Join us for our launch event on Thursday, March 3 and register for the rest of this semester’s workshops!

Finally, fill out our student debt survey to help us build our case for debt cancellation — you might even win some Debt Collective merch!

Healthcare

Over the last year, we’ve seen a deliberate assault by the Trump administration on the country’s profoundly broken public health and healthcare infrastructure. We’ve only just begun to see the consequences of federal Medicaid cuts, expired ACA subsidies, slashes to medical research funding, rollbacks of vaccine recommendations, and attacks on countless other social service programs — all sure to make us sick and drive us further into debt.

We’re mad. Maybe you are too. What can we do about it? Join us as we resume our Power Mapping the Healthcare System series on March 31 to discuss what’s changed under Trump, what hasn’t, and where we can build power in this moment of crisis to fight for the healthcare system and the world we want.

Over the next few weeks we’ll also be reaching out to folks who have expressed interest in learning more about our HealthWatch Organizing Cohort, a network focused on coordinating responses to the consequences of federal healthcare cuts across the country and learning from each other in the process. If you haven’t already, fill out this interest form so our organizers know to loop you in with more information.

Housing

For months, tenants at an Equity Residential apartment complex in Los Angeles have been on a utilities strike to demand that their corporate landlord stop using an opaque system of calculating utilities charges known as RUBS (Ratio Utilities Billing System). Now, the Los Angeles City Council is taking up the matter.

A recent report from the Los Angeles Housing Department is calling for the end of RUBS in rent stabilized housing in the city. However, many tenants who have RUBS (including the tenants on utilities strike) don’t live in rent stabilized apartments! That’s why Equity Residential tenants are organizing across the city and urging the City Council to end RUBS for all tenants. Stay tuned for updates as we fight to end this practice in America’s second largest city!

Upcoming Events

Black Anti-Fascism: Lessons from the Past for the Current Moment & Beyond

RSVP: Friday, February 27 1pm ET / 10am PT

Facilitated by Debt Collective Visionary Escalator Dr. Shamell Bell and cosponsored by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, this event features leading scholar-activists Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jeanelle K. Hope in conversation on why we must draw on the Black Anti-Fascist Tradition in this moment to organize against authoritarianism and state repression.

Final Friday Flow

RSVP: Friday, February 27th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

RSVP: Friday, March 27th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

Office Hours: Parent PLUS Loans

RSVP: Monday, March 2nd 5pm ET / 2pm PT

If you have Parent PLUS loans, you may need to take steps well before July 1, 2026 to make sure your loans qualify for lower payments and cancellation. Come to these office hours to learn about the situation facing PLUS borrowers and take the first steps together to consolidate.

Movement Monday
RSVP: Monday, March 2nd 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the first Monday of each month, these gatherings invite us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with our bodies as a vital part of organizing for debt abolition and collective care. We’ll check in with ourselves and each other through accessible, grounding somatic practices that support nervous system regulation, accountability, and mutual support.

Borrower Defense: Legislation & Litigation

RSVP: Tuesday, March 3rd 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Our Monthly Borrower Defense Calls are designed for borrowers navigating fraud, misconduct, and student loan injustice. Each call provides timely updates on the Borrower Defense landscape, current litigation, and policy developments alongside practical guidance on asserting your rights and filing claims.

New Member Call

RSVP: Wednesday, March 4th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in.

College for All Jubilee School: Kickoff

RSVP: Thursday, March 5th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

As public support for colleges and universities is eroding, we must fight back to win tuition-free public college, dignified labor conditions, academic freedom, and debt cancellation. Join us for our Jubilee School kickoff, where we’ll start to unpack these problems in higher ed and potential solutions with guest speaker Mark Huelsman.

College for All Jubilee School: The Making of the Student Debt Crisis

RSVP: Thursday, March 12th 5pm ET - 2pm PT

Debt Collective co-founder Astra Taylor unpacks the roots of the current crisis in higher education to understand how we arrived at this current moment.

Borrower Defense: Private Loans – Navient Misconduct Application

RSVP: Tuesday, March 17th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Our Monthly Borrower Defense Calls are designed for borrowers navigating fraud, misconduct, and student loan injustice. On this call, we’ll hear from CA-based lawyer Sparky Abraham on navigating private loans and Navient’s misconduct application.

Office Hours: Debtors in Default

RSVP: Thursday, March 19th 3pm ET / 12pm PT

Join us as we discuss options for debtors with federal student loans in default. We will cover options that require repayment, like rehabilitation and consolidation, as well as options that do not, like loan cancellation. We will also provide information about free tax filing resources from GetYour Refund.

50 Over 50 Monthly Call

RSVP: Thursday, March 19th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Are you 50 years old or older? Do you have student loan debt? Join our 50/50 meeting for student debtors aged fifty and above to discuss action steps, organizing plans, and build solidarity. Newcomers are welcome!

Office Hours: Student Loans & Filing Your Taxes

RSVP: Wednesday, March 25th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

This session will cover some Frequently Asked Questions related to tax filing and student loans. We will also provide information about free tax filing resources from GetYour Refund, a free tax preparation tool.

College for All Jubilee School: Tuition Prices

RSVP: Thursday, March 26th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Join guest speaker Doha Mekki, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s antitrust division, to explore the role that private equity companies play in inflating tuition pricing, the increasing cost of college, and the role of merit aid in discounting tuition.

Power Mapping the Healthcare System in 2026

RSVP: Tuesday, March 31st 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Join us as we resume our Power Mapping the Healthcare System series to discuss what’s changed under Trump, what hasn’t, and where we see opportunities to fight for something better in this moment of crisis.

“I’m making it my business to go on as many cruises as I can,” she says with a laugh. “Between now and my 80th birthday, I want to see the Wonders of the World.”

Last August, Gail sailed through the Caribbean on a cruise ship with her friends. She even once stood at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, watched the waters meet, and felt awe wash over her.

“I started telling myself I was too old when I was 50,” she says. “I’m 79 this year, and I’m just getting started.”

From a GED to two Masters Degrees

Gail’s life has been shaped by a deep desire for both knowledge and justice. Born and raised in the South Bronx, she later spent 46 years in Central Florida. Education was emphasized in her family across generations, even when they were systematically barred from accessing it.

Gail’s grandmother attended a “Normal School” in Florida. These institutions were established during the Reconstruction Era to train Black teachers. Normal Schools taught reading, writing, and practical skills to community members. Without these schools, many Black adults would have remained illiterate, making it impossible for them to vote and limiting their employment prospects. Unequal access to education based on race is a stain on American history that remains unaddressed, and has instead reemerged under the second Trump Administration.

Gail’s mother was a domestic worker. As a child, she watched her mop floors, do laundry, dust, and wash dishes in other people’s houses — and then repeat this grueling labor at home. Gail once told her mother she wanted to clean houses like the women in her family had done for generations.

Her mother slapped her.

“She just wanted more for me,” Gail reflects with forgiveness. “But no one ever told me what I could be. So I had to find it.”

Gail’s own path to education wasn’t linear. She dropped out of high school but returned twice after becoming pregnant. Eventually, she earned her GED. That credential, often underestimated, became her gateway to higher education.

“Mine took me all the way to where I am today,” she says.

It took 20 years — while raising children as a single mother — but Gail eventually earned her bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and an additional master’s degree in pastoral counseling. Today, she’s pursuing admission into a PhD program at a historically Black college, something she considers a personal bucket-list milestone.

“Every time I made an accomplishment, it took me to another level in being able to see myself as doing better,” she says.

“Learn to Advocate for Yourself”

Writing has always been a therapeutic outlet for Gail, a way to tell her story, to name grief as well as joy, and to claim her own healing. She keeps yellow pads and journals throughout her home. For her, putting pen to paper is a way of keeping language alive.

“I read everything that isn’t nailed down,” she says. “And I write all the time.”

Today, as she navigates memory loss, writing remains an essential practice.

“If I’m speaking, sometimes I have to stop and search for a word,” she explains. “But when I write it out on paper, it flows.”

Writing her memoir has helped Gail document trauma and accept healing as a lifelong journey.

In addition to being a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and activist, Gail is also a survivor of sexual violence, an experience that changed the trajectory of her life.

In 2022, Gail was awarded the National Crime Victims’ Service Award. Her name is even attached to legislation, “Gail’s Law,” which requires adequate, timely processing of rape kits in Florida.

Gail’s guiding principle is simple: “Learn to advocate for yourself.” Not everyone will stand at a podium or draft legislation, she says. But everyone can learn to tell their story, to speak up when something is wrong.

“If you don’t let someone know there’s a problem, they can’t help you,” she explains. “Follow through.” Your story starts with a word, a sentence, a paragraph. Keep going. The first step is acknowledging what’s wrong and having empathy for oneself.

The Burden of Debt and the Freedom Beyond It

Black women are uniquely positioned to understand how interlocking systems of oppression based on race, gender, age, disability, sexuality and class endanger and diminish one’s ability to imagine and build a viable future.

In the mini documentary directed by Eric Stoll and Astra Taylor, “Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis,” former Ohio State Senator, Nina Turner, narrates that a lack of intergenerational wealth, which is compounded by systemic inequities, forces Black women to borrow at disproportionate rates. Then, wage discrimination makes repayment even harder. For every dollar white men earn, Black women earn just 61 cents — a gap that amounts to nearly $1 million in lost wages over a lifetime. And as the student debt crisis worsens under the Trump administration, Black women are facing job losses at more than three times the rate of all women across 2025’s job cuts.

In “Freedom Dreams,” Dr. Shamell Bell and Dr. Richelle Brooks — educators, mothers, and Debt Collective organizers — share their visions for debt abolition; collectively they’re burdened by upwards of half a million dollars in student debt for pursuing higher education their very ancestors were denied.

“A system where Black women do not have to be subjected to crushing debt is a system that would benefit everyone,” says Dr. Shamell Bell.

“I didn’t realize how heavy it was until it lifted”

Gail has a similar story. She once carried more than $500,000 in debt. Despite all of her advocacy work and many accomplishments, Gail was one of the growing number of older debtors who struggle to pay off their student loans.

She applied for every available relief program, including IDR, PSLF, and more. She organized with people from her church and became an active member of the Debt Collective, even traveling to Washington, D.C. in 2024 to demand the Biden Administration cancel debts for older borrowers in the last weeks of his administration. She feared that she would never be unburdened.

Then one day, she received an email from the Department of Education. After decades of making unnecessary payments, waiting on hold, and being anxious about her ballooning balance, Gail’s debt was finally discharged. She could now enjoy her golden years in peace.

“I didn’t realize how heavy it was until it lifted,” she says. “It felt like the world opened up.”

Now, freed from student debt, Gail is thinking inter-generationally.

“We never got 40 acres and a mule,” she says. “So if we get relief, we have to be wise with it.”

Gail now spends her time investing in the education of future generations. She recently donated to help college students buy textbooks to pursue social science and law degrees.

“If we didn’t have debt accumulating interest, people could invest in the next generation,” she says. Gail believes freedom from student debt could transform communities across the country, especially Black communities.

“Pay it forward,” she says.

“Advocate—so the next generation may not have to pay for college at all.”

This article was written by Maddy Clifford. Original interview was edited for length and clarity. Learn more about Gail’s advocacy work: stillthekingsdaughter.com

To learn more about Black history, RSVP: Black Anti-Fascism: Lessons from the Past for the Current Moment & Beyond, Feb. 27, 2026 - 1 - 2PM est, 4 - 5pst

Facilitated by Debt Collective Visionary Escalator Dr. Shamell Bell and co-sponsored by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, this event brings together leading scholar-activists Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jeanelle K. Hope in conversation.

Learn why we must draw on the Black Anti-Fascist Tradition in this moment. From Ida B. Wells to Angela Davis, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Black Panther Party, Africans in the diaspora offer vital insights into the links between anti-Blackness, fascism, authoritarianism, and state repression—and powerful lessons on how to organize against them.

The student debt crisis impacts nearly 1 in 4 Americans and spans generations, with older borrowers now the fastest-growing group. Still, it’s especially enraging to realize that the Department of Education has historically operated like a predatory lender—and is often the very first lender young adults encounter. This cartoon drives home the ridiculously unequal, “time-bound” debtor-creditor relationship. In this case, the creditor happens to be the biggest, most powerful bank on the planet.

About the Artists:

Madeline 'Mads' Horwath is a cartoonist for The Guardian and The New Yorker living in London. They are always looking to utilize their art for progressive causes. Currently, they reside in London where they are working on their first book. Follow and support their work on IG: @madelinehorwath

Cartoon copy written by Maddy Clifford. Maddy is a literary-performance artist and organizer rooted in Oakland, CA. She has opened for OSHUN, Macklemore and written for Hammer & Hope and Teen Vogue.

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.”

– Renée Nicole Good, from “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”

It’s hard not to be horrified by the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. These deaths represent an escalation of state violence, but the response to them brings more questions. Why, for example, did the killing of Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Years Eve not garner the same public outcry, nor the murders of at least six immigrants in ICE detention this year alone? Why not the killing of hundreds more Palestinians since the latest ceasefire agreement went into effect last October?

Some may be tempted to blame the evil we are now witnessing on President Trump, but the truth is that ICE has grown into its current evolution through the efforts of both parties. Created in the year after 9/11, the domestic policing carried out by ICE is inextricable from the militarized forces that protect American interests overseas, from the Israeli Defense Forces to NATO. The brutality of ICE reveals the banality of imperial violence waged by the United States upon the rest of the world — only now, this violence has returned home to target white Americans too.

The unfounded killings of Good and Pretti tell us that there is no way to be a perfect citizen in a fascist state, just as there is no way to be a perfect debtor when every aspect of our lives is financialized. People forced to stay home from work or close businesses to protect themselves from immigration raids are falling behind on their bills, leading to default and eviction. Meanwhile, the funds slashed from healthcare infrastructure are being diverted to hire ICE agents — who are being offered $60,000 in student loan forgiveness in exchange for terrorizing their neighbors and fellow citizens.

In moments like these, our strength lies in mobilizing to care for each other, as Minneapolis residents have modeled for us. There are many ways to support your communities, from attending an observation training to reading up on migrant justice and border abolition. You can also find and join a rapid response network near you. If you’re not sure where to start, try searching online by typing in your location alongside phrases like ‘rapid response’ or ‘ICE watch’. If you don’t find anything immediately, don’t be discouraged! Sometimes the best approach is to find an in-person action near you and approach an organizer to ask how you can get involved — regular people are building new infrastructures of solidarity every day, and none of us can do it alone.

Read on to learn more about what we’ve been working on to build debtor power in the coming months and how you can get involved.

Higher Education

We are excited to share some of the events we’ve scheduled through May 2026!

Our office hours for debtors in default and debtors applying for Total and Permanent Disability cancellation are open for registration. Our Jubilee School fall semester kicks off in late February and will cover the problems within our higher education system as well as potential solutions to implement College for All. Please join us as we build power to win free college and student debt cancellation this year!

Finally, we’ve launched a survey that will help us organize and support debtors across the country. Fill it out in the next week for a chance to win some Debt Collective merch!

Healthcare

As the fight over federal health drags on in Washington, DC one thing remains clear: winning a different healthcare system requires that we look to each other to grow our power. 100 million Americans are already struggling with medical debt, and we can expect this number to grow over the coming year as cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, ACA subsidies, and many other social service programs kick in.

Here’s how to get involved as we expand the fight for a different vision of healthcare:

1. If you work in healthcare, join our Healthcare Worker Solidarity Collective

2. Navigating the healthcare system and debt economy with disability or a chronic illness? Get plugged into the work of our Disabled Debtors Cohort and join our event next Monday

3. We’re gearing up to launch a HealthWatch Organizing Cohort focused on the consequences federal healthcare cuts will have in communities across the country in the months ahead. Fill out this interest form to learn more and our organizers will be in touch about next steps.

Housing

Our California-based Tenant Power Toolkit hit a major milestone at the end of last year: since the TPT’s inception in 2022, we’ve prepared more than 20,000 legal answers to eviction paperwork and helped over 50,000 tenants! We expect growth in 2026 to outpace previous years’ thanks to our outreach expansion in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area.

On the organizing front, our work with tenants of Equity Residential — one of the largest landlords in the country — continues. We are currently eight months into a utility strike led by the Virgil Square Tenants Association, where we are organizing to ban the use of ratio utility billing systems (RUBS). This work is of growing importance as the City of Los Angeles moves towards a substantial regulation of the use of RUBS. Through our organizing efforts at Virgil Square and Mozaic apartment buildings, we have been increasing our outreach to other buildings across L.A. to pressure the city to end RUBS permanently.

Finally, this month saw the beginning of our dedicated outreach in the Bay Area. We are now working with the Oakland Tenants Union on two workshops for tenants facing eviction, and are about to launch a new Tenant Power Toolkit at the Alameda County Law Library. We expect big and exciting work in the East Bay this year!

Upcoming Events

50 Over 50 Monthly Call

Thursday, January 29th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Thursday, February 19th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Are you 50 years old or older? Do you have student loan debt? Join our 50/50 meeting for student debtors aged fifty and above to discuss action steps, organizing plans, and build solidarity. Newcomers are welcome!

Final Friday Flow

Friday, January 30th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Friday, February 27th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the last Friday of each month, these gatherings are designed to remind us that the path to debt abolition and collective liberation begins within. Through guided somatic and movement-based practices, we’ll transform exhaustion into power, fear into vision, and pain into purpose.

Cancellation Office Hours: Total & Permanent Disability

Monday, February 2nd 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Join our discussion about Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) Discharge for federal student loans. We’ll be joined by members of our Disabled Debtors Cohort who have gone through and supported each other during the TPD discharge process, and we’ll also discuss other ways our lives are shaped by the intersection of disability and debt. Join us if you’ve applied or are considering applying for student debt cancellation via the TPD process.

Movement Monday
Monday, February 2nd 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Held on the first Monday of each month, these gatherings invite us to pause, breathe, and reconnect with our bodies as a vital part of organizing for debt abolition and collective care. We’ll check in with ourselves and each other through accessible, grounding somatic practices that support nervous system regulation, accountability, and mutual support.

Office Hours: Debtors in Default

Wednesday, February 4th 12pm ET / 9am PT

Wednesday, February 18th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Join us as we discuss options for debtors with federal student loans in default. We will cover options that require repayment, like rehabilitation and consolidation, as well as options that do not, like loan cancellation. We will also provide information about free tax filing resources from GetYour Refund.

New Member Call

Wednesday, February 4th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Curious about the Debt Collective and how we’re organizing to abolish debt? Our New Member Call is a space to learn who we are, what we’re fighting for, and how you can plug in.

Writing Your Debt Story: A Short-form & Op-Ed Workshop

Part I Tuesday, February 10th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Part II Wednesday, February 25th 7pm ET / 4pm PT

Join author, educator, and Debt Collective member Kristin Collier for a two-part workshop on short-form debt storytelling. In Part I, we’ll discuss focus, structure, language, and research, and create a plan for writing a short essay or op-ed. In Part II, we’ll workshop rough drafts for group feedback and discuss publishing strategies. We welcome storytelling on debt of all kinds, not just student debt!

Town Hall Training

Wednesday, February 11th 6pm ET / 3pm PT

Want to create change but not sure how to organize? Birddogging is a powerful activist tactic that puts decision-makers on the spot with clear, inescapable questions that demand real answers. We’ll break down how to craft “bullet-proof” requests that win the room, force clarity, and are extremely difficult for candidates to dodge. Learn how to secure real commitments from candidates and elected officials for the world we’re fighting for.

Core Team Call for Final Friday Flow & Movement Monday

Monday, February 16th 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT

Want to help shape and facilitate care work in our community gatherings? We’re inviting folks to step into our Core Team! We’re especially looking for support with facilitation, storytelling, tech, social media, outreach, flyers and creative roles. Come help us build with care, intention, and radical joy!

Borrower Defense: The Landscape, Updates & Workshop

Tuesday, February 24th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Our Monthly Borrower Defense Calls are designed for borrowers navigating fraud, misconduct, and student loan injustice. Each call provides timely updates on the Borrower Defense landscape, current litigation, and policy developments alongside practical guidance on asserting your rights and filing claims.

College for All Jubilee School: Kickoff

Thursday, February 26th 5pm ET / 2pm PT

Higher education in the US is moving towards collapse, and public support for colleges and universities is swiftly eroding. In our Spring Jubilee School semester, we’ll unpack higher ed issues and potential solutions through weekly sessions with education and policy experts. Join our kickoff session to learn more about why we should care about free college at this moment and what to expect from Jubilee School this semester.

Black Anti-Fascism: Lessons from the Past for the Current Moment & Beyond

Friday, February 27th 1pm ET / 10am PT

In Minneapolis and around the U.S., the state is terrifying migrant communities and assaulting residents in the name of anti-Blackness, targeting Somalis and people of color on the same ground where it killed George Floyd in 2020. Facilitated by Debt Collective Visionary Escalator Dr. Shamell Bell, this event features leading scholar-activists Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jeanelle K. Hope in conversation on why we must draw on the Black Anti-Fascist Tradition in this moment.

From the start, Debt Collective has brought working class people together to expose the injustice of being in the red due to our profit-driven healthcare, housing and education systems. We’re proud to carry that legacy forward by uplifting our member, Kristin Collier, whose new memoir, What Debt Demands, is a compelling testament to the power of debtor-storytelling. Please enjoy the below excerpt from Kristin’s book. Her words remind us why solidarity—specifically sharing our interwoven debt experiences—can help translate and ultimately shape our reality.

Alana, a freshman I met in the fall of 2023, was set to become one of the million students who rely on Parent PLUS loans each year. When we first spoke, she had just moved to New York City to attend an expensive liberal arts school. She explained to me that her mother raised her and her sisters alone, moving across the west and north-west before settling in Nebraska, where Alana went to high school.

“I don’t have a lot of memories of my mother growing up,” Alana told me, “because my mother was always working.” Her voice was bright and rising. In the past, she told me, her mother had worked at a warehouse and a kidney dialysis center, and now, her mother was employed at a Walmart distribution center, managing incoming and outgoing trucks, and at a doctor’s office, scheduling appointments. Alana, too, had worked multiple jobs, beginning with a local movie theater when she was in tenth grade. Later, she was hired at Starbucks, a role she was able to transfer to Manhattan, working almost forty hours a week on top of a full class schedule.

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Alana chose her college from an internet search: What is the best college for becoming a book editor? Her school was at the top of the list assembled by her search engine algorithm, which she had faith in. Alana applied, was accepted, and decided to attend, even as she remained uncertain about how exactly she would pay for it. At her high school, they’d talked very little about college financing and, other than a cousin, she didn’t have any close family who’d gone to college.

When Alana was given her financial aid letter, she googled what all the terms meant, e-mailed briefly with someone from financial aid, and then enrolled, despite some of the details remaining unclear. “I’ll just take out loans,” she said to me, illustrating how she’d thought about debt at the time. “That’s very American.”

When I asked her how much she had borrowed, she said, “I’m not sure exactly,” which caused my stomach to jump. It was October, and school had already started. She explained that there was a gap in what the school offered her in merit- and need-based aid and federal loans, and her mother was awaiting approval for a Parent PLUS loan for around twenty thousand dollars.

I tried to imagine this number as a “gap” instead of what it was: a canyon. That the school would think that her mother should borrow twenty thousand dollars for just the first year of school pointed to a carelessness with students’ lives, as did Alana’s matriculation before the financing was finalized. It forced her and her family to fill this “gap” and to internalize it as theirs, which might have been less true had they been in their Nebraska living room, navigating this financing from a distance, before Alana had moved across the country, unpacked her room, enrolled in class, and opened her first course book. There was inertia. She was on the hook for this semester no matter what.

Alana offered to send me a photo of the aid letter. “Apparently my school has the most expensive dorms in the country,” she said. Next year, she hoped to save money when she lived off campus. The aid office at her school had not been much help; to each question she asked, she was directed to talk with her “parents,” despite Alana sharing that her parent, her mother, was not managing this process for her. “If we don’t get this loan, I’ll be back to square one. And then I don’t know what I’ll do,” Alana said, her voice sinking.

I felt tempted to tell her “It’s going to be okay,” but I couldn’t identify what I meant by “it.” I wasn’t sure that she and her mother would find the necessary gap money or that their indebtedness would qualify as a positive outcome. Their debt would be shared, and though the origins would be different from the one shared between my mother and me, there was resonance there that I couldn’t ignore. “Okay” in this circumstance would mean something else entirely.

She had not been sleeping much, she told me. “I don’t think there has been a class this week that I haven’t dozed off in.” Between working at Starbucks, sometimes seven days a week, her classes, and homework, she had no time for anything else. She did not list the uncertain funding as one of her stressors, though it must have been. Her current situation required a kind of cognitive dissonance: She should participate in her campus life as if it would go on for four more years even though the aid discrepancy might mean she couldn’t attend school next semester.

When we hung up, with the promise to talk again once she was further into the semester, I studied her award letter. Despite her school giving her $30,000 in scholarship money, the federal government giving her almost $4,000 in Pell grants, and the school offering another $4,000 in work study money, there was still an enormous cost of attendance that was left unaccounted for. She had already acquired the federal lending maximum of $5,500 and what remained was not $20,000 for the year, as she’d assumed, but $42,000.

That number startled me and I looked at it several times to make sure that I wasn’t misunderstanding. When I talked to my partner about it, I cried. “That’s an evil amount of money,” I said. I was especially moved that she wanted to work with books and authors someday. I didn’t see that as naive but hopeful, even as humanities departments collapsed across the country alongside the publishing industry, and editors’ wages remained stagnant. Alana believed in a world made more beautiful and interesting by the stories that reflect and expand it.

Her mother had already applied for the loan amount, and if she was approved, would likely need to borrow over $100,000 for four years of college. I wanted to tell Alana that her mother should not take out that loan and that she should not attend this school at all, but I’d known her for only an hour. I told her that she could ask me any questions she wanted, and that I would answer them honestly. I texted her a link to a group of first-generation college students that met on her campus. If I couldn’t keep her from joining the nearly 43 million Americans with student loan debt, and her mother from joining the 3.7 million families with Parent PLUS loans, then I could at least facilitate introduction to a group that might trade resources and advice, might make college less lonely.

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Soon after our first call, Alana texted me that her mother had been denied the Parent PLUS loan because of a bankruptcy on her credit report. “Credit worthiness binds families’ possible futures to their collective pasts,” Caitlin Zaloom writes in Indebted. In thinking about debt’s ability to collapse and muddle time, I hadn’t considered that a denied application for credit, the very possibility of debt, works in the same way.

A 2011 Department of Education update to the Parent PLUS loan application restricted borrowing almost overnight by lengthening the time frame for parents’ credit history from ninety days to five years. This update impacted nearly 400,000 students, who suddenly didn’t have access to loans they assumed they’d receive under the previous borrowing terms. More than 128,000 of those students attended majority-Black colleges and universities, and many Black families faced a cost-of-attendance gap without a previously accessible resource to cross it. In response to a crisis for both schools and families, the government walked back the policy change. What remained was a clarity that these harmful financial products are also necessary for many Black students to attend school. As Zaloom considers the implications of the ability to “qualify” for these loans, she notes that to qualify is to “invest a subject with particular characteristics, and in the case of PLUS loans, the process of qualifying for a loan identifies families’ financial successes and failures as a result of their private actions.” While the government is insistent on seeing the student in the context of a certain version of family, they are unwilling to see the family in the context of national history.

After Alana’s mother was denied the loan, Alana, who is bi-racial, briefly considered asking a family friend to cosign on a loan before deciding not to. Lots of lower income students, and especially Black students, are implicitly and even explicitly asked to do this work: to summon resources from extended family and the community to make school possible. And many of their loved ones offer this support with joy and purpose. Although, on average, Black parents have less wealth than white parents, they are more likely to contribute financially to their children’s education. This is true at all income levels. I sensed that Alana didn’t want to ask her family friend because it felt like a new kind of debt to her—beyond owing the government she would also, in a sense, owe a friend. Instead, she was going to withdraw from her institution.

Over Thanksgiving break, I met her for coffee. We mostly talked about her classes—what she was reading and writing—and what life was like on campus. We talked about the future only a little. As Alana’s classmates packed suitcases to travel home, temporarily, for winter break, Alana would pack up everything. After a semester home, her hope was to return to school again, somewhere cheaper. For the next month, she’d concentrate on her limited time in New York City.

“It’s been a weird couple of months,” Alana said to me when we next talked in February. “I never expected my college experience to go the way that it did.” She was trying to accept that her first college experience wasn’t what she’d wanted it to be, a process that she thought would take some time. I was hopeful that she included the word “first” because it suggested that she believed there would be another college experience in the future. I’d sent along resources in December that included a list of “no-loan” schools, all of which are competitive, and an organization that works with first-gen students during the application process.

By her last days on campus, her roommates had all gone home already and she was moving through their shared world without them, an inversion of what would come next semester when they moved through the world without her. Just before the holidays, she learned that her creative writing professor had died by suicide, and she carried that loss with her as she looked at her room for the last time. “It wasn’t the greatest experience,” she said about her semester, but she still thought she was lucky to have it. “At least I had a chance to see what life would be like if it had gone another way.”

Though she was imagining a life in which the forces at work on her had converged in another way—if her mother had gotten the loan, perhaps—I think the other life she was imagining was more accurately one in which she had family wealth.

She remembered a day she skipped class to spend time with a friend whose own class had been canceled. That slot felt like an open door, a gift. At that point she already knew she was leaving campus. They wandered around a nearby neighborhood, walking into a book-store, where her friend found a beloved book from childhood, one her father had read to her growing up. As Alana shared this memory with me, I was aware that we’d never talked about her own father or what events precipitated her mother’s choice or her imperative to raise children as a single parent. “It’s one of my favorite books now,” Alana said. The memory was a layered one. There were fathers, absent and present, friendships—now physically distant. A narrative of intimate knowledge, and somewhere, in the background, a classroom continuing on without Alana. I wondered how it felt to reread that beloved book in Nebraska, away from the friend she bought it with.

Though watching her friends’ Instagram stories from far away felt “like a little stab in the heart each time,” because she so badly wanted to be back with them on campus, Alana was happy for them. She’d let go of the bitterness she felt at the end of the semester, and what she was left with, she earnestly told me, was gratefulness for the experience. She deserved to make meaning of her life without my intervention, but I had to resist telling her, “You were not lucky. You have enormous debt from a school you were, essentially, pushed out of—all because your family doesn’t have wealth and inherited knowledge about college financing.”

I struggled to balance Alana’s right to her own narrative, to the agency to say this was worth it, with my sense that the mechanism of debt creates and enforces this kind of thinking. We must “apply” for its kindness in the form of credit, and if we are denied, it is because we don’t deserve it. We must make payments toward this debt and are punished if we cannot. If we receive relief someday, through a government program designed to provide it or because our schools have defrauded us, we are “forgiven.” These concepts feel weightier when what we want to access with this debt is education, something Zaloom refers to as a “benefit of citizenship.” Right now, these benefits are given out unequally, she notes, with the largest share given to those who have historically benefited the most.

I asked Alana if she thought about her debt, to which she responded, “I think about it in that I’m putting money away from my job but also I don’t think about it.” It was out there, somewhere, she understood, waiting to collect payment from her, which it did the next summer when a collection agency contracted by her school contacted her to begin making $500 monthly payments on her $21,000 of unpaid tuition.

Unlike her federal loans, the unpaid tuition wouldn’t qualify for the income-based programs that would minimize interest payments and eventually, after long enough, relieve her of what was left. I didn’t say that. What I wanted to believe was—when it’s time for you to make payments, when you’ve graduated and are pursuing a career that brings you happiness and pays you a living wage, it will be different.

Alana didn’t know where she would go to school next or when, though she hoped it would be soon. She understood that the time she was away might dull her urge to attend. She wanted to use the momentum of her fall to swing her into a new school. Definitely one with good literature programs, one that offered comprehensive financial counseling, and, hopefully, no more debt.

Adapted from WHAT DEBT DEMANDS by Kristin Collier, published on November 18, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Kristin Collier. Used by arrangement with Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.

Kristin Collier is the author What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System (Grand Central Publishing), an organizer with the Debt Collective, and a visiting scholar and TREC community engagement fellow at Metro State University. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.

The year has just begun and already there is a lot to be mad about. ICE agents continue to spread violence throughout American cities while student loan borrowers face the financial violence of wage garnishment for past due balances the federal government has the power to discharge. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. We can’t do it alone.

Read Debt Collective’s’s latest article in Truth Out for student debt updates, consider becoming a member and or joining an upcoming call. Still, there are silver linings. We can use our rage as fuel to take precise action, organize, build power and demand an economy that works for us.

This group represented hundreds of thousands of debtors defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges. Many were promised debt cancellation by the Department of Education years ago. But delays, bureaucracy, and inaction have left them with ballooning debt and fading hope. They need relief now, not more delays, especially as the Trump administration continues to threaten to dismantle the DOE entirely.

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It’s no secret that student debt is notoriously hard to escape—even for borrowers who serve their communities, make consistent payments, and follow every rule. And yet, it used to be even harder. That began to change in 2014, when the collapse of Corinthian Colleges inspired organizers with the Debt Collective to share a little-known Higher Education Act program: Borrower Defense to Repayment.

Designed to cancel debt for students misled or defrauded by their schools, Borrower Defense to Repayment (BDR) gained traction as more debtors applied and won relief.

Billions in student debt have since been abolished through BDR.

Now, more than a decade later, Sweet v. McMahon—one of several cases brought by the Project on Predatory Student Lending advocating for defrauded debtors— was brought to determine whether the Department of Education will receive yet another extension to review pending BDR applications.

Why is this case so important? Because the for-profit college industry’s uniquely deceitful practices reveal a deeper problem: corruption spreads and students suffer when higher education is a profit-driven industry, instead of a public good.

We spoke with Valerie Scott, a veteran and Debt Collective organizer, about her experience with for-profit, Argosy University, and what this moment means for those still waiting for the relief they deserve.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Maddy Clifford: Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Valerie. Can you share how much debt you currently owe and how it feels emotionally for you?

Valerie Scott: I owe about $411,000 in student loans and saying that number out loud is overwhelming and upsetting. I’m angry that I was taken advantage of, and that the government allowed it to happen. They knew Argosy University and other for-profit schools were lying and exploiting students and still let it go on for years.

What’s especially painful is that I’ve paid consistently for many years, and my balance has only gone up, never down. If mortgages or car loans worked like this, there would be public outrage.

Have your feelings changed from when you graduated to now?

When I graduated, I’d borrowed about $265,000. I checked my balance and thought, “Okay, this is a lot, but I can pay it off.”

A couple of years later, I checked again and saw $300,000. I was confused and started doubting myself, wondering if I’d misremembered how much I borrowed. It wasn’t until I got involved in Borrower Defense [to Repayment] and organizing that I realized I hadn’t made a mistake—the balance was designed to go up.

That’s where a lot of my anger comes from. This is government-sanctioned usury.

What makes Argosy—and for-profit universities like it—uniquely harmful?

Well, Argosy lied about the cost of their programs. Many students signed contracts saying their degree would cost $70,000–$90,000, but the real cost was way higher.

They also targeted vulnerable people, including homeless people, by promising that students could receive federal student loans, use some for tuition, and keep the rest for housing and food. In reality, Argosy took every single dollar for tuition, fees, books, and expensive required materials.

They went after people ignorant about for-profit college financing, including first-generation students like me who didn’t understand compound interest or the structure of student loans.

Argosy also had “preferred lender” relationships with companies like Sallie Mae, later Navient, and now MOHELA. The more students borrowed, the more kickbacks Argosy received from those lenders. That created a clear incentive to push students to borrow as much as possible.

How did you learn about Borrower Defense to Repayment?

I didn’t hear about Borrower Defense until June 2022, after a major lawsuit against the Department of Education (under DeVos/Cardona) was settled. A friend saw a press release naming Argosy as a bad actor school and sent it to me asking if my loans might be qualified.

I started researching, found a Facebook group, and looked at the application. It was complicated and very unclear about what exactly to include. But I did eventually submit my application in October 2022, just before the November 2022 deadline to be part of the post class.

The Project on Predatory Student Lending (PPSL) sued, and as part of the settlement, many past denials had to be reconsidered under new rules. Some borrowers who attended certain schools like Argosy received automatic loan discharge because the evidence of misconduct was so strong. While I didn’t qualify, my case must be adjudicated under the 2016 Borrower Defense rules, which are less harsh on borrowers.

So I believe we have a strong chance—if they ever finish processing our cases.

You didn’t qualify for automatic discharge because your settlement group falls in a later window, where the rules were changed and require the Department of Education to review each case individually. What’s stopping the federal government from simply canceling debt for people at proven predatory schools like Argosy?

The 2019 rules were very harsh and led to extremely high denial rates. The judge in our case said those rules were unfair and ordered that we be judged under the 2016 rules, which are much more favorable to borrowers.

We did request group cancellation for Argosy borrowers, arguing that borrowers from similar schools received group cancellation in May 2024. Senator Ed Markey, Senator Dick Durbin, and Representative Maxine Waters, wrote to President Biden on our behalf, urging him to cancel our loans.

But Argosy borrowers received no equivalent relief.

Today, Judge Alsup will consider whether or not to give the Department of Education more time to process our applications. Every delay means more interest piling up, people stuck choosing between paying loans that may be canceled, or going into forbearance and watching their balances explode.

Do people know that Argosy shut down because they stole from the federal government?

I’m not sure if people are aware that Argosy stole federal student aid, GI Bill funds, military scholarships, and VA benefits. They were supposed to take tuition out of government funds and then refund the remainder to the student. Instead, Argosy started keeping all the money.

If an individual stole federal money, they’d likely go to jail. Argosy’s higher-ups have faced no such repercussions. Many students are still paying back money that Argosy stole from the government, effectively making the scam complete. Argosy took the money, leaving students on the hook for the debt.

Why should people—even those without student debt—care about these cases?

We’re seeing a push to privatize more of higher education and student lending. When education is run for-profit, the focus shifts to shareholder return, not quality of education.

Recently, the Trump administration capped how much certain professions can borrow with federal loans. Mental health therapists and nurses are no longer treated as “professional degrees” for higher borrowing limits. They want people to believe this will force schools to lower tuition. I don’t buy that!

When students hit the federal cap, for-profit schools typically hand them an application for a private lender. Students then take out private loans with interest rates as high as 20%.

Borrower Defense to Repayment only applies to federal loans, not private ones. So once your debt is private, you’re largely stuck. You might be able to discharge some of it in bankruptcy, or you can just stop paying, wreck your credit for 7–10 years, and hope they don’t sue you.

But why should I have to ruin my credit and my life when I didn’t do anything wrong? All I wanted was an education so I could provide a better life for my family. Instead, I’m punished with ballooning debt while the institutions and executives who caused this crisis walk away scot free.

Update (via PPSL.org)

At the December 11, 2025 hearing, Judge Alsup ruled to deny the Department of Education’s request to extend relief decisions for post-class applicants by 18 months. The following deadlines were granted:

• All post-class applications related to Exhibit C school must be decided by the original deadline, January 28, 2026. Find the full list of Exhibit C schools here.

• All other post-class application decisions must be decided by April 15, 2026.

If you believe a predatory for-profit school defrauded you, apply for Borrower Defense to Repayment.

Join the Debt Collective. RSVP for an upcoming call and organize with others fighting for free college, universal healthcare, and housing for all!

In addition to debt, pregnant people in the U.S. now also face an increased risk of criminalization and incarceration, even for miscarrying. Healthcare providers also risk being criminalized for providing reproductive healthcare in restricted states. As a result, many are leaving to practice in other, less oppressive conditions, making healthcare even harder to access for Black and brown communities, women, and the working class in these states.

While the U.S. has regressed from protecting to restricting abortion rights, the global struggle for abortion rights has made great strides forward, particularly in Latin America. Since 2018, the grassroots feminist movement known as the Green Wave has spread across the region, leading to the legalization of abortion in Argentina in 2020 and in Colombia in 2022.

Green Wave protestors demonstrate in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Marcelo Endelli / Getty Images)

In a region characterized by religious conservatism, weak democratic institutions and histories of military dictatorship, abortion rights activists successfully organized not only against abortion restrictions, but in favor of increased access to reproductive healthcare. While this achievement cannot be attributed to the efforts of any one organization, the emergence of abortion accompaniment networks played a crucial role in destigmatizing abortion and helping pregnant people assert their reproductive autonomy. These networks helped shift public opinion, build political power, and keep people safe when the state failed to care for them.

What could we learn from the accompaniment model’s successes to build networks of support to help each other navigate debt, access resources, and build communities of care in the U.S?

The body as a territory

In the 2000s, organizers in Latin America formed the first abortion accompaniment networks to disseminate the medication needed to self-manage abortion, as well as to support pregnant people throughout the process of self-managing their abortions. Led entirely by volunteers and feminist collectives, these networks rely on lay expertise, mutual aid, and peer support to help individuals who are marginalized, harmed, or exploited by state healthcare systems.

In addition to providing practical support, abortion accompaniment networks like Argentina’s Socorristas En Red (“first responders”) also encouraged the women they accompanied to think critically about the conditions which brought them there.

“We speak a lot about patriarchy, women’s rights, and different types of violence. By meeting with them once, by only speaking with them for a few hours, we really change people’s lives. That’s amazing, and that creates a sense of responsibility as well. We are discussing politics every time we meet with someone.”
– Lu, Socorrista

In addition to political education, abortion accompaniers prioritize the needs of the individual self-managing their abortion through empathetic, compassionate, and judgement-free support. Providing person-centered care rooted in bodily autonomy can be transformative for both the accompanier and the accompanied.

“Autonomy comes from this idea of seeing the body as a territory. It is yours, it is your territory. Sometimes abortion is the only decision which some of the people we accompany have made autonomously.”
– Lu, Socorrista

Socorristas assemble at an annual feminist gathering in San Luis, Argentina. (Socorristas En Red)

A debt of democracy

The massive street protests that characterized the Green Wave took off following the 2015 emergence of allied feminist movement Ni Una Menos, which called for an end to gender-based violence following the brutal murder of a pregnant teenager in Argentina. At the time, efforts to legalize abortion faced religious and political backlash, but the movement to end femicide was broadly supported.

Abortion rights activists brought their movement into mainstream view by successfully arguing that abortion restrictions were a form of gender-based violence because they endangered the lives of women forced to seek out unsafe abortions, perpetuating a form of state-sanctioned violence against marginalized women. By observing that women without these rights were not equal citizens, organizers made the claim that Argentina and other states banning abortion owed women a “debt of democracy.” By connecting the fight for abortion rights to the fights for gender equality and democracy, Green Wave activists used an existing political opportunity to expand their fight for abortion legalization.

“All these organizations and networks brought the discussion into everyone’s houses and mouths. We started speaking about violence against women, particularly — women dying at the hands of their husbands, boyfriends, ex-husbands, bosses, neighbors, uncles. We were on the streets protesting for feminist rights and human rights!” – Lu, Socorrista

Beyond the Green Wave

In addition to legal advocacy and massive street protests, the direct services provided by accompaniment networks were a crucial element of the Argentine abortion rights movement. By destigmatizing abortion, developing shared political analyses, centering the needs of the most marginalized communities, creating alternative infrastructures of care, and modeling mutual aid rooted in solidarity over charity, accompaniment networks provide a powerful model of community-based care which has since been adopted across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Global South.

The success of the Green Wave abortion rights movements demonstrates that legal victories follow culture change, not the other way around. When ordinary people come together to care for their communities, the consequences can be revolutionary.

This Saturday, December 6, join us for Capitalism Can’t Stop Our Care: Lessons from Abortion Accompaniment Networks Across the Global South.

The Debt Collective’s Healthcare Worker Solidarity Collective will host an international panel discussion with leaders of abortion accompaniment networks and feminist collectives from Ecuador, Argentina, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Together, we’ll explore the potential of the accompaniment network model to transform care into collective power through mutual aid, feminist organizing, and international solidarity.

Mohana Kute is an Atlanta-based organizer, reproductive justice advocate, and communications manager at the Debt Collective.

Most people believe eviction happens because someone failed to pay rent, slacked off, didn’t follow rules or didn’t try hard enough. That’s what I used to think, too. That is, until eviction happened to me.

I’m not lazy. I’m not irresponsible. I’m not a “bad tenant.” But I was tricked into a bad situation by a corporate landlord called Equity Residential (EQR).

EQR lures tenants into “luxury” apartments with low deposits. Once people are moved in, they raise the rent, ignore building repair needs, and then they throw Band-Aids on apartment fixes—all with minimal to no communication. That’s exactly what happened to me and my sister at The Hesby in North Hollywood.

To start, my sister and I are LA natives and artists. We were initially excited about living in North Hollywood. I’d go there often with friends while attending Cal State Northridge. But EQR didn’t see us as “neighbors” as they claimed. They saw us as numbers. EQR cut off communication after we fell behind on rent for one month during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. They ignored habitability issues like roaches, broken doors, and recurring break-ins; two months later, EQR served us an eviction notice. We were shocked and heartbroken.

During our court session, we were asked whether we had rent relief (we did), only for EQR to refuse to accept it. They then took us through months and months of negotiations, rent debt growing as time passed. What I didn’t know was that we weren’t alone in this nightmare. In fact, 1 in 8 renters owes rent debt. We ended up losing our home. We lost our storage and all of our belongings. We ended up living in our car. And—to add insult to injury—we were left with almost $14,000 in rent debt, ruined credit, and trauma that we’re still trying to process. Our experience wasn’t a one-off. It’s actually EQR’s business model. EQR, and corporate landlords like them, actually profit from evictions, rent debt, and displacing people who fall victim to their predatory practices.

The Term “Corporate Landlord” Doesn’t Tell the Full Story

It’s no secret that California is in the midst of a full-blown housing crisis, and it’s hitting Black and brown Angelenos especially hard. Generations of anti-Black housing policies — from redlining to discriminatory lending — have made it difficult for Black families to access safe and affordable housing. Add on the fact that many working-class Angelenos are living paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford to be free to live, and it begins to feel like we’re navigating a cruel recurring nightmare of our ancestors—we’re “enslaved” to unstable work lives to keep our homes, to remain sheltered.

Today, corporate landlords like Equity Residential (EQR) are continuing a systematically racist legacy in a new form — using exploitative business practices to trap tenants in unstable housing, rising rent debt, and forced evictions. Behind it all is a deeper issue: housing is increasingly controlled by these corporations, turning our need for housing into a profit-making machine for already wealthy investors. In fact, the term “corporate landlord” doesn’t even tell the whole story. Many of these conglomerates are actually real estate investment trusts (REITs)—massive financial firms, by law, focused on maximizing returns for shareholders. Their business model doesn’t just de-prioritize tenants like my sister and me—it literally exploits us. EQR has used strategies including fake junk fees, algorithm-driven rent hikes, serial eviction, saddling evicted tenants with debt, and more. These are regular tactics to increase profits, not a last resort. A feature, not a bug, as the saying goes. So what can we do?

Fighting Back with the Landlord Reporting and Rent Debt Tool

After being evicted, my sister and I connected with Debt Collective and other tenant organizers who’d had their own horrible EQR stories. Our experiences became a point of connection; soon the despair that comes with eviction wasn’t a harm we had to navigate in isolation. In fact, finding community was our lifeline. The support and shared stories of other tenants were invaluable in our fight against EQR.

We spent the next year gathering as much info as possible about their shady practices. We attended meetings, spoke to journalists, learned our rights and our work culminated in a groundbreaking rent debt strike. Although the process was inspiring, our struggle isn’t over. The next stage of our organizing work is to get the word out about the Landlord Reporting and Rent Debt Tool. And we need your help.

Here’s how it works: let’s say you suspect your landlord is doing something illegal. Maybe your apartment has frequent issues like mold or bugs and your landlord fails to maintain a clean, safe or habitable environment. Take note. Perhaps your landlord keeps enforcing payment for services you and other tenants never use. Write it down. Has your landlord ever used deceptive pricing, hidden fees and excessive rent increases? Our tool is for you! My sister and I have first-hand experience with the stress of trying to keep track of EQR’s many infractions, which is why the Landlord Reporting and Rent Debt Tool is so helpful. It’s easy to use, simply choose yes or no if a scenario applies to you. And don’t forget to pass it on to your friends, family and neighbors once you finish filling it out.

All in all, my sister and I don’t just want to survive in Los Angeles. We want to thrive in our city, not just for us, but for our friends, our neighbors and our co-workers.

The future we want to build in Los Angeles is for the people. Where the real LA is preserved and protected—not just the version sold to tourists. We want an LA where community is valued over corporations, where housing and fair wages are treated as human rights; where the artists, families, and elders who continue to build this city can actually stay in it for a lifetime. We’re imagining a city where Black and brown Angelenos are prioritized and celebrated, not pushed out and forgotten. We’re fighting for a city where private equity doesn’t profit from working class people’s pain. And the fight is just beginning.

Have you filled out the Landlord Reporting and Rent Debt Tool? If so, we’d love it if you could RSVP for our upcoming EQR Debt Defense Workshop.

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Last week, President Trump and NYC Mayor-Elect Mamdani found surprising common ground — affordability. While Trump’s budget has gutted anti-poverty programs to give tax breaks to billionaires, he seemed to agree with Mamdani that the costs of housing, child care, groceries, and utilities are unaffordable for most Americans.

This last expense, utilities, has become unbearable. As the Trump administration slashes investments in renewable energy, 1 in 20 households are facing collections on their utilities debt. Meanwhile, AI companies are building massive data centers that will use as much power as entire cities, and states with high concentrations of these centers are already seeing electricity prices surge by 12% or more.

We can’t wait for politicians to give us debt relief — we have to take matters into our own hands.

For nearly seven months, Los Angeles tenants at an Equity Residential building have been on a RUBS strike in protest of the billing system which has more than doubled the cost of their utilities. In response, their corporate landlord has returned more than $25,000 to tenants — but the strike will continue until Equity Residential can demonstrate how their bills are calculated, with the ultimate goal of lowering utilities fees and inspiring other tenants to organize to ban RUBS altogether.

As Giving Tuesday approaches, we’re aiming to bring in 100 new dues-paying union members to strengthen our tenant organizing and build debtor power — and we’re already on our way to reaching this goal!

Dues-paying members provide the crucial funding we need to launch and sustain debt strikes, build tenant associations across California, and scale up to organize tenants in Equity Residential buildings across the U.S. Your contribution is an investment in the nation’s only union of debtors.

Become a dues-paying member today for as little as $5 a month!

Special shout out to our dues-paying union members and paid Substack subscribers for investing in the nation’s only union of debtors — this work is only possible with your support. Below, you’ll find updates from our Higher Ed, Medical Debt, and Housing teams, plus a rundown of events through the end of the year. Let’s get into it!

Higher Education

Earlier this month, Debt Collective joined the American Association of University Professors and a coalition of higher ed students and workers to take action against Trump’s higher education compact. We assembled and protested outside of the NYC headquarters of Trump-supporting billionaire Marc Rowan’s private equity firm, Apollo group. So far, all but two universities approached to sign Trump’s compact, which is essentially a loyalty oath for institutions to sign onto in exchange for additional funding, have rejected the offer. In addition to supporting the compact, Rowan also owns the University of Phoenix, a notorious for-profit scam school.

Rowan and his Apollo group embody three prongs of the right-wing attack on higher education: privatizing education through for-profit schools that see students as dollar signs, forcing academic institutions to bend the knee and abide by the Trump administration’s fascist agenda, and turning taxpayer-backed federal student loans into shareholder profits.

Next month, we anticipate that the Trump administration will further rewrite the rules on school accountability by removing the guard rails that prevent for-profit schools from scamming borrowers. We’re also gearing up for a 12/11 hearing in the Sweet v. McMahon (formally Devos/Cardona) lawsuit, which would provide cancellation for more than 250,000 defrauded borrowers. The hearing will determine if the Department of Education can get an 18-month extension to process debt relief applications. If approved, this extension would cost these debtors an additional $17,000 each in accrued interest.

For over a decade, Debt Collective has fought these attacks on all fronts by developing an application known as Borrower Defense to Repayment, which allows students defrauded by for-profit schools to take advantage of a provision in the Higher Education Act to cancel their loans. Learn more about the landscape of borrower defense and how defrauded debtors can organize to fight back at our next monthly higher education call on December 4 at 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT.

Medical Debt

The longest federal government shutdown in US history came to an abrupt end earlier this month after eight Senate Democrats unceremoniously struck a deal with Republicans to reopen. The biggest losers in the deal? All of us who rely on healthcare to live with dignity.

Here’s why: these Democrats had been holding a line against funding the federal budget established by Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill — budget legislation that slashed Medicaid, SNAP benefits, and many other social welfare programs, and functionally ended the subsidies most people on Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans need to afford their health insurance premiums. The shutdown was primarily about defending healthcare.

The full devastating effects of these Dems breaking rank will become clear over the months and years ahead, with 18 million people expected to lose Medicaid coverage and another 24 million on ACA plans being forced to decide if they can still afford health insurance as monthly premiums skyrocket. But it should already be apparent that we must not limit our political power or imagination to what can be won through the actions of Congress alone.

So what is to be done? We think part of the solution is something that’s still being built: a radical coalition of patients, medical debtors, healthcare workers, and clinicians across the country who have had enough of a healthcare system that doesn’t work for any of us. Earlier this year, Debt Collective established the Healthcare Worker Solidarity Collective as part of the work building toward this vision of a health care constituency that can wield real political power. The collective is a group of individuals committed to building solidarity and power among healthcare workers, patients, and all those suffering at the hands of our for-profit healthcare system through education, organizing, and collective action.

Next Saturday, December 6 at 12:30pm ET / 9:30am PT, the Healthcare Worker Solidarity Collective is hosting Capitalism Can’t Stop Our Care, a virtual event with leaders of abortion accompaniment networks and feminist collectives from Ecuador, Argentina, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Join us to discuss the relationship between debt and restrictions on bodily autonomy as tools of social control, learn from these leaders about ways the accompaniment network model transforms care, and reflect on what it could look like to build networks of support to help each other navigate debt, access resources, and deepen communities of care in the U.S.

Housing

On November 12th, Los Angeles passed the strongest reform to its rent stabilization formula in over 40 years. Existing rent stabilization laws in LA allow rent increases of 3-8% depending on inflation, as well as plus rent increases for utilities. As a result, rent has played a driving factor in overall inflation for years.

The new changes, supported by the Debt Collective and a broad coalition of organizations, will cap rent between 1-4% a year at 90% of local inflation. This law also removes rent increases for utility charges and strengthens protections by eliminating rent increases when moving in a new dependent tenant.

Through October of this year, we have helped roughly 1 out of every 6 tenants facing an eviction in LA County avoid a default judgement with our Tenant Power Toolkit. Three years into providing legal mutual aid to tenants, we’re excited to expand our reach in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area!

Finally, as tenants at Virgil Square enter their 7th month on RUBS strike, we’ve been meeting with tenants across Los Angeles who are also dealing with this unjust and opaque utilities billing process. Across buildings and geographies, the same patterns of opacity and threats have emerged as an enduring feature of RUBS and the related junk fees that corporate landlords impose on their tenants. If your corporate landlord is charging you junk fees, violating your lease agreement, or if you owe rent debt, fill out our Landlord Reporting and Rent Debt Tool and join us on Monday, Dec 8th at 8pm ET / 5pm PT for a debt defense workshop, where we’ll help tenants like you understand how you can fight back against debt collectors and hold your landlord accountable.

Upcoming Events

Building Blocks for Budget Justice

RSVP: Tuesday, December 2nd 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT

Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, what can communities do to fight against austerity policies to get access to necessary resources? Presented by scholar-activist Celina Su, our final Jubilee School session for this semester will center budget justice, participatory democratic experiments, and people’s budget campaigns around the country to outline key challenges, tensions, and possibilities covered in Su’s new book Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities.

New Member Call

RSVP: Wednesday, Dec 3rd 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

At our monthly new member call, we’ll break down what we’re organizing for, the campaigns we’re fighting, and how you can plug in. Whether you’re a longtime supporter or brand new, there’s a place for you here.

Right to Learn: The Landscape of Borrower Defense – The battle of defrauded debtors

RSVP: Thursday, Dec 4th 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

What is borrower defense? The history of organizing defrauded borrowers and the rocky landscape ahead. At our monthly Higher Ed call, we’ll discuss the Right to Learn and organize to win debt-free, liberatory, fully-funded free public higher education.

Capitalism Can’t Stop Our Care: Lessons from Abortion Accompaniment Networks Across the Global South

RSVP: Saturday, Dec 6th 12:30pm ET / 9:30am PT

More than three years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion has become more difficult and expensive to access in the U.S., increasingly putting pregnant people at risk of criminalization and medical debt. But across the Global South, feminist organizers have long navigated oppressive political conditions to build accompaniment networks, volunteer-led organizations that help people self-manage their abortions and much more.

Join the Debt Collective’s Healthcare Worker Solidarity Collective for a panel discussion with leaders of abortion accompaniment networks and feminist collectives from Ecuador, Argentina, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We’ll explore the potential of the accompaniment network model to transform care into collective power through mutual aid, feminist organizing, and international solidarity.

EQR Debt Defense Workshop

RSVP: Monday, Dec 8th 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Do you owe rent debt? Fill out our Landlord Reporting and Rent Debt Tool and join us for a debt defense clinic. Organizers and housing experts will break down strategies for fighting back against debt collections and abolishing our unjust debts. This event is open to all tenants, but we are particularly interested in tenants who currently live in or owe rent debt to apartment buildings owned by Equity Residential.

50 Over 50 Monthly Call

RSVP: Wednesday, Dec 10 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Are you 50 years old or older? Do you have student loan debt? Join our 50/50 meeting for student debtors aged fifty and above to discuss action steps, organizing plans, and build solidarity. Newcomers are welcome!

Solidarity,

Debt Collective

P.S. Your contribution is an investment in the nation’s only union of debtors. Become a dues-paying member today by giving what you can!

Even if your folks are more liberal-leaning, you might still find yourself in cringe-worthy convos about the affordability crisis. Although it might be obvious to you why cutting back on avocado toast isn’t going to help anyone get out from under a ballooning student loan balance, you’d be surprised by how propagandized your folks are.

The ultra-rich benefit from the normalization of personal responsibility rhetoric, which means that small talk about economic justice can actually lead to big shifts in thinking. That’s why we’ve compiled some helpful responses to make discussions more meaningful and steer chats with loved ones away from trickle-down-delusion and towards clarity and empathy.

Since the ghost of Ronald Reagan continues to haunt the American psyche, a lot of well-meaning liberals love to parrot the same failed talking points over and over — so let’s unpack them!

Popular arguments against student debt cancelation

1. “You took out a loan; you should pay it back.”

Ah, yes, this argument is a classic that refuses to die. We’ve been hearing about it for almost a decade. The problem is, our economy doesn’t work that way. Rich people take on debt all the time and never pay it back. In fact, this debt is a key mechanism that they use to build wealth.

Here’s how you can respond. Illuminate the power imbalance that’s at play here, which includes the predatory nature of the economy and the entire student loan system. It isn’t as if student debtors asked their neighbor to borrow $20 (you should always try to pay your neighbor back like you promised). Most student debt is owed to the federal government—the biggest bank on the planet.

When wages stay stagnant for decades while tuition and housing costs skyrocket, “personal responsibility” arguments collapse. This isn’t about individual morality — it’s about systemic exploitation.

An additional counter to personal responsibility framing is to point out that student debt is one of the few types of debt that borrowers cannot escape through bankruptcy. Student loan debtors — many of whom took on a massive loan before their prefrontal cortex was fully developed — don’t have the luxury of pivoting. Imagine if a 19-year-old tried to start a business and was awarded a $100,000 loan. Wait, you can’t imagine that because that literally doesn’t happen.

2. “They shouldn’t cancel all the debt — just lower the interest rates.”

The lowering of interest rates as a “solution” to the student debt crisis is underwhelming. It’s like if someone said, “I don’t mind getting screwed over, as long as it’s gentle and slow and preferably to R&B music.” You’re still getting screwed, though, right?

The reality is that lowering interest rates is like placing a Band-Aid over a gaping wound.

The student debt crisis isn’t just about the interest rates; it’s about making what should be a public good — quality education — into a debt trap. Most borrowers pay for decades without seeing their balances go down. Mass debt cancellation is about ending the cycle of financial servitude, not making debt peonage terms slightly softer.

3. “You better start paying your student debt back — Trump will never cancel student debt.”

Never say never. Debt Collective has been organizing for student debt cancellation since what was dubbed “T-day,” the day the student debt crisis hit one trillion dollars. We’re now closer to 2 trillion. That means, we’ve been organizing under Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again.

Ironically, Trump initiated the pause on student loan payments during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a move that had a positive impact on millions of households. As disparaging as our current political moment is, it’s also full of openings — think The New Deal after the Great Depression, Occupy Wall Street organizing as a response to the 2008 Recession, or the Eviction Moratorium after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. These responses demonstrated the power the government has to provide economic stimuli for the working class.

Still, it’s important to remember that lasting political wins don’t come from the state — they’re won from the ground up. We’ve got to organize and demand not only mass student debt relief, but college for all. The future depends on it.

4. “Canceling student debt costs taxpayers money.”

This argument is popular amongst conservatives. Why do they love this framework so much? Because it traps the conversation in a nonsensical dance about who is or isn’t a “taxpayer” and what we should or shouldn’t be paying taxes for. Newsflash: student loan borrowers — who make up 1 in 4 Americans — are also taxpayers. This fact throws a wrench in this entire argument.

A more recent counter-point is that when Biden canceled $187 billion in student debt, taxes didn’t go up. Debt cancellation isn’t about withdrawing from a massive taxpayer fund — it’s about the government choosing not to collect on meaningless debt it already owns, and will likely never collect on anyway.

5. “Canceling all federal student debt would increase inflation.”

So scary! *looks at grocery bill* Wait! But my groceries are already expensive?!

This argument has been repeated endlessly and it’s baseless. Economic boosts from the ground up actually strengthen the economy with minimal levels of inflation. Think about it — if people aren’t drowning in debt, they can then spend money on housing, groceries, and other necessary household items.

Meanwhile, we’re already living through “greedflation,” as corporations increasingly price-gouge consumers and drive up food costs. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than a hypothetical, marginal inflation bump.

6. “The Supreme Court struck it down. Canceling student debt is illegal.”

Not true. The case against student debt relief barely pretended to make sense.

Has anyone noticed the Supreme Court is ruling from the bench and has all but lost legitimacy as a moral or legal authority? The truth is, student debt relief is legal. Any president has the power to cancel all federal student debt using the Higher Education Act of 1965. In fact, the president has a Swiss Army knife of legal options to administer widespread student debt cancellation. It’s always been within executive authority.

7. “They’ll never collect on this debt anyway.”

That’s… actually true. The federal government knows most federal student debt will never be fully repaid, which is why they discharge student debt when a borrower dies and have a bevy of cancellation programs that incentivize non-payment.

So the question becomes: why keep up the charade? Why not cancel the debt now and let people live more fulfilling lives? Because these debts are less about money and more about social control.

Reframe the Conversation

A key takeaway is to avoid getting stuck inside your relatives’ moral framing of unjust debt, which insists that paying debt back is about virtue or responsibility.

Instead, you can shift their perspective entirely. Remind them that Americans have been trained to have a limited imagination about what their government can do for them. In the 1960s, the U.S. government seriously proposed expanding free public education from kindergarten through 14th grade and adding two extra years of community college. Education was seen as a public good, not a profit center. College isn’t solely about getting a job. It’s about the essence of what builds a liberatory society: expanded literacy, curiosity, critical thinking skills, and access to abstract ideas.

Student debt relief is about our right to learn, to imagine, and to build a more equitable society.

So instead of trying to “win” arguments at all, focus on expanding the frame of what’s possible in the conversation. This is how you win people over.

These holiday conversations don’t have to end in frustration. They can be opportunities to plant seeds, to shift perspectives, and to remind people that mass debt cancellation isn’t even that radical. It’s just common sense.

Learn more about the origins of the student debt crisis from our recent Jubilee School session with Ryann Liebenthal, author of Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis.

If we’ve missed any arguments you’ve heard about student debt, let us know in the comments below!

Well, generally yes! But the federal government was shut down because Democrats were holding a really important line on health care. We’ll explain:

What Happened in the Shutdown Fight?

The Affordable Care Act (ACA)—sometimes referred to as Obamacare—was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010. We will be the first to acknowledge the ACA’s many flaws, but it also marked a major change, opening the door for millions of Americans to receive health coverage that wasn’t tied to their employment status by purchasing it through a state exchange.

Donald Trump has been hellbent on dismantling the ACA for years, and not in the interest of a system that would be better for patients. That’s because he knows the same thing we do: debt is a tool of social control. When working class Americans are vulnerable to the worst aspects of the medical-industrial complex—when it’s nearly impossible to get health care without going into debilitating debt—it becomes that much more difficult to fight for a liberatory future.

This July, early in his second term, Trump and the Republicans passed the so-called Big Beautiful Bill—a disastrous piece of federal budget legislation that slashes SNAP benefits, Medicaid, and many other critical social welfare programs, and fails to extend the tax credits that make it possible for low-income people to afford ACA plans in the first place. The funds that support those programs are redirected into (1) the massive expansion of the militarized police state and deportation machine we’ve seen terrorizing Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and communities across the country, and (2) massive tax giveaways for corporations and the wealthy and powerful 1%.

To implement the terms of the budget bill, Congress had to pass a funding package. At the end of September, led by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and in response to public outrage—most Democrats in Congress drew a hard line, refusing to pass a package that didn’t extend the tax credit subsidies most people on ACA plans need to afford their monthly health insurance premiums—and demanding reversal of Medicaid cuts that will see an estimated 18 million people lose Medicaid in the coming years.

Republicans refused to negotiate on these terms, forcing a government shut down. With no concessions from the Republicans, the government has remained closed. That is, until this past weekend when eight Dems broke rank. Now their legacy will be green lighting one of the worst deals in political history.

For more analysis, check out this Now This video:

Reclaiming Our Political Power as a Health Care Constituency

Working class communities, workers and debtors, and all of us who aren’t billionaires, cannot limit our political power or imagination to what can be won through the actions of Congress, in which the vast majority of members of both parties clearly have corporate interests—not ours—as their priority.

So what is to be done? There are several ways to think about how to answer this question. Supporting bids for office by more progressive Democrats is one good, simple place to start. More critically, now is a great time to form a union in your workplace or become more active in your current one, as unionized workers across sectors align contracts and organize toward a general strike on May Day 2028.

In years past, our Rolling Jubilee Fund (as well as offshoot efforts inspired by the Rolling Jubilee) has purchased medical debt on the secondary market and then abolished it. That immediate relief has been life changing for people—but it isn’t sustainable. We can’t purchase all the debt in the country. No one can. And despite having been the ones to set this practice of small-scale debt jubilees into motion over a decade ago, we have our own critiques of this approach and its limits.

We think part of the solution is something unique that doesn’t yet fully exist, but has been slowly taking shape: a radical coalition of patients, medical debtors, healthcare workers, clinicians, and working class people across the country who have had enough of a healthcare system that doesn’t work for any of us.

Together, we can act as a political constituency with the power to interrupt and push back on the medical-industrial complex. Healthcare profiteers—large hospital systems, insurance companies, big pharma, credit card companies, and other bad actors trapping us in debt for healthcare we need—do not exist or operate in a vacuum. What we need, and what we are building, is a union of debtors, acting collectively and with our allies to demand debt relief, price reductions, and the structural transformation of a healthcare system that has failed us.

We cannot wait on leadership in this fight from members of Congress, because it will never arrive. In the words of Frederick Douglass: Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

It’s now on us to make those demands, to lean into our political agency, and to make power concede.

Scenes play out every day across the country that show us the tragedy of a healthcare system we have somehow come to accept as normal: a retired public school teacher in Georgia finds their mailbox overflowing with past-due notices from the hospital billing department; a family in Wisconsin files for bankruptcy after dad’s cancer treatments become too much to afford; a veteran takes out another credit card to pay for an emergency dental procedure in New Hampshire.

You probably know someone with a story like this—maybe you have one yourself. For millions of us in the United States, our encounters with the healthcare system are defined by death, debt and despair—or some combination of the three.

At Debt Collective, we believe that we have power as debtors and as potential debtors (or even likely debtors, in the case of our healthcare system). Realizing this power starts with organizing medical debtors and, together with our natural and strategic allies in the struggle for a different healthcare system, beginning to identify ourselves and act as a political constituency.

Alone, we suffer individually. Together, we can fight against the capitalist grip of our system and its exploitation of our needs—and for a transformed healthcare system. The truth is, none of the changes we need are going to come from the goodwill of the people at the top. They’ll be won from below, led by regular people with a stake in the fight. We invite you to make Debt Collective your political home.

Join our upcoming calls to learn more about how we’re building the fight for medical debt abolition and a world transformed:

• National Call for Medical Debt Abolition – Monday, November 17 @ 8pm ET / 5pm PT

• Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: Rejecting Healthcare Costs – Thursday, November 17 @ 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Throughout Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s grassroots campaign, establishment Democrats were baffled — and even disgusted — by his success (brief reminder that days ago, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y) answered “no” when asked if Mamdani was the future of the Democratic Party, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declined to endorse Mamdani through Election Day). Was it Zohran’s stellar media strategy that drew attention? His youthful energy? A bench of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) volunteers? Well, those assets certainly didn’t hurt.

But let’s get real: Mamdani campaigned on widely popular policy ideas — plans that resonated across the entire working class electorate, such as rent freezes and rent control, free and faster public transit, child care for all and standing up to President Trump. Oh, and don’t forget his commitment to arresting war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.

Zohran Mamdani, a self-identified democratic socialist, has done the impossible by winning a powerful executive seat in the backyard of billionaires. But now, he has an even bigger task at hand: debt.

This may sound basic, but it’s worth repeating. The federal government prints its own dollars — it doesn’t need to borrow from anyone to function (despite currently not functioning). Cities, on the other hand, cannot print their own dollars. Much like you — a person that probably has some student or medical debt, a mortgage, credit card debt or an auto loan — municipalities must too borrow money they do not have if they want to spend more than they tax. So what does that mean? Cities are forced to borrow from Wall Street to do nearly everything — from building parks and schools, to staffing libraries and hiring bus drivers, to patching roads and strengthening bridges.

Wall Street’s Grip on “Public” Money

Let’s use New York City as an example of how debt entraps entire cities, and thus communities. In New York City, the local government spends nearly $4 billion a year on interest payments to Wall Street alone. Imagine if the city had four extra billion dollars per year — imagine the housing that could be built, the healthcare that could be provided, or the climate resilience upgrades that could be made to the subway.

Like all state and local governments in the United States, New York City funds its public infrastructure and social programs by borrowing from the municipal bond market, a system worth more than $4 trillion.

This market allows cities to access credit while investors buy bonds and collect tax-free interest. So, even though we may think of these projects as “public,” Wall Street is deeply entangled in them.

Here’s the catch: before any tax revenue can be spent on public programs like rent control or free transit, the city must first pay back Wall Street. That means private financiers effectively hold veto power over social policy. This means they get to decide what governments can and can’t provide to their people.

From 1945 to 1975, New York City had a thriving welfare state. We’re talking free public education, municipal hospitals, and subsidized transit. But the 1975 fiscal crisis changed everything. In exchange for private loans, the city was forced to impose harsh austerity measures, slash public programs, and lay off thousands of workers.

For decades, banks and the investor class have used debt as a weapon, a way to extract wealth and enforce austerity while the public loses access to essential services.

Michael Beyea Reagan, a professor at Rutgers University, sums this up well in a recent Op-Ed for In These Times:

“Wall Street [has a] stranglehold on city finances. With private financing necessary for public programs, the private sector has the ultimate veto over social policy. It can simply close the purse. When public programs are financed through the private sector, banks hold the ultimate veto power. This is what happened in the fiscal crisis of 1975, when Wall Street locked the city out of the credit market and forced New York to make cuts to the satisfaction of the banking sector. And this had happened before, in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, when the ​“bankers’ agreement” closed credit markets on the city and forced austerity on municipal spending. This is the structural veto that Wall Street holds over our very democracy.

This is not to say that these obstacles are insurmountable, or that the hope of progressive reforms can never be achieved in the United States, or at least in New York City. Indeed, Mamdani may be savvy enough, may have the popular support he needs, may benefit from an organized working population that can force through these reforms and the financing necessary to pay for them. It is to say, however, that in a capitalist democracy, capital holds all the cards. Electing a single, lone, progressive politician is not enough to discipline the rich to pay for what all we need.

The Debt Dilemma for Mamdani, Progressives

We think Mamdani may inherit a city-wide budget problem that existed before him, similar to the budget crisis that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson faced. David Backer touched on this dynamic in a piece published a few days ago:

“Like Mamdani, [Johnson] came out of an ascendant left coalition of organizers, unionists, and socialists of all kinds. Johnson’s victory was seen as a defeat of neoliberalism and austerity, just as Mamdani’s promises to be. Yet despite ideological and political alignments across the mayor’s office, Board of Education, and union leadership, Johnson had to put on the straitjacket, inheriting a perennial budget crisis where bonds played a crucial role.”

Mamdani, just like Johnson, and other popular leftist mayoral candidates like Katie Wilson in Seattle, will all face a common threat: debt from Wall Street and the strings that come with it. This structural challenge, addressed head on by campaigns like #CancelWallStreet, could prove to be even more difficult than winning an unthinkable race.

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Take this example: the New York City public school district is in massive debt because of neoliberal policies from previous administrations. The district isn’t properly funded, and thus must rely on loans from creditors to make up for gaps. Mayor-Elect Mamdani is inheriting this situation — he didn’t create it. To put it bluntly, the debt service payments owed to Wall Street is a form of racialized extraction. Money that should be spent on New York City schools, students, and teachers is instead sent to Wall Street lenders and creditors. Creditors and credit ratings agencies will apply pressure on Mamdani to “reign in costs” and be “fiscally responsible” by making austerity-based cuts or being conservative with school funding at a time of broad right-wing attacks on education.

What we must do now is help Mamdani in his fight to generate more revenue for New York City schools and against the forces that will call for brutal austerity. It would be wise for him to work alongside a debtor’s movement powerful enough to challenge Wall Street directly, to demand that it loosen its grip on our cities, our public institutions, and our collective future. In fact, this is an opportunity for all mayors exhausted with the false choices Wall Street has “provided” to us to join forces in illuminating the capitalist grip on our cities — especially in advance of centrist and right-wing attacks against progressive policy agendas.

We can negotiate debt payments in the favor of debtors. In fact, Mamdani knows this well from playing a major role in the fight for New York City taxi drivers. But until we confront the role of unjust debt as a mechanism of control, even the most progressive policies will keep running into the disparaging debt obstacle.