Student loans are so complex, experts can’t even figure it out

By: Jillian Berman - New York Post

As director of the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project, Persis Yu spends her days doing pretty much exactly what her title implies — working on behalf of low-income student loan borrowers both helping them with their individual cases and advocating for laws and policies that would benefit them.

But for about six months last year, Yu found herself in a strange position: Advocating for herself as she worked to manage her own student loans.

Yu faced delays of several months as she tried to switch from one program that allowed her to pay her loans according to her income to a different income-driven plan. For a short period, her loans actually flipped into delinquency, a status which means you’ve missed a payment, because her servicer — the company the government hired to manage her federal student loans — took too long to apply a payment pause, known as an administrative forbearance, she was entitled to by law as she went through the application process.