Your New Student Loan Plan Is a Plan. That's the Problem.

Every four years or so, the American government does something to the student loans, and every four years or so, the American people do something to the American government: they read the new rules, and they quietly decide that the rules are not for them.

This time, the rules are not even new enough to be confusing. They are new the way a new floor is new: the old floor is still there, the new floor has been poured on top of it, and the building is now two stories tall with no elevator. As of July 1, new federal loan borrowers are choosing between the standard repayment plan and a plan the Department of Education calls, with the confidence of a man who has never once had to fill out a loan application, the Repayment Assistance Plan. The old plan — the one with a name people could say without a teleprompter — is gone, repealed, as one legal scholar put it, in the shadows. And the Department of Education is now telling students heading back to school that everything is “transitioning,” which is the government’s word for “we are doing it and we are doing it to you.”

Let me tell you what the transition looks like from the other side of the desk. A woman — let us call her what the Department of Education calls her, a borrower — used the administration’s own online loan simulator, and the simulator told her that her monthly payment, which had been $150, would be $713 under one of the new plans, due to “changes in how payments are calculated.” $150 to $713. That is not a payment increase. That is a different life. It is the difference between a student loan and a second mortgage with the student still in it.

And the timing! The timing is the best part. The system, as Politico puts it, “looks messy” as students head back to class. The Department of Education is restarting debt collection. The legal challenges are, in the words of the American Prospect, “inadvertently accelerated” by the overhaul itself, which is the only sentence in American financial history that contains the word “inadvertently” and is not meant as a compliment.

I want to be fair, because I am a fair person, and fairness is the one thing the student loan system has never offered me. The administration has a point, and the point is this: the old system was, in fact, a mess. It was a mess for a decade. It was a mess in a way that produced a repayment plan so complicated that the people who designed it needed a second plan to explain the first plan. The new system is not a mess. It is a different mess. It is the mess that arrives with a new name, a new acronym, and a new phone number, and it is the mess that tells you, in a letter, that your payment has changed, and then, when you call, tells you that the number on the letter is “transitioning.”

So here is my advice to the 45 million Americans who are, technically, part of this: read the letter. Call the number. Wait on hold. Ask for the supervisor. Ask for the plan, in writing. Ask for the math. And when they give you the math, do not do it. Not because the math is wrong, but because the math is the point: the entire system is a performance in which the government is the audience, the students are the actors, and everyone is pretending that the script was written before the curtain went up.

At press time, the Department of Education’s loan simulator was, according to one borrower, “down for maintenance,” which is the only maintenance window in American history that occurs the exact week students are trying to use the thing.