The conventional wisdom about student loan debt frames it as a young person’s problem — a burden carried by 26-year-olds clutching English degrees and cold brew coffee. But that picture leaves out a significant and growing population: older Americans who borrowed later in life, often to retrain or advance in careers they’d already spent decades building, and who now find themselves in their 60s with loan balances that outlasted their best earning years.
Brittany Yarbrough is one of them. When she responded to a call-for-sources I posted on social media last February — asking to hear from people navigating government benefits in 2026 — her message was brief and blunt: “I’m 65, I work full time, I owe $47,000 in student loans, and nobody in Washington seems to know I exist.” I called her the next morning.
A Degree That Was Supposed to Change Everything
When I sat down with Brittany Yarbrough over video call from her apartment in Denver’s Montbello neighborhood, the first thing she did was laugh — not warmly, but with the specific exhaustion of someone who has explained her situation too many times to too many indifferent offices. She is 65, single, and has worked as a dental assistant for nearly 30 years. She is also, quietly, putting her younger brother through his second year at a community college in Aurora, covering roughly $580 a month toward his tuition and books.
In 2007, when Brittany was 46, she enrolled in a part-time graduate program in health services administration, convinced it would move her into a supervisory or administrative role. She borrowed $52,000 in federal Direct Loans over three years. She finished the degree in 2010. The promotion never materialized. The practice where she worked changed ownership twice, and the new management had no interest in restructuring roles for a dental assistant with a master’s degree they didn’t require her to have.
By the time I spoke with Brittany in February 2026, she had paid down roughly $5,000 of the original balance, but interest accumulation over years of deferment and forbearance had kept the total stubbornly high. She currently owes approximately $47,200. Her take-home pay after taxes and health insurance deductions is around $2,650 per month.
When the Car Breaks Down and the Math Falls Apart
Brittany’s situation crystallized into crisis last November when her 2011 Honda CR-V threw a timing chain. The repair estimate from two shops came in at $2,800 and $3,100 respectively. She did not have either amount liquid. She borrowed $1,400 from a coworker and put the rest on a credit card at 24.9% APR, which she is now paying off in installments alongside her student loan bill.
She takes two buses to work. The commute is 54 minutes each way. Denver winters make this harder than it sounds.
As Brittany explained it, her frustration is not directed at any one person or office — it is diffused across an entire architecture of programs that seem designed for someone other than her. She has heard of income-driven repayment. She has heard of loan forgiveness. She spent parts of three evenings last fall trying to navigate the Federal Student Aid website and came away more confused than when she started.
“I kept reading about all these plans that were going to help people like me,” she told me. “Then I’d call and sit on hold for 45 minutes and someone would tell me the plan I was asking about was paused, or under review, or that I had to consolidate first, and then the consolidation might affect something else. I stopped calling.”
Navigating the Income-Driven Repayment Maze
This is where Brittany’s story gets specific and, frankly, difficult to watch unfold. Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans — which cap monthly loan payments at a percentage of a borrower’s discretionary income — exist precisely for situations like hers. Under a standard IDR plan, borrowers who maintain payments for 20 to 25 years may have remaining balances forgiven. Brittany, who has been in and out of deferment since 2013, does not have a clean 20-year payment history to point to.
According to information available through Federal Student Aid, borrowers on income-driven plans can qualify for forgiveness after 20 or 25 years of qualifying payments depending on the plan. The key word is “qualifying.” Periods of deferment and forbearance, while they pause collections, do not typically count toward that forgiveness clock — a distinction Brittany says she did not fully understand until 2023.
The Turning Point — and Why It Was Only Partial
In January 2026, Brittany connected with a HUD-approved housing and financial counseling agency in Denver through a referral from a coworker. The counselor she was assigned to — she asked me not to use the agency’s name, citing privacy — spent two sessions reviewing her loan history and identified something important: a batch of payments Brittany had made between 2015 and 2017 that had been miscategorized by her previous servicer and were not showing up in her IDR payment count.
The correction, if upheld after a formal dispute, could credit her with an additional 26 qualifying payments. That would not get her to forgiveness — she’d still need many more qualifying years — but it would move the timeline in a meaningful direction.
As of the time I spoke with Brittany in late February 2026, the dispute had been filed but not resolved. Her servicer had 90 days to respond. She was continuing to make payments in the meantime — approximately $214 per month under a current income-contingent plan — while waiting.
The outcome is genuinely uncertain. The dispute may be upheld, partially upheld, or denied. Even in the best case, Brittany Yarbrough is not approaching the end of her loan repayment journey. She is, at best, approaching a clearer picture of how long that journey still is.
What Brittany’s Story Reveals About the System
I asked Brittany directly where her anger goes when she thinks about all of this. She was quiet for a moment before answering.
Her situation is not unique. Across the country, older borrowers face a student loan system designed around assumptions — career growth, rising income, decades of working years ahead — that do not fit their realities. Brittany is 65. She is not at the beginning of her earning arc. She is, by any reasonable measure, near its end. And she is still riding two buses through Denver winters because a car repair she could not afford forced her onto a credit card that now charges her interest on top of everything else.
The broader policy environment offers little comfort. Debates in Washington around student loan relief have remained turbulent well into 2026, with various IDR forgiveness mechanisms tied up in legal challenges or administrative review. According to NLC’s 2026 federal advocacy outlook, housing and financial stability programs for working-age adults remain under significant funding pressure at the federal level — a context that frames just how precarious Brittany’s circumstances are.
Resources like USAGov’s assistance directory can help borrowers locate HUD-approved counseling agencies at no cost — the same pathway that ultimately got Brittany closer to an answer than three years of phone holds had. That step, at least, is real and available.
When I ended my call with Brittany, she mentioned that her brother had just registered for his spring semester. She sounded, briefly, less tired. She was proud of him in a way that cut through everything else she had described over the previous hour. That, too, is part of her financial picture — not just the debt, not just the broken car, but the $580 a month she keeps sending because she decided that someone in her family was going to finish what they started.
Whether the system ever fully accounts for people like Brittany Yarbrough — older, working, carrying debt from a degree that didn’t pay off the way it was supposed to — remains an open question in 2026. For now, she is waiting on a dispute response, paying $214 a month, and taking the bus.
Related: She Makes Good Money and Still Can’t Afford Her Prescriptions — and Now She’s Behind on Property Taxes
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