Students whose college years were upended by Covid face their next hurdle: repaying loans

After Covid completely upended life on college campuses, students and recent graduates are encountering a new challenge: student loans.

Federal student loan payments are resuming this week, ending the three-year pause enacted through policies in 2020 to ease financial burdens when the Covid pandemic rattled the economy and countless people’s livelihoods.

Millions of college students and graduates — including Black women, who carry the highest burden of student debt — held on to the hope of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, which the Supreme Court struck down in June. Yet, Biden is aiming to push policies that would provide relief for loan borrowers, with his announcement Wednesday approving $9 billion in student loan forgiveness for 125,000 borrowers.

Still, as payments resume, several Black students and graduates told NBC News that they are not ready for the financial obligation, including those who say the pandemic stripped away large portions of their college experience.

A lackluster college experience

Halfway through Anne Laurie Joseph’s freshman year at George Washington University, the pandemic essentially shut down campus. The English literature and music double major said she was one of the few students who could remain on campus during her sophomore year. But there were so few students around, Laurie Joseph said, that her college experience was mostly nonexistent.

“All of that was just basically living in my dorm and doing classes on Zoom,” said Laurie Joseph, 23, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, and was a first-generation college student.

While George Washington University resumed in-person classes during her junior year, Laurie Joseph said the pandemic disrupted her major plan of studying abroad in France. Born and raised in Haiti — where French is the second spoken language after Haitian Creole — Laurie Joseph said traveling to France would have given her the opportunity to become fluent in French.

“I had everything set to study abroad for an entire year,” Laurie Joseph said. “I had gotten all the scholarships that I needed to do it. And then it all got ruined.”

Senior Demari Jetter had a similar experience when she started attending Jackson State University in August 2020. She said she envisioned her first year attending classes in person, participating in engaging classroom discussions and meeting friends. Instead, she said she experienced the exact opposite. While Jackson State told NBC News in a statement that certain annual traditions were offered virtually or postponed, Jetter said she was not aware of them.

“I didn’t even know what a welcome back week was or a freshman welcome week was because I never had it,” she said.

It was also difficult adjusting to a new learning environment that was completely opposite from her high school experience, she said.

“Virtually, the professor don’t know you,” she said. “They don’t know how you are. They don’t know how you learn. It’s hard to ask questions because you don’t want to unmute yourself, and then they’ll say, ‘Hold on, wait until the end of class.’ You can’t raise your hand. It was just a lot of challenges.”

Aaron Waithe, an information technology major at Towson University who is graduating next year, said he’s had to do the verification process for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a form that determines college students’ eligibility for student financial aid, with little help for the past four years. He also said many students are often left in the dark when it comes to repaying their student loans.

“I would have loved to have it,” Waithe said about Biden’s blocked student loan forgiveness plan. “But either way, the payments are going to have to be paid.” Waithe said he currently has about $20,000 worth of student loans.

Students have mixed feelings about paying education loans

While Jetter and Waithe will have a six-month grace period before they start making student loan payments after graduating next year, they both said they are still not prepared for the financial changes that lay ahead.

Jetter began college while the pause was in effect, and while her tuition was being paid with loans, she said she was not made aware that she would be on the hook to pay them once she graduated. “No one ever spoke on them since I enrolled in college,” she said. “Now all of a sudden I have a 35, $45,000 balance.”

Black college students face specific challenges when it comes to eliminating their student debt. Black graduates hold an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than their white counterparts, according to the Education Data Initiative. Four years after graduation, Black college graduates also owe an average of 188% more than white students borrowed, EDI reported.

These disparities for Black graduates are directly linked to the lack of generational wealth in Black families. The median white family with a full-time worker has 7.6 times more wealth than the median Black family that also has a full-time worker, according to the American Sociological Association’s Contexts magazine.

Though she received scholarships while she was in school, Laurie Joseph said she didn’t have the financial support of her family to help with her expenses. She said she owes about $30,000 for her education at George Washington University and will have to pay back her loans by herself.

She also acknowledged the struggles that many recent graduates like her face, but that going to college is “kind of a choice that you have to make,” she said.

“It’s either you go straight into the workforce after high school, or you make a decision to take out loans in pursuit for their education, which most likely is investment in yourself,” said Laurie Joseph, who currently works at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. “For some of us, college was the only option.” Paying back student loans, she added, “is definitely a burden.”

Like Laurie Joseph, Saundrea Rupert-Shropshire started school in 2020 as a part-time law student at Georgetown University and had to attend classes virtually.

Rupert-Shropshire, who is 31 and lives in Alexandria, Virginia, said doing so removed the social aspect of learning from her educational experience.

“I think law school is one of those kind of experiences where you don’t just pay for law school, you’re paying for the network of professors and colleagues that will attend that school with you,” said Rupert-Shropshire, who will complete law school in December. One example she cited is a weekly happy hour for law students.

“I have such a great cohort of classmates that we all still ended up pretty close,” she continued. “But, I think it’s definitely a lesser version of what I would have had if we would have started in person our first year.”

Rupert-Shropshire earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Howard University in 2014. She said she was able to fully pay off her undergraduate loans by receiving a full scholarship and working as a congressional staffer for six years, which offered a student loan repayment program, capping payments at $10,000 a year. While Rupert-Shropshire has managed to repay $10,000 toward her student loans from law school, she said she still owes about $75,000.

Rupert-Shropshire has a job offer at a law firm, but it doesn’t start until next year, so she recently started waiting tables at a local restaurant to earn income in the meantime. Paying back these student loans, she said, will be burdensome on top of her other expenses — including the rent for her one-bedroom apartment with parking, which is $2,200 a month. Despite that, she said she is as “prepared as I’m going to be” to pay back her student loans, even though that might interfere with some of her future goals, like buying a house.

“Am I ready? No, like, absolutely not,” Rupert-Shropshire said. “But, the debt exists and it has to be paid. I don’t come from an affluent family. So, if I don’t pay my loans, no one pays them.”

Despite the challenges the pandemic created, there were some positive outcomes.

Jetter, who is a part-time content creator and restaurant server, said going to college during the pandemic gave her “no other choice but to be focused on school.” In the future, she hopes to become a social media or digital marketing manager. Now, she said that she’s getting the full college experience since everything is back to normal.

As for Waithe, he said the pandemic allowed him to grow closer to his peers.

“It made me more close-knit with my friends that I met here and the friends that I came up here with, because we were more, like, sticking together with ourselves,” Waithe said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com