Opinion | Student Loan Repayments Are Dwindling - The New York Times

In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren't making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal. Wage stagnation is a long-running phenomenon that worsened after the Great Recession. 

But an important additional source of student loan misery is the widening and diversifying nature of the Americans who take them out. It's increasingly the case that people who were always going to have low earnings no matter their educational attainment are also overloaded with student debt — think of underpaid teachers who acquired expensive master's degrees for only a modest pay increase.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/13/opinion/politics/student-loan-payments-resume.html