Desperate for debt forgiveness

HER $90,000 IN STUDENT DEBT TRAILED JILL WITKOWSKI Heaps for decades, like a pesky private eye, as she moved from New York to Fort Myers to New Orleans to Annapolis, always hovering to remind her of her negative net worth.

And then one day, while sitting in a coffee shop near Buffalo, she learned it was gone. “Congratulations!” the email from her loan servicer, FedLoan, said. “You qualify for loan forgiveness.” Her balance was now $0. First, Heaps cried. Then she texted her husband. Then she logged onto the FedLoan website to make sure the email wasn’t some sort of cruel joke.

“It was like I won the lottery,” says Heaps, a 43-year-old environmental lawyer whose loans were forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which is supposed to allow people who work for nonprofits or the government to wipe out their loans after making 120 payments over 10 years. The program is a boon, but in reality, a tiny fraction of the people who applied for the program have received forgiveness.

The sheer balance of student loans