The Family Loan

What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System by Kristin Collier. Grand Central Publishing, 304 pages. 2025.

In spring 2008, shortly before she graduated from the University of Michigan, Kristin Collier applied for her first credit card at a bank in Ann Arbor. She was twenty-two, soon to be starting graduate school for secondary English education, and planned to use the card to cover the basics of her new life: clothes, toiletries, groceries, public transportation. Prior to applying for the credit card, the only debt Collier had personally taken on was just over ten thousand dollars’ worth of Stafford Loans from the federal government to help finance her undergraduate education.

She was shocked, then, when the bank’s loan officer told her that she had been denied due to her credit report, which revealed that more than two hundred thousand dollars in debt had been taken out in her name, the bulk of it in the form of private student loans. “I don’t recognize any of this,” she told the loan officer. “It can’t be mine.” He told her she had to “take that up with the police.”

Instead of calling the cops, Collier called her mother. Her mother didn’t attend college, and her father only completed a degree as an adult, taking classes at night after work. When Collier left her hometown near Lake Michigan to matriculate, “we all sensed that I was departing for a place from which I’d never truly return,” she writes in What Debt Demands. Though her parents had achieved a middle-class lifestyle over the course of her youth, they had been struggling since Collier’s sophomore year, when her mother lost her job at a credit union. Still, Collier felt that her mother, who had always managed the family’s finances, would know what to do about the mysterious loans. “I wanted her to say that we would figure it out, that there was, in fact, a way out of the harm that someone, a stranger, had done to me,” Collier writes. Instead, her mother immediately confessed that she was responsible for the fraudulent loans.

This could be the start of a juicy work of true crime that unravels how a mother could steal a daughter’s identity and saddle her with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt. In fact, Grand Central, the Hachette imprint behind What Debt Demands, published such a book in 2019: The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity by Axton Betz-Hamilton. Like Collier, Betz-Hamilton grew up in the Midwest. Like Collier, she was a young adult when she first learned that someone had ruined her credit; like Collier, the first person she called for help was her mother, who managed the household’s finances. Both What Debt Demands and The Less People Know open with scenes where the authors first encounter their bewildering credit reports.

The overlap was such that when I began reading What Debt Demands, I thought I had heard Collier’s story years earlier on an episode of the podcast Criminal. I was confusing her with Betz-Hamilton, who told the host that if she had learned of her mother’s betrayal before her death, she would have pressed charges. Betz-Hamilton said she wanted retribution for “the amount of embarrassment that I had to go through in establishing myself financially.” The singular villain in her story is her mother.

But while Collier expresses anger and frustration at her mother in What Debt Demands, and while her mother always ends their fights with the quip “If it would make you feel better, you can send me to jail,” she writes, “I couldn’t conceive of how incarceration would fix anything for either one of us.” Collier’s aversion to pressing charges is rooted in her leftist politics, her desire to avoid further harm to her family, and her understanding that incarceration would not lead her mother to take accountability. Instead of acquiescing to the logic of carceral punishment, Collier wished for her mother to accept a more nuanced version of justice. She writes that she wanted her mother to acknowledge the “continual presence” of the harms she caused in the past in their present lives, and understand that forgiveness “was not an object that I could hand over willingly, a singular gift, but a space we could exist in together, moving toward and away from each other in response to pain and joy and memory.”

Collier’s mother racked up debt—first in her own name and then in her daughter’s—in an attempt to contain the fallout from a debilitating gambling addiction. Some of the fraudulent student loans were even cosigned by Collier’s grandparents, German immigrants whose “brand of love was material,” she writes, explaining how they came to be entangled in the debt. “If my mother needed money or said I needed money, it was their responsibility to give it to her, even if they didn’t have it.” Early on, Collier learns that if she were to default or pursue legal action against her mother, the lenders would attempt to collect from her grandparents, who couldn’t shoulder the costs either. And Collier’s mother was indeed punished by the criminal legal system—just not for stealing her daughter’s identity.

In summer 2008, she was charged with embezzling from the dentist’s office where she worked and for committing health care fraud by billing insurance for fake procedures (though the latter charge was ultimately dropped). She took a plea deal and was sentenced to two and a half months in a local jail. Serving time did not help Collier’s mother reflect on her crimes. It also made the task of paying back the fraudulent loans more burdensome—with a felony on her record, her employment opportunities were limited, and Collier and her father were forced to take responsibility for making payments against debts that only ever grew. The interest alone was eye-watering, as the private student loans her mother had taken out in her name had much higher interest rates than federal student loans. “On a loan of $30,000 with an interest rate of 14 percent, the accrued interest each year was over $4,000,” Collier writes. “And there were eight loans. To track the accumulating interest was to watch myself be buried alive.” Due to the interest rate and high origination fee on that $30,000 loan, Collier would be asked to pay $100,000 over time.   

While readers may find Collier’s mother’s behavior and inability to take responsibility for burdening her daughter with what amounts to a “life sentence” of debt reprehensible, Collier does not position her as a villain in What Debt Demands. Instead of replicating the simplistic morality tale of The Less People Know About Us, Collier zooms out, tracing the larger web that her family became entangled in. She focuses her ire on the entities that enabled her mother to commit her crimes in the first place: the banks that looked the other way when she stole her daughter’s identity again and again, allowing her to take on private student loans that well exceeded the total costs of Collier’s tuition, and the larger system of lending that those banks operate within. Made up of banks, loan servicers, public and private universities, and the federal government, this system reaps rewards from the suffering of borrowers like Collier. And this system does not care about how or why the debt was acquired. The “loyalty” of loan companies “is not to the students they claim to support,” Collier asserts, “but to the act of collection.”

Weaving in interviews with other borrowers and research on the history of student lending in the United States, Collier examines how being saddled with debt touches every aspect of a person’s life, from their employment decisions to their relationships to their health, as well as how sociocultural circumstances push people into debt in the first place. By locating her own story of the Kafkaesque, yearslong journey of getting her fraudulent debt discharged within a larger reckoning with the student lending system, Collier acknowledges that while the circumstances of her case may be unusual, her experience of indebtedness is not. What Debt Demands ultimately argues for the dismantlement of the American student lending system, which rests on the assumption that higher education is not a public good but a benefit that deserving individuals may unlock through private wealth or private debt. Instead, Collier argues that “a future that is just, reparative, and kind” is a future where public education is free and debts are forgiven.

For Collier, the fact that her mother fed her gambling addiction with fraudulent student loans, rather than other kinds of debt, is significant: “It matters that it was student debt—debt that weaponizes a person’s desire to learn, that is unique in status and collection, that binds you to your family, that promises a world it very rarely delivers.” Indeed, even without familial identity theft, the American student loan system assumes and reinforces familial financial entanglement. The structure of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)—which every college student must complete in order to determine their eligibility for federal grants, loans, and work study benefits, and which colleges use to craft their own financial aid packages—is built to benefit an intact nuclear family, and presupposes that they will bear the cost of higher education together.

By tying access to financial aid to family finances, the FAFSA, as Collier writes, “creates a real and imagined relationship between family values and economic mobility,” reinforcing an individualist view of socioeconomics that upholds inequalities. “A bad family is one that cannot save, that is headed by a single, Black mother or queer parents or contains no parents at all because a young person is on their own,” Collier continues. “If they have insecure housing or not enough food to eat or cannot find stable work, if their life is hard, it is their fault because they have not created a good family and adhered to its values.”

The federal government once attempted to untangle access to higher education from the nuclear family’s financial circumstances, passing the Higher Education Act (HEA) in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. But as Collier illuminates, while the HEA was intended to expand college accessibility beyond white men with generational wealth by increasing the amount of federal aid given to poor students, the law also created an incentive for private industry to make money off of college students and their families. The HEA created a system of guaranteed loan programs, whereby “essentially, the government paid private banks to issue loans to borrowers . . . promis[ing] banks that they would be repaid if the students defaulted,” Collier writes.

When the federal government moved to wind down these guaranteed loans after a 1991 Government Accountability Office report found that issuing loans directly would lead to a savings of a billion dollars in the first year alone, private banks fought to continue their lucrative role in higher education. As executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center (now Protect Borrowers) Mike Pierce told Collier, “An entire house of cards was built with an eye toward extracting as much money from working people paying for college and driving it into these private sector companies.” And though the guaranteed loan program finally died with President Barack Obama’s 2010 Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, that law preserved the role of the private sector—the government would pay loan servicing companies, like American Education Services (AES), to administer collection.

AES serviced much of Collier’s fraudulent debt and tormented her for years. The company’s representatives refused to speak with her about the fact that she was a victim of identity theft, and when she hired a bankruptcy lawyer to help her attempt to discharge the debt, AES delayed the process of allowing the lawyer access to her accounts for months, all of which created “a bureaucratic paperwork maze with mostly dead ends.” It would take years for Collier’s lawyer to force AES and the lenders it represented to acknowledge the facts of the case and release Collier from the fraudulent debt. Throughout this process, collectors called Collier as many as ten times per day, demanding payments she could not afford on her teaching salary. “I remember the feeling of hearing my phone vibrating in my desk while I was teaching—the sense of claustrophobia and predation,” Collier writes.

In 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) brought two lawsuits against AES that laid bare how the loan servicer exhibited a pattern of illegally bleeding borrowers dry. The first suit alleged that AES failed to respond to borrowers’ requests for relief, including during the pandemic’s period of relief on federal student loans. The second alleged that AES pursued borrowers whose loans had been discharged through bankruptcy proceedings (The CFPB dropped this case in February). Seven years earlier, the CFPB sued one of AES’s lenders, National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts, for illegally attempting to collect on private student loan debts that the servicing company could not prove they owned or that were too old to sue over. By allying herself with the borrowers wronged by AES in cases such as these, Collier argues that her personal nightmare was just one iteration of a larger scheme that demands a public reckoning. “My suffering was good for someone else—financially and politically,” she writes. “Why else would the servicer trap me in this endless loop of phone calls, faxes, emails, and portal requests? Why else had our government not shielded me from this?”

Collier braids her exploration and analysis of the student lending system through with reflections on how this system shunts borrowers into a “shadow world” where debt circumscribes one’s every move. While her own experience with both fraudulent and legitimate student loans forms the foundation of What Debt Demands, Collier draws on conversations with other borrowers to illustrate the indignities and dilemmas of indebtedness. Caleb, a black and queer borrower in his thirties from Washington State, “felt like he’d been punished with student loan payments at the exact moment that he was trying to use his education to secure meaningful employment that would allow him to live,” Collier writes. Jim, a white borrower in his sixties who had recently begun a new career as a nurse to pay down his family’s student loan debt, told Collier of his exhaustion explaining to colleagues that, without this job, he’d never be able to retire. Steph, a white borrower in her late thirties with debt from both college and graduate school, explained that she and her husband had to make the decision between paying her private student loans or having a baby. These stories and others shed light on how, as Collier puts it, debt “bend[s] time itself.” Student loan debt, “acquired in the past and collected in the present, collapses ‘then’ and ‘now,’” she writes. “A future of relief is always beyond reach.”

Even after her fraudulent debt was discharged, Collier struggled to reestablish an open relationship with her mother. “I had been, and despite my best efforts still was, devastated that she’d left me alone with the debt,” she writes. But “if I felt abandoned by my mother at times, I also felt that the state had abandoned us both.” It is this systemic abandonment that Collier seeks to address through working with the Debt Collective, a union of debtors fighting for debt cancellation, public funding of higher education, and universal health care and housing. Since its beginnings in 2012, the union’s organizing has helped abolish nearly $200 billion of student debt.

Collier describes taking part in a Debt Collective march in front of the Department of Education building in spring 2022, when the pandemic-era student loan moratorium was set to expire. Borrowers named their debts, on signs and to one another in the crowd. “It benefits the systems that indebt us when we are ashamed, certain that we have done something wrong in our acquisitions, that we are wrong, and because we are wrong, remain committed to this act of repayment,” Collier asserts. In reframing who is to blame for her student debt, Collier opens up a broader view of what justice would look like—one that seeks to free millions of student debtors from a system that the government has chosen to trap them in.

Currently, American student borrowers owe more than $1.8 trillion. The brief moment of hope for widespread student debt cancellation under President Joe Biden—which would have forgiven $430 billion in loans for 43 million people—evaporated in the hands of the Supreme Court. The second Trump administration’s open hostility to student borrowers is evidenced in its phasing out of income-driven repayment plans that offered a modicum of relief in monthly loan bills, and in its recent issuing of a rule that would kick some borrowers out of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program if they work for employers who have “a substantial illegal purpose”—which could include providing gender-affirming care to minors. Trump’s desire to shutter the Department of Education, which manages student loans and repayment plans, will further ensnare borrowers, Collier explains: “The management of student loan disbursement and collection, a process already riddled with errors, will not become more equitable and streamlined under the supervision of a new agency with no experience and no mandate from the administration to protect students.” 

Yet Collier ends What Debt Demands on an optimistic note concerning the possibility of a future of debt abolition and free college. Organizers with the Debt Collective, she writes, “repeat a quote from oil baron J. Paul Getty: ‘If you owe the bank $100, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank’—meaning, of course, that despite what credit tells us, we have power.” This reminder of the power of borrowers fuels Collier’s belief that there can be an end to late capitalism, but that “we must engineer it ourselves.”