As student loan debt has ballooned over the past two decades, the issue has moved from the sidelines of wonky policy debates into a full-fledged campaign issue, with even presidential candidates playing to the economic anxieties of parents and recent college grads. In the latest sign of just how far-reaching student loan debt has become, the issue is now on the radar of another, perhaps more surprising group: AARP.

Over the past several years, the nation’s leading senior lobby has become increasingly involved in student-loan issues, pressuring the federal government to stop garnishing the Social Security benefits of older borrowers who defaulted on their loans. And in some state capitals the group is taking on the student loan industry, pushing for more regulations to police abusive loan-collection practices.

A retirement organization may seem like an unlikely force for reform of student debt. But AARP’s involvement underscores just how long a shadow student loans are increasingly casting over Americans’ economic lives—a shadow that stretches all the way into their retirement. Remarkably, Americans over 60 years old are the fastest-growing category of student loan borrowers, having roughly quadrupled in number between 2005 and 2015, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Although older borrowers still account for just a sliver of the more than $1.5 trillion in total outstanding student loan debt, they’re more likely than younger borrowers to be behind on payments. Most are repaying debt they took out to help finance the education of their children or grandchildren, though some are still paying off their own tuition.

“We consider it a looming threat,” said Lori Trawinski, director of banking and finance at the AARP Public Policy Institute. A central concern, she said, is how student debt—for themselves and their children—can delay key financial milestones like home ownership and chip away at retirement savings.

More older Americans are paying off student debt in retirement, often loans that they took out to help their children or grandchildren pay for their education. | Getty Images

As Americans of every generation struggle to pull together enough savings to ensure a healthy, comfortable retirement, concern is growing about how debt can be a lifelong drag on people’s financial lives, especially debt from areas like higher education and health care, where costs are growing faster than the economy overall. Those costs can lead to some brutal surprises in old age. “The idea that you could have student loan debt of your own that lasts 20 or 30 years, and then pick up some for your child that could last another 20 or 30 years—you’re looking at a lifetime of carrying student loan debt in some form,” Trawinski said. “Depending on one’s income level, that that can really hamper the ability to have financial security” in retirement.

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Concern over where those trend lines are headed prompted AARP to update its policy agenda last year to include a new focus on higher education, calling for greater transparency in how colleges set tuition and fees, more state and federal spending on higher education, and regulations to reign in for-profit colleges with poor outcomes.

AARP is also lobbying in several states, such as New York and Maine, to pass new laws aimed at cracking down on predatory practices by companies that are collecting student loan payments. The efforts to more tightly regulate student loan servicers at the state level have been met with opposition from industry groups and, recently, the Trump administration.

A more pressing concern for some older loan borrowers is Social Security garnishment, which AARP has long opposed. Student loans are harder for borrowers to discharge than other kinds of debt, and federal law allows the Education Department to reduce safety-net benefits to recoup defaulted federal student loans—a collection power that’s increasingly been used as more older borrowers fall behind on their payments. In the 2015 fiscal year, according to the Government Accountability Office, the government garnished the Social Security benefits of almost 114,000 student loan borrowers over 50 years old, reducing their benefits, on average, by more than $140 per month.

Older Americans have had their Social Security payments garnished to pay back student loans— a problem that has drawn AARP into the debate over the rising level of student loan debt. | Getty Images

Senate Democrats, led by Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have introduced legislation that would take away the federal government’s power to garnish Social Security benefits to collect debts like student loans.

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, a nonprofit advocacy group that lobbies to protect seniors’ benefits, is backing the legislation to stop garnishment. Dan Adcock, the organization’s director of government relations and policy, sees student loan debt as another wrinkle in an overall retirement crisis driven largely by stagnant wages and employers who no longer offer retirement benefits. “On top of that you have student loan debt, and that’s going to make your situation even worse in terms of saving for retirement,” he said.

When it comes to debt’s impact on retirement, mortgage and credit card debts still rank higher than student loans among today’s retirees in dollar terms. But student debt is growing quickly: The number of American borrowers over age 60 jumped from about 700,000 to 2.8 million between 2005 and 2015, according to a CFPB analysis of data from the New York Federal Reserve.

The increase has largely been fueled by borrowers who are helping their children or grandchildren pay for college, though roughly a quarter of the debt owed by older borrowers was used to fund their own education.

Geoff Sanzenbacher, associate director of research at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, sees the erosion of retirement savings from student debt as a compounding problem. College graduates with student loans accumulate just half as much in retirement savings by age 30 as graduates without debt, according to forthcoming research by Sanzenbacher and his colleagues. And other studies show that student loan borrowers tend to delay homeownership. The result is future generations will enter retirement having saved less and with less home equity—and possibly gearing up to take on new debt to help pay for their kids’ education.

College graduates now entering the workforce will face “a double whammy of their own student loans stalling them in the beginning—and then their kids’ student loans potentially stalling them later on,” he said. “It’s going to be a bigger problem in the future than it has been so far.”

But the solutions are less clear. As AARP wades into student loan debt, it’s taking on an issue that policymakers on both sides of the aisle have struggled to address. Democrats have responded to growing concerns about student debt and the cost of college in the most recent presidential election with calls for billions of dollars in new federal investment in public colleges and universities so that schools could eliminate tuition for some students. They’ve also proposed, more modestly, to reduce payments for student loan borrowers by lowering the interest rate on existing debt.

Senate Democrats — including Sherrod Brown of Ohio, left; and Ron Wyden of Oregon, right — are sponsoring legislation to prevent the federal government from garnishing Social Security payments to pay off student loans. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

Some conservatives, meanwhile, have called for a greater federal focus on less expensive alternatives to four-year college degrees. They’ve also blamed the availability of federal student aid for driving up the cost of college while calling for greater transparency about college costs. Lawmakers from both parties have floated proposals that would put some colleges and universities on the hook for how well their graduates are able to repay their federal student loans.

The biggest dust-up over student debt issues in Washington right now is over the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era borrower protections and rules on for-profit schools that conservatives believe went too far. But more sweeping action from Congress that addresses the underlying issues of student debt isn’t likely anytime soon.

So, what might spur lawmakers to a fresh round of action? It’s strange to think that seniors may be a key to getting politicians to tackle college debt, but the gray wave is only getting bigger. And far more than college students and 20-somethings, older Americans really do show up and vote.

Michael Stratford is an education reporter for POLITICO Pro.

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