Ms. Kelley found work as a teacher at a public school. To be eligible for the highest possible salary, she needed additional graduate work, which she borrowed to complete. By staying enrolled in graduate school from 1999 to 2004, she was able to again put off repaying her older loans. But the interest charges continued, compounding every year. Graduate school and child care added $60,700 to the principal.

Reaching $194,603

For those keeping track, the loans totaled $194,603 by April 2005.

Ms. Kelley’s husband worked in the construction industry. In 2005, the family moved to Laredo, Tex., following the great American housing boom. The Great Recession was devastating. Facing home foreclosure, Ms. Kelley cashed out her public teacher retirement funds, despite the stiff penalty. But it wasn’t enough. In 2008, she and her husband lost their home, and they divorced.

Ms. Kelley was now several years out of graduate school, and the loans were due. But the federal government allows a borrower to defer payments for up to three years in the case of an economic hardship, which Ms. Kelley certainly had. She consolidated her loan balance, which had grown to $260,000, at slightly more than 7 percent interest.

By this time, Ms. Kelley’s children were reaching college age. One received a financial aid package that included $12,000 in Parent PLUS loans, a federal program that allows parents to borrow money for their children’s college education after the children have reached the maximum on loans of their own. She agreed, hoping to minimize her children’s debt. She briefly enrolled in an education Ph.D. program at Texas A&M before withdrawing, but not fast enough to avoid an additional $7,458 in loans.

Eventually, Ms. Kelley moved back to Missouri, where she found work as a high school teacher in a parochial school. After resolving a long, contentious child care fight with her ex-husband, she finally felt financially stable enough to tackle the pile of student loan documents that had been accumulating. After her loan deferment ended, she enrolled in another, similar federal program called forbearance, also because of an economic hardship. The hardship this time was the loans themselves.

A representative from Ms. Kelley’s loan servicer called this September, explaining that her final forbearance would expire in 16 months. After that, Ms. Kelley said, they told her they would “come after her,” garnishing her wages and eventually her Social Security. She had taken out her first student loan 25 years earlier and had yet to make a single payment.