Nicholas Hillman is the director of the Student Success Through Applied Research lab at UW-Madison. He said there were thousands of borrowers behind on payments when they were suspended in March 2020.
“So during this pause, we’ve had kind of an artificial view of the significance of student loan repayment,” Hillman said. “And now we’re going to turn the system back on here in a few months, and we’re going to have the same exact problems all over again.”