The Student Loan Payment Pause Helped Journalists Navigate A Precarious Industry

For Kyle Perrotti, a journalist and editor in western North Carolina, the student loan pause of 2020 coincided with some of the most important reporting of his career.  

Perrotti remembers March 2020 vividly – the world was falling apart but he had just been given a much needed financial shot in the arm. He has about $80,000 in federal loans for attending Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in creative writing. That’s after the portion that was partially paid for via the G.I. Bill. His wife also has loans. Prior to fall 2019, the two were making it work, assisted by an income-driven loan repayment program, until disaster struck. Due to surgery and then complications following surgery, his wife was out of work and then only able to work half time when she did return in January 2020, taking a big chunk out of their planned budget. 

“We were thrilled,” he said of first hearing about the loan pause.

In spring 2020 he stopped freelancing on the side, which he attributes in no small part to the loan pause and additional pandemic aid. After a stint on unemployment while furloughed, he returned to his reporting job at the regional newspaper The Mountaineer and was freed up to devote himself to more ambitious stories.

That summer he authored a piece about a Black Lives Matter protest in the small, conservative town of Maggie Valley, chronicling the protest’s reactionary backlash. “It was honestly heinous, the things that I saw,” he recalled.