Jed Shaffer works with homeless high school dropouts helping them earn their GEDs — exactly the public service work that should qualify for loan forgiveness. He borrowed for a master's degree, tried to follow the rules, and still ended up in a complicated mess that took years to untangle.
Where this was said
At 22:38 · chapter starts 22:36
To put a human face on these systemic failures, Lieber turns to the subject he's written about more than anyone else: Jed Shaffer, whom the NYT team affectionately calls 'the patron saint of lost student loan causes.' Shaffer works with high school dropouts, some of them homeless, helping them acquire life skills and earn their GEDs — exactly the kind of public service work that the PSLF program exists to support. He got a master's degree to do this work better and borrowed money to pay for it. He believed he was following the rules for loan forgiveness, making payments correctly, working a qualifying job. He was wrong — or at least, the system was so complicated that it was nearly impossible to know whether you were doing it right. Eventually Shaffer's situation was sorted out, but had it not been, he would likely still be making large monthly payments today while simultaneously trying to save for his own children's college tuition. [1] — Ron Lieber "Jed Shaffer works with homeless high school dropouts helping them earn their GEDs — exactly the public service work that should qualify for…" 22:38 It's a scenario, Lieber says, that no one envisioned when the loan programs were first designed.
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Bobby watching a father hold his baby triggered an existential moment: he and Andrew might be missing fatherhood. They priced out adoption ($40K–$70K private, $0–$2K foster care) and briefly considered adopting a child to timeshare like a condo.
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The manosphere begins with genuinely useful advice — get fit, be ambitious, find a partner. But it rapidly devolves into dominance, misogyny, and crypto university grifts. The most famous manosphere figures are running $50-a-month Ponzi schemes, exploiting the very loneliness they pretend to cure.
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