This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemita Basso. Today, America's big polarizing student debt problem.

About two decades ago, Ryan Liebenthal graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

This was 2005, and I had something like $21,000 of debt.

A few years after graduating, Ryan decided that she wanted more out of her life and career, so she applied for a graduate journalism program at New York University. It was expensive, but...

They offered me a one-semester tuition scholarship, and they encouraged me to take out loans.

She got her master's degree in 2010 and left NYU with more than $100,000 of debt.

Her first job as a fact checker paid about $31,000 a year.

I was like terribly depressed about it.

And I would just be like, this is just a black hole.

I will never get out of this.

I will never have a house.

I will never be able to have children. I felt worthless.

Today, 45 million Americans are about one in six adults owe $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.

That's millions of people carrying around the kinds of fears

and anxieties Ryan did for so long. So she decided to write about it. Her book is called

Burdened, Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis. I sat down with Ryan to talk about

the student loan system today, how we got here, and some ways to reform it.

She started by taking me back to the beginning to the very first federal student loan program that came about in a kind of surprising way.

The first federal loan program, it's responding to a kind of panic over the launching of Sputnik by the USSR.

And this idea that we are really far behind on our science and engineering capabilities,

and that that's not only embarrassing on the international stage, but is actually dangerous because now the

Soviets can launch, you know, missiles and we can't. And that started this push to improve our

...