Amanda Lynn Tully, 37, hasn't made a single repayment on her $65,000 in federal student loans in seven years. Not because she lost her job. Not because she faced a medical crisis. Not because some catastrophe wiped out her savings. She moved to Prague.
Tully, who holds a master's degree in historic preservation and a bachelor's in art history from the University of Oregon, relocated to the Czech capital just months after graduating in 2017. She couldn't find a job with her credentials, so she left the country and the debt behind.
Her repayment was just $60 a month.
The New York Times profiled Tully's situation, and the reaction was swift and merciless. Tully told the Times she had been on an income-based repayment plan, which would have allowed her to have the remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. Instead of making those payments, she stopped entirely.
"I was never financially stable because I was never taught to be financially stable."
That was Tully's explanation. She also complained that even the $60-a-month payment was "psychologically burdensome," according to the Times. The payments, she said, weren't covering the interest.
"The payments weren't even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating."
So she chose a different path: flee the country, stop paying, and hope the problem resolves itself. She has been working in Prague as an "E-learning content developer" for various companies since 2019 and currently describes herself as "open to work" on her LinkedIn profile. She did not respond to requests for comment.
Social media users on X shredded the Times piece and its subject with the kind of precision that only genuine public frustration produces. One user put it plainly:
"This is just Whole Foods shoplifting. They fancy it a better kind of theft bc they're educated elites and their reasons for doing it are more therapized than the average thief."
Another cut deeper:
"But if you move to another country to escape a $60 a month payment, you're a loser and a whiny b—h."
The Times itself took collateral damage for choosing Tully as a sympathetic figure. One user noted the paper's habit of selecting protagonists who generate the opposite of the intended response:
"The NYT has an uncanny ability to illustrate a 'hardship' story with people who are so unsympathetic that I end up actively rooting against them."
Another user noticed that Tully appeared to be wearing designer headphones in her photoshoot for the Times, prompting the observation: "She couldn't afford $60 a month but could afford Beats by Dre."
Perhaps the most telling response came from a user who captured the political effect perfectly:
"I was already opposed to student loan forgiveness and now I'm radicalized all over again."
Tully is not an outlier. She is a mascot. Recently released figures from the Education Department show that almost 8 million of the 40 million borrowers with federal student debt have defaulted on their loans. That's one in five. The scale of the problem is enormous, and it raises a question the student loan forgiveness movement would rather not answer: how many of those defaults look like Amanda Tully's?
The standard progressive framing presents student debt as an unbearable structural burden imposed on helpless young people by a predatory system. And for some borrowers, that framing contains a kernel of truth. But Tully's case exposes what the movement actually protects in practice: people who borrowed money for degrees of questionable market value, declined to make even minimal payments, and now expect the public to absorb the cost.
A master's in historic preservation is a fine thing to study if you understand what you're buying. It is not a vocational credential. It does not command a salary that justifies $65,000 in debt. Tully apparently discovered this after graduation, which means either she didn't research her field's earning potential before borrowing, or she did and borrowed anyway. Neither version supports the narrative that she was victimized.
The income-based repayment plan Tully was enrolled in already represented a significant concession by taxpayers. It capped her payments at $60 a month and promised full forgiveness after 20 years. The system bent over backward to accommodate her. She walked away from even that.
This is the part of the student loan debate that never gets honest airtime. Forgiveness advocates talk about crushing debt, unaffordable payments, and a generation locked out of homeownership. Those problems are real for some people. But the poster children the media selects keep turning out to be people who borrowed for unmarketable degrees, made no effort to repay what they owed, and treat the obligation itself as an injustice.
The progressive position requires you to believe two contradictory things at once: that these borrowers are sophisticated enough to deserve advanced degrees but too helpless to understand a loan agreement. That they are capable adults who should be trusted with the franchise, a mortgage, and a career, but not with the consequences of their own financial choices.
Tully told the Times she was never taught to be financially stable. She has a master's degree. At some point, the expectation that other people will teach you basic adult responsibility expires. For most Americans, that point arrives long before age 37.
There is something almost poetic about the specifics. Not a border town. Not a developing country where the cost of living might genuinely prevent someone from scraping together $60. Prague. A European capital with craft beer, Instagram-worthy architecture, and a thriving expat scene. The decision wasn't survival. It was a lifestyle.
Almost 8 million borrowers are in default. Taxpayers are on the hook. And somewhere in the Czech Republic, a woman with a master's degree in historic preservation is open to work, hasn't paid a dime in seven years, and wants you to know that $60 a month was just too psychologically burdensome to bear.
