Then there is Alan Collinge of Tacoma, who for years has described his struggle with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt to anyone who will listen. He has appeared on “60 Minutes” criticizing Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student lender, and has been quoted in the pages of The New York Times and other newspapers attacking loan companies.

“I’m sort of the complaint box for the industry,” says Collinge, who runs a Web site called StudentLoanJustice.org out of his Spartan apartment.

AVERAGE DEBT IS $20,000

Student lending is a big business, one that has been the subject of many complaints over the past two years after revelations of questionable ties between lenders and colleges’ financial aid officers. More recently, tight credit markets raised the possibility that some students might not be able to borrow to go to college in the fall.

But much less attention has been paid to what happens to students after they borrow.

It’s hard to tell how widespread repayment problems are. The overall default rate calculated by the federal Education Department was under 5 percent in 2005, the most recent data available. But that figure includes only defaults within two years of beginning repayment.

A 2006 study by the department’s National Center for Education Statistics followed federal loan borrowers for 10 years, ending in 2003-4, and found that nearly 10 percent defaulted. (The average debt among the two-thirds of 2003-4 college graduates who use loans is about $20,000, according to the College Board.) And with more students borrowing, more students are potentially at risk.

Garrett Mockler filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2004, after months of struggling to make payments on credit cards as well as on $40,000 in student loans. He was working multiple jobs as a teacher, dancer and choreographer in Los Angeles after earning a Master of Fine Arts in 2003.

‘ALL MY BILLS STARTED PILING UP’

His lenders wanted more than $400 a month on top of credit card debt, Mockler said. “All my bills started piling up,” he said. “It was either pay one bill or pay another or not eat or not have a roof over my head.”

He had to scrimp to save $200 for the bankruptcy filing. Then he emerged from bankruptcy and found that all his student loans had stuck with him. While the federal government gave him more forgiving repayment terms on his guaranteed loans, he said, the company that had made him a private, unguaranteed loan had no incentive to negotiate a payment plan with him because he had no way to avoid the obligation.

While trying to learn more about student loans and his rights in dealing with lenders, Mockler said he came across StudentLoanJustice.org, Collinge’s site.

Collinge founded a political action committee in 2007 that was named after the site. His top goal is to have the bankruptcy law changed to put limits on how and for how long lenders can pursue debtors. His organization now has about 3,000 members, many of whom have shared debt woes on the site. Over the past year, he says, he has raised just over $12,000 – a sum that reflects his constituents’ financial constraints.

To raise awareness of student loans, he embarked last year on a trip that took him through 42 states in an effort to meet with staff members of every lawmaker on the Senate and House education committees. Money raised by his PAC hasn’t yet covered his costs.

Representatives of loan companies are not fond of Collinge’s tactics. He has called company executives at home to criticize their corporate policies, and sent the occasional profanity-laced e-mail message to lender advocates.

“He’s had a lot of problems paying his loans back, and he’s spent an awful lot of time out there talking about his problems rather than trying to pay his loans back,” said Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae.

Student loans raise serious issues, Joyce said, “but he’s just the wrong poster child.”

Collinge acknowledges that at least some of the e-mail messages and phone calls he has made were inappropriate, but he maintains that the sentiments expressed were genuine. His words may simply reflect the resentment of thousands of borrowers.

In conversation about anything other than student loans, Collinge, 38, comes across as laid-back and easygoing. He takes salsa and tango classes and goes bicycling in a park overlooking Puget Sound.

Collinge said he did not set out to be a student loan activist. But he backed himself into a corner in his research job at the California Institute of Technology in 2001 by asking for a raise. When he did not get one, he quit.

He said he found himself underemployed and gradually overwhelmed by about $38,000 in federal student loans; his lender wouldn’t grant a forbearance, he said. He had borrowed to study toward his two degrees and a certification, all in aerospace engineering, at the University of Southern California.

He went into default in 2001, and over the next three years his debt, with interest and fees, grew to $100,000. His best shot at a job, involving work for a military contractor, vanished when his debts kept him from passing a security check, he said.

The Education Department said in a statement Friday that it and others had tried to work with Collinge, and in February 2008 offered to waive accrued interest and fees.

Driven by frustrations like the security check, Collinge has devoted himself full time to learning about student loans and has supported himself with various jobs.

He has found out what many a struggling former student found out before him: Short of paying them off, student loans are awfully hard to get rid of.

Without a court order, lenders – or, more likely, collection agents – can garnish up to 15 percent of wages of borrowers who have defaulted on federally guaranteed loans, said Deanne Loonin, a lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston.

Lenders and collection agents can also intercept tax refunds, Social Security payments and even this year’s stimulus checks from the government. “It’s really unbelievable,” Loonin said.

Collinge is not giving up. On a warm and sunny Thursday afternoon this month, a few members of Student Loan Justice joined him to hand out pamphlets in front of the government office building in Seattle where Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of the Senate education committee, has an office.

“I’m fighting the system,” Collinge told one young passerby. The man declined to accept a pamphlet then, but when he passed by again, he took one.