REDLANDS, Calif. – A California couple is highlighting a problem with private student loan companies that has them on the hook for nearly $200,000 after their daughter died.     

Steve and Darnelle Mason are struggling to repay the private student loans of their deceased daughter after the 27-year-old died suddenly in 2007 of liver failure. The Redlands couple is also trying their best to raise their daughter Lisa’s three children, now between the ages of 9 and 14.

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Both are employed at a local church – Steve as the pastor and Darnelle as the director – but their modest incomes have left them unable to catch up on their daughter’s $100,000 debt from nursing school, which has ballooned to nearly $200,000 because of late fees and high interest rates. Steve Mason co-signed the loans for his daughter, and is now solely responsible for paying them back, CNN reports.

“It’s just impossible on a pastor’s salary raising three kids to pay $2,000 a month on loans,” Mason told the news site.

With private student loans, loan forgiveness or other options are at the discretion of the lender, and up until the CNN report, all of the companies holding Lisa’s loans had shrugged off the Masons’ calls for help.

When the news site’s reporters called Navient Corp., one of the companies that owns about $35,000 of the debt, the company lowered the interest rate to 0 percent on three of four loans and reduced the total to $27,000, according to the news site.

But Steve Mason said the other company that handles most of the rest of the debt has been uncooperative in helping him resolve his dilemma. In the years since Lisa’s death, the Masons have burned through their retirement savings and have accepted the hard truth that they’ll likely be forced to work well into their 70s.

“We’ve pretty much gone through our retirement (funds) already – we didn’t have a lot saved to begin with and now any extra money goes to the kids, as it should, and then whatever we can pay on the loans, we do,” Mason told CNN. “At my stage of life, I should have a very different lifestyle than I do.”

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What makes matters worse is that even declaring bankruptcy likely won’t solve their problems because student loans are very rarely discharged in bankruptcy court, something Mason thinks is unfair.

“People with other debt from splurging – they can discharge that,” Mason said. “Student loans should really be the one type of debt they do discharge because it’s done to further an education and career. But somehow getting (my daughter) an education has encumbered me for the rest of my life.”

And Mason is far from the only one.

There have reportedly been numerous Change.org petitions aimed at pressuring private lenders into forgiving the debts of students who have died, but so far most have garnered more sympathy from the public than from the lenders.

“There’s been one success story so far, where the brother of a deceased borrower petitioned a bank to stop going after his grieving father for payments, and the loan was forgiven,” CNN reports.

Legislation has been introduced in Congress in recent years to address the problem, but have gained little traction, according to the news site.