TikTok users have banded together to eliminate student loan payments, with “pay off your debt” becoming a new trend on the platform.
According to EducationData.org, as of 2023, the average student in the United States will have loan debt of about $37,338, with private students expected to owe an additional $20,000.
Not only is this a large amount of debt for many, but data shows that “20 years after enrolling, half of student loan borrowers still owe $20,000.”
Now, a new trend is emerging in which TikTok users are banding together to take advantage of the social media platform’s creator rewards program in order to reduce the amount of money they have to pay back on their student loans.
The idea behind the “Pay Off Your Debt” trend is that if users watch each other’s videos enough times, the video will go viral and the original creator will make a lot of money.
User Jake “Jaysenberg” shared that he “did the math” and found that it would take 247 million people watching five seconds of video to pay off a loan.
But to be eligible for TikTok’s program, videos must be one minute long, and Jake solved the problem by eating cereal in front of the camera, since he “didn’t have a lot of content to offer.”
Viewers were quick to buy into Jake’s plan, with one user saying “the students all did it for each other,” and claiming it was “like a pyramid scheme, but TikTok is paying for it.”
Though he ultimately fell short of his goal, Jake posted a follow-up video sharing the results of his experiment, which garnered over 25 million views.
“Did I pay off my student loans with that one video? No way,” Jake admitted, revealing that the video ultimately made him $4,200.
Though it wasn’t enough to pay off all his debt, Jake said the video “was more than I was making in two months at my previous job,” adding, “But technically I didn’t reach my goal, so unfortunately that means I have to keep making content.”
Still, Jake’s video sparked a “pay off your debt” trend that has gone viral on TikTok, with people helping each other out to make small dents in their debt payments — even if those dents aren’t necessarily big ones.
“The friendships that have come out of all of this are just amazing,” Jake praised. “Not just for me, but for other people. Congratulate yourself, give yourself a pat on the back.”
