Should Businesses Help Employees Pay Off Their Student Loans?

Every month, Fidelity Investments contributes exactly $167 apiece toward the student-loan payments of almost 9,000 of its employees. In most cases, Fidelity can make a simple electronic transfer to student-loan servicers, the patchwork of companies that handle billing and other administrative functions for student loans in the United States, of which there are over $1.5 trillion outstanding. A few servicers, though, force Fidelity to issue paper checks for individual loan payments—and if there’s an error, the check eventually gets sent back. “There are definitely issues,” says Akhil Nigam, the head of emerging products for Fidelity’s workplace-investing division. “I think it’s a learning exercise for the recordkeepers as well as the loan servicers.”

Fidelity started offering the student-loan repayment benefit to its own staff in 2016, after surveying its employees and hearing from clients that student debt was holding their workers back from saving for retirement. (Why $167 a month? That totals $2,000 a year, the threshold where employees feel