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Across the nation, many individuals feel as though they're drowning in student loan payments, yet some experts argue that the idea of a "crisis" is overblown. Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal takes a 360-degree look at the problem, in the latest video in our "How the Deck Is Stacked" collaboration with Marketplace and PBS NewsHour.

For a generation of students, the college years coincided with rising prices and stagnating middle class wages.

In reporting The Choice 2016, FRONTLINE conducted dozens of interviews over hundreds of hours in order to better understand the people, moments and forces that have shaped Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. FRONTLINE is publishing 18 of these conversations. Taken together, this collection offers new insights into who the candidates are -- and how they might lead as president.

Hillary Clinton and Nancy Bekavac were in a small cadre of women attending Yale Law School in the early 1970s. Visiting Clinton in Arkansas in 1974, Bekavac was taken aback by the role women played in public life -- while men talked politics, women stayed "at the table with the Jell-O," she says. In this interview with FRONTLINE, Bekavac discusses what it was like to be part of a trailblazing group of women at Yale Law School, her long friendship with Hillary and the price she says Clinton has paid for being a pioneer.

Jim Dowd was tapped to manage publicity for "The Apprentice" and its star, Donald Trump, before the show premiered in 2004. This introduction of Trump to the rest of America was "the beginning of [a] potential political career," he tells FRONTLINE. "Oddly enough, firing people on television each week made him likable."

Famed "Washington Post" reporter Carl Bernstein calls Hillary Clinton "the most famous woman in the world." In his biography of Clinton, "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," Bernstein examined her family, faith and record. In this interview with FRONTLINE, Bernstein discusses Clinton's relationship with her parents, the influence of a Methodist pastor who shaped her world view as a teenager, and a secret that Clinton kept for more than 30 years.

Nikki Haskell claims to be the first television producer to have interviewed Donald Trump, and has been friends with him ever since. Haskell helped Trump make connections in New York: "How else are you going to become an important person if you don’t hang around important people?" she remembers telling him in this interview with FRONTLINE.

As a lawyer in Fayetteville, Jim Blair met Hillary Clinton at University of Arkansas Law School. In this interview with FRONTLINE, Blair recalls the Hillary Clinton who first arrived in Arkansas, discusses how a commodities trading deal he advised her on become one of the early controversies of her public life, and what Clinton's reaction to his wife's cancer diagnosis and death reveals about the woman he has called a friend for more than 40 years.

"Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump," says Omarosa Manigault, one of the stars of the first season of "The Apprentice," in an interview with FRONTLINE.

Betsy Ebeling has known Hillary Clinton since the two met in the sixth grade. In the 50+ years since then, she has been there for many of the most pivotal moments of Clinton's life. In this interview with FRONTLINE, she recalls episodes ranging from the time the two went as teenagers to see Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, to her visit to the White House to be with Hillary Clinton as the details of the Monica Lewinsky scandal became public.

There is something familiar about Donald Trump's rhetoric on the 2016 campaign trail, says Sandy McIntosh, a former classmate from the New York Military Academy. He calls it "echoes of the barracks life that we had and that we grew out of."