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Washington • Rosemary Anderson could be 81 by the time she pays off her student loans. After struggling with divorce, health problems and an underwater home mortgage, the 57-year-old anticipates there could come a day when her Social Security benefits will be docked to make the payments.

Like Anderson, a growing percentage of aging Americans struggle to pay back their student debt. Tens of thousands of them even see their Social Security benefits garnished when they cannot do so.

Among Americans ages 65 to 74, 4 percent in 2010 carried federal student loan debt, up from 1 percent six years earlier, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday at a Senate Aging Committee hearing. For all seniors, the collective amount of student loan debt grew from about $2.8 billion in 2005 to about $18.2 billion last year.

Student debt for all ages totals $1 trillion.

"Some may think of student loan debt as just a young person's problem," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., chairman of the committee. "Well, as it turns out, that's increasingly not the case."

Anderson, of Watsonville, California, amassed $64,000 in student loans, beginning in her 30s, as she worked toward her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She said she has worked multiple jobs — she's now at the University of California, Santa Cruz — to pay off credit card debt and has renegotiated terms of her home mortgage, but hasn't been able to make a student loan payment in eight years. The amount she now owes has ballooned to $126,000.

"I find it very ironic that I incurred this debt as a way to improve my life, and yet I still sit here today because the debt has become my undoing," Anderson said in prepared testimony for the hearing.

The GAO found that about 80 percent of the student loan debt by seniors was for their own education while the rest was taken out for their children or other dependents. It said federal data showed that seniors were more likely to default on loans for themselves compared with those they took out for their children.

The GAO found that about a quarter of loans held by seniors ages 65 to 74 were in default.