By Abby Shafroth and Persis Yu Earlier today, an NPR investigative report revealed sweeping problems plaguing a federal student loan program intended to provide borrowers affordable monthly payments and loan forgiveness after two decades in repayment. The investigation found that on top of previously documented problems with loan servicer misconduct preventing borrowers from accessing and staying enrolled […]

Yesterday, the Department announced an important first step toward fixing the badly broken borrower defense program by rescinding the deeply flawed and unsupported “partial relief” policy adopted by former Secretary DeVos. The Borrower Defense rules were intended to provide relief for borrowers who took on federal student loan debt to attend schools that used deceptive […]

By: Senya Merchant and Alex Elson of the National Student Legal Defense Network (Student Defense) This post originally appeared as an article on defendstudents.org and has been edited into a studentloanborrowerassistance.org blog post. Borrowers seeking further assistance may contact Student Defense at info@defendstudents.org.   Following lawsuits brought by former students of the Art Institute of Colorado, […]

Today, the U.S. Department of Education officially published new rules  stripping away protections put in place by the Obama administration in what is often called the “borrower defense rule.” As a result, students who were harmed by school misconduct or closures will have a harder time getting relief from their federal student loans or holding […]

By Margaret Mattes Tens of thousands of student borrowers unable to complete their educations at the approximately 1473 postsecondary schools or campuses that closed between November 2013 and November 2015 nationwide are now entitled to have their federal student loans immediately discharged—i.e., cancelled. As of October 16, 2018, the U.S. Department of Education is legally […]

This month, in a victory by and for student loan borrowers, a court ordered that the Department of Education had illegally delayed giving effect to an important rule from 2016 designed to protect student loan borrowers and taxpayers from school closures and misconduct.  The court’s order meant that the rule—often called the 2016 “Borrower Defense” […]

By the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, which is representing the plaintiffs in Calvillo Manriquez v. DeVos. This post originally appeared on https://predatorystudentlending.org/updates/update-preliminary-injunction-granted-what-it-means-and-what-happens-next/. On May 25, 2018, a federal court in San Francisco granted former Corinthian borrowers’ motion for a preliminary injunction in Calvillo Manriquez v. DeVos, ordering the Department of […]

Today, the Department of Education announced that it does not plan to implement new rules designed to protect students in online degree programs from being taken advantage of by schools that load students up with debt but offer useless degrees. The “Program Integrity and Improvement” rules (also known as the “State Authorization of Distance Education” […]

By Jane Greengold Stevens and Danielle Tarantolo, Co-Directors of Special Litigation Unit, New York Legal Assistance Group This post originally appeared on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/59a870f5e4b0d0c16bb523c2 and http://nylag.org/blog/2017/08/relief-in-sight-for-defrauded-student-borrowers. Former students who attended the “Wilfred Beauty Academy” in the late 1980s and ‘90s should keep an eye on their mail. Guaranty agencies, servicers, and the U.S. Department of Education are beginning to […]

By Adam S. Minsky, Esq., Law Office of Adam S. Minsky, Boston, Massachusetts This post originally appeared on http://bostonstudentloanlawyer.com/student-loan-management-disaster-strikes/. It’s a scary time for millions of Americans right now. Much of eastern Texas has been declared a disaster area following Hurricane Harvey. Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have been declared disaster areas […]