A borrower defense to repayment (“borrower defense”) allows borrowers who were misled, defrauded, or subject to illegal behavior by their school to discharge the federal student loan debt they borrowed to attend the school. Borrowers can request a discharge by submitting an application to the Department of Education (“ED”) detailing the school’s misconduct. Given recent […]

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 […]

On July 1, 2020 the Department of Education’s newest borrower defense rules went into effect and made it much harder for defrauded borrowers to get loan relief. The Department of Education falsely claimed that it needed new rules to guard against students’ “frivolous” claims, even though it provided no evidence that students were submitting frivolous […]

Today, new U.S. Department of Education (the Department) regulations will go into effect, erasing many of the protections students had against school fraud. These regulatory changes could not have come at a worse time. As students are trying to weather the economic instability caused by the coronavirus, the Department has given predatory schools the green […]

On March 11, 2020, Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to preserve student loan borrower protections put in place in 2016 (often called the “borrower defense rule or rules”) and to overturn new rules from the current U.S. Department of Education (“the Department”) that would strip away those protections and make it nearly impossible for borrowers […]

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 […]

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 […]

As recently as this April, we explained that Congress chose not to roll back the important protections for defrauded student loan borrowers provided by the Department of Education’s borrower defense rules. Unfortunately, the Department has not only delayed implementation of the bulk of the borrower defense and gainful employment rules, but has also announced that […]

Advocates for student loan borrowers breathed a sigh of relief on March 30, when the deadline passed for Congress to introduce a resolution to roll back the new “borrower defense” rules.  These rules are designed to protect students and taxpayers from harm by predatory schools.  After rumblings from Washington that these rules would be in […]