On  April 6, 2022, President Biden directed the U.S. Department of Education to extend the coronavirus-related payment suspension and 0% interest rate on certain federal student loans for four months. The payment suspension was due to expire at the end of April, but it is now extended to August 31, 2022.   Fresh Start for Borrowers in Default The […]

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 […]

Did you attend a predatory school? Please share your story with us here.  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 […]

On December 22, 2021, President Biden directed the U.S. Department of Education to extend the coronavirus-related payment suspension and 0% interest rate on certain federal student loans for an additional 90 days. The payment suspension was due to expire at the end of January, but it is now extended to May 1, 2022.   Here’s what borrowers need to […]

In August, the Department announced that it would automatically discharge the loans of over 323,000 disabled borrowers. These borrowers were identified through a matching program with the Social Security Administration (SSA). This announcement follows the Department’s 2019 decision to automatically discharge the loans of veterans with a service-connected disability. The VA auto discharge program is […]

On April 30, 2020, Student Defense and the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), with the support of the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education (“Department”) and then-Secretary Betsy DeVos, demanding an immediate halt to the Department’s garnishment of student borrowers’ wages, which the Coronavirus Aid, […]

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 the campaign trail, President-Elect Biden made a number of student loan promises that would alter the lives of millions of Americans. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, he promised to provide wide-spread cancellation to all federal student loan borrowers(here at 1:10, here at 16:22, here at page 26, here). As we have written before, […]

The U.S. Department of Education (Department) continues to garnish the wages of student loan borrowers despite some efforts to comply with the law. One of those borrowers is Craigory Lee A. Jenkins, whose wages continue to be garnished, depriving her of exactly the relief Congress decided she needed when it passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, […]

UPDATE (June 4, 2020): The Department of Education has provided more information about implementation of the CARES Act.  Updates are provided in the text below. **************************** On Friday, March 27th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed and the President signed into law the ‘‘Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act’’ or the ‘‘CARES Act,’’ emergency […]