UPDATE (April 2, 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 […]

This past week has been a dizzying array of announcement after announcement related to COVID-19. The world of federal student loans has not been spared from this frantic information overload. Understandably, borrowers are confused about what they should be doing and unfortunately, there are few answers right now. We’ve tried to distill the information for […]

‘The injustice of the federal government withholding disability benefits for people who it knows are totally and permanently disabled and entitled to debt relief is hard to comprehend.’ by Alex Elson Too often, political blinders thwart commonsense policies that everyone should support. That is why the Trump administration’s decision last month to automatically discharge student […]

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” […]

It has been one year since student loan borrowers have been theoretically eligible to have their loans forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. And yet, out of the 28,000 borrowers who applied, only 96 have had their loans forgiven. That is less than 1 percent of applicants. That number is shocking and […]

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 […]

Student loan borrowers who apply to have their loans canceled due to their disability or the death of their child can worry about one less thing: possible tax consequences. When a borrower dies or becomes permanently disabled before paying off student loans, the loans can be discharged, relieving the disabled borrower or surviving family members […]

Defaulted student loan borrowers planning to file their taxes should know that any refund they were expecting will likely wind up at the Department of Education (ED) instead of their bank account. Tax refund offsets are one of the powerful tools the government uses to collect defaulted federal student loans. For many struggling student loan borrowers, […]

With nearly a quarter of federal student loan borrowers in default, borrowers need a system that will help them to successfully repay their loans. Unfortunately, the Department of Education continues to reward contractors that lie to borrowers and to incentivize programs that set borrowers up for failure. InsideARM reports that over the weekend, the Department […]