They also uncovered an obscure clause in the law governing loans: if borrowers were significantly cheated by their school, they could ask the government to forgive them for the loans. In the same way that a bank evaluates a home before issuing a mortgage, the Department of Education is supposed to ensure that programs that allow it to pay off secured taxpayer loans are legitimate.
Corinthian 15, backed by the Debt Collective, recruited hundreds of students to flood the department with loan relief applications through a program known as “borrower defense until repayment.” . Tens of thousands of Corinthian alumni finally joined the action. In 2015, Arne Duncan, the then secretary of education, announced that the government would eliminate its loans.
But the process dragged on, and by the time President Barack Obama left office, relatively few of the debts had been settled. Betsy DeVos, who served as Secretary of Education under President Donald J. Trump, froze the program and tried to reduce the relief offered to successful applicants.
Mr. Biden reversed those moves, and some 100,000 former Corinthian students have already received their loans in full forgiveness. Wednesday’s action will extend the relief to hundreds of thousands more who had not filed for defense of the borrower. And those who made payments on federally owned loans that are still outstanding will receive repayments for their previous payments, Department of Education officials said Wednesday.
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“It’s been a long time coming,” said Nathan Hornes, a member of Corinthian 15 who attended Everest College in Ontario, California.
Latonya Suggs, another participant in the original strike, said she had conflicting feelings about the victory. “It took too long,” he said. “I struggled for years to deal with that.”
Tens of thousands of borrowers from dozens of different schools are still awaiting decisions on their borrower advocacy claims, some of which were filed six years ago. Some 200,000 applicants, including 130,000 denied in the last year of the Trump administration, are part of a class action lawsuit seeking relief.