Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to cancel the student loans for the 7,200 student borrowers in Massachusetts who attended the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey applied for “borrower defense” on behalf of 7,200 former Corinithian College students as a group application. Borrower defense is the provision that helps defrauded students by giving the Secretary of Education the authority to discharge debt when schools lie and cheat their students.
DeVos refused to forgive the debt and Healey sued Secretary DeVos and the Department of Education for their refusal to accept her application for debt forgiveness on behalf of the defrauded student borrowers in her state. The Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School also filed a similar suit.
Now the federal judge has said the Department must cancel the debt of these 7,200 students. “This ruling is a clear and powerful statement of the rights of student borrowers, and a resounding rejection of the Department of Education’s ongoing and across-the-board refusal to recognize these rights and cancel fraudulent student loans, said Project on Predatory Student Lending Director Toby Merrill in a statement.