Exclusive: Education Department data details struggle for students who feel defrauded – Yahoo! Finance
Education Department (ED) data obtained by Yahoo Finance details a backlog of claims from U.S. college students who felt defrauded, underscoring the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions toward U.S. higher education and the regulatory issues inherited by the Biden administration.
U.S. citizens and eligible non-citizens with federally-backed student debt can apply for borrower defense if their college or career school education misled them “or engaged in other misconduct in violation of certain state laws,” according to the ED’s Federal Student Aid office.
Borrower defense applications surged after the Obama administration cracked down on predatory for-profit colleges in 2015 and created new regulations, but the mechanism for defrauded borrowers seeking debt relief broke down during the Trump administration.
An analysis of the new ED data by Yahoo Finance and The Century Foundation (TCF), a progressive think tank that previously obtained and analyzed borrower defense application data, found:
- Students who believed they had been defrauded filed a total of 337,190 borrower defense claims as of December 2020, according to ED data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.