About Us

PROTECT BORROWERS

Protect Borrowers (formerly Student Borrower Protection Center) is a team of experts, lawyers, and advocates fighting to build an economy where debt doesn’t limit opportunity.

We investigate financial abuses, take predatory companies to court, and push for policies to protect working people from debt traps. We aim to deliver immediate relief to families while building power and driving systemic change.

Our Team

Why Are We In This Mess

Debt is sold as a pathway to opportunity—a way to broaden access to higher education, homeownership, and the other hallmarks of a middle-class life. According to the sales pitch, household debt aligns the interests of families, private businesses, and government to build a stronger country with a highly educated workforce and stable communities.

This is a false promise. Policymakers and corporations from Wall Street to Silicon Valley embrace debt to the opposite effect—for tens of millions of families, debt now undermines the very opportunity it was supposed to create. This is by design.

Powerful corporations and corrupt politicians push public policies that drive families into debt because debt allows the government to privatize profits while socializing risk.

This has created a two-tiered financial system, rigged to make sure the rich get richer and leave everyone else behind. Families feel this every month when they compare their growing debts to the extreme wealth hoarded by the billionaires and big corporations that are the real winners in our society.

The consequences are everywhere. Student debt has shattered public trust in the federal government and turned higher education into a lifelong financial burden. Medical debt has compromised our healthcare system. Employer-driven debt has suppressed wages and undermined worker rights.

Debt poses an unprecedented threat to families’ economic stability and to the economy as a whole. We’re here to change that.

OUR MISSION

Founded in 2018 by former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau officials, we began as Student Borrower Protection Center to confront the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis, achieving historic wins:

Suspending federal loan payments for 40 million borrowers.
Cancelling nearly $190 billion in debt for 5 million borrowers.
Driving predatory lenders out of the student loan market.

But we know the fight doesn’t end there. By relaunching the Student Borrower Protection Center as Protect Borrowers, we are underscoring that borrowers = workers = people.