Domino: A Blog About Student Debt

On April 30, 2020, Student Defense and NCLC, with the support of the SBPC, filed a class action lawsuit against the Department of Education and then-Secretary Betsy DeVos, demanding an immediate halt to ED's garnishment of student borrowers’ wages, which the CARES Act had prohibited since March 27, 2020.

With millions of newly unemployed Americans desperate for help, unscrupulous schools and lenders are pouncing. Without substantial, immediate, and sustained action, tens of billions of dollars will flow to predatory programs that will harm borrowers, their communities, and our country for decades to come—just like in the last recession.

The results of a new investigation published today by the SBPC offer new evidence that for-profit coding bootcamps and ISA companies may be systemically violating federal law by omitting a legally mandated term from the contracts underlying students’ ISAs—language required under the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) “Holder Rule.”

An issue brief published by the SBPC and the Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law makes clear that the CFPB already has the power to hold for-profit colleges accountable for many of their worst practices and to protect borrowers from abuse.

The SBPC and the National Consumer Law Center wrote to the Department of Education to call for commercial FFELP borrowers to get desperately needed relief during COVID and for the Department to rectify past and present wrongs that have imposed historic hardship on these borrowers.

Any comprehensive analysis and regulatory prioritization grounded in removing barriers to societal equity must acknowledge the racially disparate effects of the student debt crisis and the decades-long failure to effectively regulate the student loan industry.

The policies put in place by the Trump-era Education Department continue to obstruct critical law enforcement work required to clean up the market.

Unlike federal student loans, these debts do not come with special consumer protections or guaranteed repayment options, and they are not subject to the same current payment freeze. Yet these debts can completely upend a student’s educational aspirations and hang over borrowers’ heads for years.

Throughout the pandemic, millions of borrowers owing hundreds of billions of dollars in privately owned student loans have been left with little or no relief.

Despite the devastating public health and economic fallout caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, student loan companies continue to haul borrowers into courtrooms across the country. Every day, we see more of these unconscionable lawsuits, including cases brought by companies that once publicly pledged to halt these practices in the first...