Domino: A Blog About Student Debt

The practice of building credit products with income-based repayment features and subsequently attempting to evade consumer protection law is rapidly growing. Without action by regulators, ISAs could be the next chapter in the long history of predatory lending.

With respect to student financial services, the need for effective discrimination enforcement is acute: there should be no room for doubt that discrimination is illegal and will be regulated with respect to predatory for-profit schools, exotic education-financing arrangements, fraudulent financial “advisory” services, student-specific consumer reporting, and third-party debt collection of...

The SBPC and coalition partners sent a letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency— the nation’s top bank regulator—urging careful scrutiny of the “partnership” between Blue Ridge Bank, a federally chartered national bank, and MentorWorks, a student financing company that offers ISAs.

Some of the most notorious actors profiting off the student debt crisis are student loan servicers. A a history of lawsuits, shocking investigations, and ruined financial lives makes clear that these companies harm borrowers from the day they get their first bill to the moment they pay off their loans.

Our new report reveals tens of thousands of newly uncovered instances in which federal student loan servicers misreported borrowers’ repayment status to credit reporting agencies in apparent violation of the CARES Act and consumer financial laws such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

A growing body of evidence suggests that the student debt crisis is exacerbating America’s stark economic inequalities, with huge consequences for disparities across race and gender.

The SBPC released a new analysis of a sample of ISA contracts offered by some of the largest ISA providers in the student financing market. What we found was cause for alarm. Despite representations by lenders that ISAs are “not a loan or credit,” our analysis concludes that a typical...

We released a report revealing extensive evidence that the financial technology student lender Stride Funding, may be violating federal fair lending law, illustrating the deep fair lending risks inherent to Income Share Agreements.

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.