News Clips

Deputy executive director and managing counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center, Persis Yu, says this will leave borrowers “in limbo” until the Supreme Court hears the case next year.

On Thursday, the Student Borrower Protection Center released a report that found, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by advocacy group Student Defense, that the Education Department continued to garnish student-loan borrowers’ wages after Congress required the department to cease those collection tactics when the pandemic began in March 2020.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request analyzed by the advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center revealed the Education Department continued garnishing people’s wages at least through August 2021, 10 months longer than the agency’s inspector general reported. “It’s a leaky faucet that they can’t seem to fix,” said Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “If the department has no real control, then the system…

Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center, says that this email puts many borrowers back “in limbo.” “[Tuesday’s email] may not seem like a big deal, but borrowers are trying to figure out how to move on with their lives,” Yu says. “And so they’re hanging on these words and these words matter.”

“The letter of the law is clear: canceling student debt was legal when Joe Biden announced his historic debt relief plan in August and remains so today,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center. “In the wake of a series of radical decisions decimating fundamental rights Americans hold dear, the public now rightfully questions whether this court is interested in pursuing justice or upholding the rule of law.

Characterizing the email snafus as “disastrous errors,” the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) wrote to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona last week, arguing that “this stunning and embarrassing display of incompetence by one of the big financial firms that manages the student loan system is sowing further confusion” and is “fanning the flames of misinformation” that have plagued the student loan system. “Errors like this are not only costly and unacceptable, but likely violate…

“This extension means that struggling borrowers will be able to keep food on their tables during the holiday season — and the coming months — as the Administration does everything it can to beat back the baseless and backward attacks on working families with student debt,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, in a statement following the news.

Among 1,500 midterm voters polled by the Student Borrower Protection Center and Seven Letter Insight after the general election in November, just over half (51 percent) said that student debt relief was either the only reason they voted or was very or somewhat motivating to their decision to go to the polls, with 25 percent saying it was very motivating.