News Clips

As the talks dragged on, the back-and-forth between the administration and outside groups grew tense at times. Groups complained that the administration wasn’t being responsive to their outreach. But a major strategy among advocates “was to never close doors and to show the administration that when they do good things that help people with student debt they’ll get cheered for it,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.

“I think the administration is structurally attempting to fix many of the problems that have plagued the inconvenient payment system. Whether or not it gets the job done is going to depend on the details,” said Persis Yu, policy director and managing counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center, a leading advocacy organization focused on alleviating student debt.

“The White House is about to ask the Education Department to do something that is extraordinarily difficult, and that is going to have the effect of denying debt relief to low-income folks, economically vulnerable folks, who have the hardest time navigating these complicated paperwork processes,” Mike Pierce, executive director and co-founder of the Student Borrower Protection Center, a think-tank that advocates for universal debt cancellation, told ABC News in an interview.

“Even if you were a hard-nosed accountant who only cared about collecting money for taxpayers, it makes no sense to try and collect a loan by driving borrowers into poverty and preventing them from getting back on their feet,” Education Department Undersecretary James Kvaal said in his opening remarks during a virtual panel held by the Student Borrower Protection Center.

Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, makes the case that clawbacks violate consumer-protection laws, particularly those forbidding unfair lending and debt collection practices, and he’s been eager to find the right case to test his theories. “You have this other body of rights and protections,” he says. “And they’re stronger in many ways.”