Betsy DeVos stalled Obama’s student loan relief program. Borrowers hope Biden will fix it
But the Trump administration, which disagrees with the policy, allowed a massive backlog of more than 200,000 claims to pile up — leaving some borrowers waiting throughout the entire administration to hear whether they’ll get a break.
“As each year went by, I became a little less hopeful. I feel like I’ve lost my faith in the government,” said Sanchez Norton, who received a photography degree from the now-defunct Brooks Institute in California.
She and others say the school misled them with inaccurate claims about graduates’ salaries and job placements. Sanchez Norton’s credits weren’t accepted by California state colleges when she returned to school after failing to find a high-enough paying job. She’s now a licensed mental health counselor.
Sanchez Norton, who was a single mom at the time she attended Brooks Institute, says her debt not only devastated her finances but also strained family relationships. Her loan payments are paused due to pending litigation but the interest still accrues and she can’t get approved for a car loan or a mortgage with her high debt-to-income ratio.
“The rule from the Obama administration seemed like it really acknowledged that there are schools out there preying on students. But now it feels like the government is saying what happened is OK and doesn’t care about the financial and emotional devastation a lot of us faced for many years,” Sanchez Norton said.
Zero applications processed for more than a year
Students misled by a college with false claims about things like job prospects are legally eligible for debt relief. The idea is that if they didn’t get the education they were promised, they shouldn’t have to pay back their federal student debt.
The Obama-era rule, known as Borrower Defense to Repayment, clarified the process for those seeking relief. The number of these applications soared as the Obama administration cracked down on for-profit colleges.
The rule has been in limbo throughout the entire Trump administration. For about 15 months between 2018 and 2019, zero applications were processed while the total pending grew at one point to more than 200,000.
Judge: Denials are ‘Kafkaesque’
This past April, the administration finally agreed to process the pending applications within 18 months as part of a settlement agreement in a class action lawsuit over the stalled claims brought by Harvard’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.
The department sped through 74,000 over the summer — yet rejected 94% of the claims without much of an explanation.
That prompted US District Judge William Alsup to reject the settlement agreement in October. He called the denials “Kafkaesque,” nothing that after months of delay, DeVos had begun issuing “perfunctory” form denial notices at “breakneck speed.”
After three and a half years without hearing anything about her claim, Sanchez Norton was one of those borrowers who received a denial over the summer.
After submitting dozens of documents to show Brooks Institute misled her, she said it “felt so callous” to receive a denial letter that looked like thousands of others. Despite the judge’s rejection of the settlement, she’s given up hope that she’ll receive any debt relief at this point.
130,000 people waiting for a ruling
More than 131,000 borrowers have been denied, but another 130,000 were still pending as of September, the most recent available data. About 61,000 people have received some debt relief valued at $563 million since 2016.
“I think I have developed some kind of anxiety over this. I’m constantly reading articles about it,” said Morgan Marler, who applied for loan forgiveness three years ago.
She belongs to one of several Facebook groups where borrowers post updates from lawyers, news articles, notices from loan servicers and generally commiserate.
Marler had trouble finding a job when she graduated from ITT Tech with an associate’s degree in information technology in 2016. Soon after, the Department of Education pulled the plug on ITT Tech’s federal funding because it failed to address its accreditor’s concerns. The school closed its doors two months after she finished, casting doubt on the quality of her degree.
Other schools won’t accept her credits from ITT Tech and she’s too scared to take on more debt to earn another degree. Instead, her husband decided to rejoin the Army and she stays home to take care of their 6-year-old daughter, who was just 3 years old when she applied for the debt forgiveness.
Biden administration could change the rule back
Even if the borrowers’ lawsuits aren’t successful, it’s possible the Biden administration will make it easier for defrauded students to seek debt relief again.
Rewriting the entire rule again could take time. But there are some things Biden could do more quickly. Currently, some students qualify for automatic loan forgiveness if their school closes. The administration could extend that eligibility to borrowers like Marler, who finished before the school shut down.
Progressive Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are already pressuring Biden to go further, calling on him to cancel $50,000 in student loan debt for every borrower.
But Biden may be reluctant to wipe away debt unilaterally and prefer it come from Congress — which will remain divided unless Democrats sweep two runoff Senate elections in Georgia on January 5.