Over 15,000 Americans who have been carrying the burden of student loans for schools that have been shut down will soon get notices in the mail saying that their debt will either be repaid or canceled.
The initiative is part of the Department of Education’s newly-enforced “borrower defense rule” which allows students to have their loans repaid if their college was shut down for defrauding its attendants.
According to NPR, half of the people who will be receiving notices of their debt cancellation were former attendants of Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit college chain that closed down in 2014 as a result of its inability to prove that it was offering substantial education for the student aid money they received.
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Though the legislation allows students to file their own claims and evidence of being defrauded, the initiative will also automatically discharge students of their debt if they had been attending a college that closed down between November 1st, 2013, and December 4th, 2018.
Over the course of the last five years, more than 3,600 schools have closed down, which means that collectively, the initiative will end up forgiving $150,000 million in debt for jilted students – and it could end up forgiving millions more.
“There are thousands of students entitled to automatic relief who in all likelihood don’t know it,” National Student Legal Defense Network’s chief counsel Dan Zibel told NPR.
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