Court Orders Betsy DeVos To Finally Cancel Millions in Student Debt After She & GOP Delayed for Years

Around $150 million in student loans will be cancelled in accordance with an Obama-era rule that is being implemented by the Department of Education after over a year of Betsy DeVos trying to block it.

The Department of Education said Thursday that it would wipe away student debt for 15,000 borrowers, implementing an Obama-era rule that Betsy DeVos has fought to block for more than a year.  The debt cancellations will total about $150 million.

The Borrower Defense to Repayment rule is "designed to help students cheated by for-profit colleges," and the students having their loans cancelled were attending schools that closed during their enrollment.

The announcement comes about two months after a federal judge ordered immediate implementation of the rule. The judge had sided with attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia who sued DeVos for delaying the rule while she worked on rewriting it.

Which 15,000 current and former students will be included?

Those students who will immediately see their loans canceled were at schools that closed while they were enrolled. About half of the debt was owed by borrowers who attended one of the now defunct for-profit Corinthian Colleges.

The network of schools folded in 2015 after it was fined $30 million by the government for misleading prospective students with inflated job placement numbers. At the time, about 16,000 students were enrolled at its remaining 28 campuses.

All is not fixed; this is just a small victory that required lawsuits after delays that wrecked lives.  There's so many more students being wrong by DeVos and Republicans.

.... the rule also was designed to make it easier for students to apply for relief if they believe their schools misled them, by inflating job placement rates, for example -- even if they weren't enrolled when the schools closed.  Many of those students still have debt relief applications pending.

"This is a good first step, but it's not good enough," said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, a senior member of the Senate committee on education, in a statement.

"I call on Secretary DeVos to abandon her attempts to rewrite the borrower defense rule to let for-profit colleges off the hook and instead fully implement the current rule and provide relief to more than 100,000 borrowers who were cheated out of their education and savings," she said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/13/politics/devos-student-loan-cancellation/index.html