The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued results from its Student Loan Borrower Survey, providing insights into the effects of student loan debt relief programs and the challenges borrowers face in navigating repayment options. The survey, conducted between October 2023 and January 2024, gathered data from a representative sample of student loan borrowers as the federal […]
Category Archives: Student Loans
The future, they say, is the hardest thing to predict. With that caveat, what can we expect from a second Trump administration for consumer prediction? Some quick thoughts: President-elect Trump will surely ask CFPB Director Rohit Chopra to resign so that he can replace Chopra with someone he prefers. Despite the fact that Vice President-elect […]
In a long-running litigation filed in Pennsylvania federal district court, the CFPB today filed a proposed stipulated order, which, if entered, would largely remove Navient from the federal student loan market, and require the company to pay a $20 million penalty and provide $100 million in relief to borrowers. The case includes allegations that Navient […]
A federal court this month issued an order, in a case filed by the Federal Trade Commission, to temporarily stop a predatory student loan relief scam that targeted Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking borrowers. According to the FTC’s complaint against USA Student Debt Relief/Start Connecting SAS, operating out of Florida and Cali, Colombia, these entities falsely represented […]
The essay, by Mark Rivett, who both attended a for-profit college and taught at one, is titled I was Trapped in For-Profit College Hell (behind paywall). It’s subtitle is “Predatory schools tricked students like me into assuming huge debt for worthless credit.” Here’s the beginning: “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject […]
The National Consumer Law Center has released a student-loan toolkit. According to NCLC, it is “a free online resource to help borrowers navigate the student loan system and manage their debt. It’s also a resource for financial counselors, legal aid attorneys, and other advocates who advise borrowers on the options and strategies for their loan […]
I’m not always consistent about whether I consider student loans part of consumer law. Government student loans are, as the name implies, a government program, rather than a consumer program. But sometimes I think of them as part of consumer law, perhaps because we also have private student loans or because the loans are used […]
Since 1994, the Department of Education has had a process for discharging federal student loan debt where students show they were defrauded or misled by the schools they attended- referred to as the “borrower defense” process. The Biden Administration’s borrower defense rule is currently on hold as a result of a Fifth Circuit opinion. But even […]
The Department of Education today approved roughly $6 billion in student loan relief for more than 300,000 students who attended The Art Institutes, a network of for-profit colleges that was plagued by fraud allegations before completely shutting down in September 2023. The chain’s parent company, Education Management Corporation, reached a nearly $100 million settlement with […]
As many of us feared, those who support student loan debt have used the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Biden administration’s broad-based loan cancellation scheme to attack any debt relief offered by the Department of Education, regardless of statutory basis or how targeted it may be. Yesterday, in a rambling complaint including, for some reason, […]