Dive Brief:
- The Washington Post reports on the continuing fallout from the closure of Corinthians College, as more than 79,000 former students of the for-profit are still receiving notices for collections on students debts in spite of their eligibility for payment relief.
- More than 23,000 students have formally applied for loan forgiveness, but just 3,787 have received approval, and on Sept. 28, a lawsuit was filed against Secretary of Education John King over the department's continued debt collection attempts.
- “This suggests an obvious failure in the effort to inform students of their rights to a discharge,” said U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren in a September 29 letter to King.
Dive Insight:
This is not the first time the Department of Education has been accused of low effort in the work of informing students of major policy changes, but it is the first time the work hasn't been done following a massive PR campaign to announce the effort.
In 2011, the Department quietly changed the rules of eligibility on Parent PLUS Loans, only for the shift to become a national issue after thousands of students either stopped or dropped out of college due to non-payment. Now, a sitting federal lawmaker is questioning the effort of the agency, and for the institutions working to offer alternative education to former for-profit students, will ED's bureaucracy slow the process for students getting their academic careers back on track?
