Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Department of Education’s loan forgiveness promise to Corinthian Colleges students could potentially bring relief to thousands of other students who took out billions in loans and believe they were misled.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that certain groups praised the long-awaited plan for its help to borrowers, but some on the left criticized the ‘overly individualized adjudication process’ as well as the complicated bureaucratic nature of the system that would prevent many students from seeing relief.
• Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, who chairs the Senate education committee, opposed the new system, which will stick taxpayers with a bill for damage done by private companies.

Dive Insight:

The Department of Education will name a “special master” to create guidelines for the loan forgiveness process. This person will ultimately decide how many students get their loans discharged based on how hard he or she makes it to qualify for debt forgiveness. If the process favors student borrowers, the department could be stuck with billions of dollars in loans it has already paid out to colleges but won’t get back. Student advocates argue that the Department of Education already failed students once by allowing problem schools to collect federal money in the first place. Corinthian’s downfall came, originally, when the department halted payments to more closely scrutinize its schools, causing a cash flow problem that torpedoed the chain.