On June 16, 2021, President Biden's U.S. Department of Education announced that $500 million of student loan debt will be canceled under the borrower defense to repayment rule for 18,000 defrauded borrowers who attended ITT Technical Institute (ITT). Previously, President Biden discharged over a billion dollars in federal student loans and provided debt relief to borrowers with defaulted Federal Family Education Loans (FFELs).
All of this relief is in addition to pausing student loan payments, reducing interest rates to 0%, and halting all collections of student loans in default from March 2020 to September 30, 2021
In 2016, the Obama administration set up a new loan forgiveness program to help defrauded student borrowers cancel their federal student loans. Under a federal law known as "borrower defense to repayment," if your school, say ITT or a Corinthian College, misled you, deceived you, or engaged in other illegal misconduct that convinced you to enroll or remain enrolled, you can get a full discharge of the federal Direct Loans you took out to attend the school. (34 C.F.R. § 685.206).
On June 16, 2021, the Education Department announced it would approve 18,000 borrower defense to repayment claims for students who attended ITT. These borrowers will get 100% loan discharges, amounting to around $500 million in cumulative loan relief.
The approvals cover two categories of claims that borrowers who attended ITT Technical Institute submitted:
The Department said it will notify borrowers about loan approvals in the upcoming weeks and then discharge those borrowers' loan balances. For more information about borrower defense to repayment claims, go to StudentAid.gov/borrower-defense.
Since taking over the presidency, Biden has canceled around $3 billion of federal student loans. In addition to the loan forgiveness discussed earlier in this article:
Effective date: June 16, 2021