Total victory for Corinthian’s victims
By 
For seven years, a collection of 15 “debt strikers” from the defunct for-profit education chain Corinthian Colleges have refused to pay back their student loans, after being duped into enrolling in schools that lied to them about the value of their degrees. The Corinthian 15 would eventually be joined by thousands of debtors from across the country, helping to spur a movement around the way America finances higher education.
Now, they have finally won what they asked for from the beginning.
The U.S. Education Department will announce tomorrow that it will grant blanket, automatic debt cancellation to all students of Corinthian Colleges, which disbanded in 2015 after a host of state and federal investigations into its misleading marketing and job placement claims. The department will also refund all borrowers with outstanding balances on their loans for payments they made.
This will affect all borrowers who attended Corinthian schools and took out loans from 1995 to 2015, and is expected to lead to $5.8 billion in discharges to 560,000 borrowers. That’s on top of the 100,000 Corinthian debtors who have already received full or partial relief. Vice President Kamala Harris, who as California attorney general was the first to file suit against Corinthian for illegal conduct against students, will make the announcement tomorrow.
For-profit education is generally a massive scam, and Corinthian was a particularly egregious case. It shouldn’t have taken this long to make the borrowers whole — thank you Betsy DeVos! — but it’s good that it happened.