Many borrowers with federal student loans also carry balances on loans owed to private companies. Students take out private loans to cover the cost of education, to pay for living expenses while in school, and in response to aggressive marketing by for-profit schools and private lenders. Unlike...

I wrote five years ago that “There is no amount of incremental reform that can fix the broken government student loan system. The time for tweaking is long past.” At that time, the Bipartisan Policy Center listed the following failings of student debt: “Too many students rely excessively...

A team of researchers at the University of Memphis and the University of Michigan released the results of a groundbreaking analysis revealing the massive personal benefits that student loan borrowers enjoy as they approach and, in particular, as they achieve debt cancellation through the Public...

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Education, the Student Borrower Protection Center (SPBC), National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), and Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) offer comments on proposed regulations to implement new statutory requirements to establish Federal Pell Grant (Pell Grant)...

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were approximately 7.7 million student loan borrowers in default on approximately $168 billion in federally-held student loans, including Federal Family Education Loans (“FFEL”) and Direct loans. Though borrowers have in theory been able to get out of...

This report investigates a decades-long scheme by the student loan industry to rob borrowers of their right to debt relief on many types of private student loans. Despite industry-perpetuated misconceptions, only a specific subset of private student loans face heightened scrutiny in bankruptcy....

The results of an investigation by the Student Borrower Protection Center offer new evidence that for-profit coding bootcamps and ISA companies may be systemically violating federal law by omitting a legally mandated term from the contracts underlying students’ ISAs—language required under...

A cornerstone of for-profit schools’ business model is to encourage students to borrow as much as possible to finance their college attendance. After drawing people in with misleading advertisements, for-profit colleges quickly hand prospective students off to financial aid officers who rush...

This report synthesizes research, public records, and largely-overlooked documentary evidence from the Department of Education to identify various glaring warning signs that Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) is failing millions of borrowers who have been in repayment for decades on federal student...

This report examines the role that the use of alternative documentation of income (ADOI) plays in driving racial disparities in access to Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) for student loan borrowers. In doing so, it underscores how breakdowns in IDR are a clear civil rights issue.In order to enroll...