by Thomas Gokey, HELU Delegate from the Debt Collective
HELU member organization the Debt Collective began in 2014 with a campaign to organize students who had been defrauded by predatory for-profit universities. Fifteen people went on a debt strike and nearly 10,000 more filed claims with the Department of Education. All these debtors demanded the Department of Education enforce – for the first time – a little known provision of the Higher Education Act called “borrower defense” that requires the government to discharge fraudulent student loans.
The fight has been long. During the first Trump administration, indebted students had to sue the Department of Education when they simply refused to process claims. The Project on Predatory Student Lending has represented these students valiantly across three presidential administrations. It is now the largest class-action lawsuit in US history. Just this month (August 2026), an additional 170,000 student debtors will be getting full cancellation.
The personal, financial, and emotional of weight of this debt cannot be overstated. Many of our members have been denied mortgages for no other reason than their debt-to-income ratio was out of whack from these fraudulent student loans. Some have lost their housing because of this debt.
Jessica Madison was one of the original student debt strikers. Jessica’s bravery helped win this cancellation for everyone. Everyone should know her name. But Jessica couldn’t afford to see a doctor because of these debts. Her wages had been garnished for fraudulent debt for Corinthian College even after her loans were approved for cancellation. We never got a full refund for her. By the time she did see a doctor, her cancer had advanced too far to save her. The emotional and psychological burden from these debts can be crushing. But getting organized and meeting other debtors in the same situation has been empowering.
When the debts get cancelled, it is also impossible to overstate how transformative and liberating that is. People have texted me from the factory floor telling me they broke down weeping when they got the news their debts will be cancelled. It has allowed people to go back to school to get the real education these fraudulent schools denied them. People have been able to quit jobs, move, start families, buy a home.
One thing we hear over and over is that debtors don’t want to quit until everyone who attended their fraudulent school gets their loans cancelled. The people included in this record-breaking class action are people who took the steps to fill out complicated forms to ask the government to do what they should be doing automatically: enforcing the laws and cancelling debts they already have evidence are fraudulent. But many people who attended the same schools never filled out that complicated paperwork because the government never told them it was even an option.
There are many lessons to learn from this fight. It was long. If not for the Project on Predatory Student Lending doing long, hard, often thankless and overlooked work fighting the legal fight, this victory never would have come to be. Nothing was instant. Nothing was easy. But seeds planted by debt strikers in 2015 have now liberated hundreds of thousands of people from tens of billions of dollars of debt. The course ahead is clear: we need to cancel all student debt, cut off federal funding to fraudulent for-profit universities, and fully fund all public colleges and universities so that future generations of students never have to take on a penny of student debt ever again. That fight is not going to be easy or quick. But if we organize and stick with it, we can win.
Even under the Trump administration we can still win billions of dollars of student debt cancellation. This is still just the tip of the iceberg – there are hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent debt from for-profit universities that should rightfully be cancelled if the law is enforced across the board. This victory demonstrates that massive wins are possible if we never give up and stick with it for the long term.