by Thomas Gokey, HELU Delegate from the Debt Collective
HELU member organization the Debt Collective got started in 2014. Our organization began 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 an additional 170,000 student debtors will be getting full cancellation.
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.