Borrower defense is the rule that says if your college lied to you, you do not have to pay for the degree it sold. It has existed for decades and, for most of the last ten years, it functioned as a filing cabinet: claims went in, nothing came out.
In 2019 a class of borrowers sued over exactly that, alleging the Education Department had "deliberately and illegally" stopped processing borrower-defense claims. The case became known as Sweet, and it outlasted three secretaries of education. On July 17, a Ninth Circuit ruling closed it out. [1]
The result: more than 450,000 borrowers are having about $23 billion in student loans erased. The class covers students of more than 150 colleges, mostly for-profit institutions, among them the University of Phoenix. [1]
Divide it and the average discharge is above $50,000 a person, which is roughly what a fraudulent degree costs, and roughly what carrying one does to a person's thirties.
What makes this different from a policy-driven forgiveness program, and more durable: nobody decided to be generous. A class of people documented that the government had stopped doing something the law required, sued, and won. The relief is a remedy for a proven failure to process, not an act of discretion that a later administration can simply reverse.
Seven years is a long time to wait for a filing cabinet to open. For 450,000 people, it opened this month.
