Statement on Education Department Approving ITT Borrower Defense Claims | Press Release
BOSTON – Today, the Department of Education announced that it will approve the borrower defense applications of a select 18,000 student borrowers who attended ITT Technical Institute (ITT). According to the Department, the borrowers will receive 100 percent loan discharges, resulting in approximately $500 million in relief.
Statement from Eileen Connor, Legal Director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending
"For 18,000 former ITT students who attended the notorious for-profit college – this is good news. However, the Department needs to address the more than 700,000 borrowers with over $3 billion in fraudulent debt from ITT. Come September, it will be five years since ITT filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy court has recognized that all 700,000+ students were scammed by ITT and are the true creditors. Their “debts” to ITT have been cancelled, as have the sham private loans that ITT forced on them. We cannot ask these borrowers to wait another day or pay another dollar toward federal student loans that never should have been made in the first place. This approval of a new category of borrower defense discharges is absolutely a step in the right direction. The Department is right that ITT systematically cheated students for over a decade, but we need more from the Department of Education and our clients need it fast." The ITT borrowers are among the class members in Sweet v Cardona, a lawsuit in which the Project on Predatory Student Lending represents 170,000 borrowers whose borrower defense applications were illegally stalled by the Department of Education. The Project also represents ITT borrowers in the ITT bankruptcy, Villalba et al v. ITT. The Project on Predatory Student Lending has represented more than one million former for-profit college students and won landmark cases against the Department of Education and predatory colleges.
About the Project on Predatory Student Lending
Established in 2012, the Project on Predatory Student Lending represents former students of predatory for-profit colleges. Its mission is to litigate to make it legally and financially impossible for federally-funded predatory schools to cheat students and taxpayers. The Project has brought a wide variety of cases on behalf of former students of for-profit colleges. It has sued the federal Department of Education for its failures to meet its legal obligation to police this industry and stop the perpetration and collection of fraudulent student loan debt.
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