More than 170,000 borrowers will have their student loan debt erased as part of a years-long class-action battle over about $23 billion in canceled loans.

The Education Department will erase roughly $11 billion in federal student loan debt owed by more than 170,000 borrowers after a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to delay relief for students who claimed they were defrauded by their schools.

More than 170,000 federal student loan borrowers who say they were defrauded by their schools are set to have their debts erased after a federal appeals court rejected the Education Department's effort to delay relief.

A years-long legal battle that left hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers in limbo is ending. 

After a recent court ruling, students who were defrauded by the schools they attended — mostly for-profit colleges that misrepresented the value their degrees could offer students — may soon get relief.

The sprawling case, centered on students defrauded by for-profit schools, has now become the largest class-action settlement in American history.

Hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers have gotten their debts forgiven, or soon will, due to a $23 billion class-action settlement with the U.S. Department of Education.

The long legal battle to erase the debts of nearly half a million federal student loan borrowers who say they were defrauded by their colleges is finally coming to an end, after a recent court ruling in a lawsuit that has spanned three presidential administrations.

Student-loan forgiveness is finally here for thousands of borrowers.

A federal court denied the Department of Education's request to delay student-debt relief for borrowers entitled to relief under the Sweet vs. McMahon settlement. The settlement has allowed for $23 billion in relief for over 500,000 borrowers defrauded by their schools.

The Education Department must proceed with discharging student loan forgiveness for a group of eligible borrowers in a settlement case after a recent ruling from a federal appeals court.

The Friday decision marked a win for about 179,000 borrowers in the drawn-out Sweet v. McMahon settlement. In the ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected an appeal from the Department of Education to alter the initial settlement timeline since they hadn't expected a large amount of applications for loan relief. The borrowers applied in a five-month window stretching from June to Nov. 2022.

The decision is just the latest in the Sweet v. McMahon case, which was originally filed in 2019 under the first Trump administration. At the time, borrowers alleged that the Education Department was stonewalling their applications for borrower defense.

As of this April, the Education Department had discharged or refunded $12 billion for almost 300,000 borrowers under the settlement, the agency said in recent court documents.