US DOE Responsible for Student Loan Default Victims

While the U.S. Department of Education is holding negotiated rulemaking for loan discharges with a continued assault on proprietary schools, it has done nothing to help those students wrongly defaulted by its own doing.

Every one of these defaults is an American citizen who is suffering the consequences of a student loan default and the majority these defaults are due to the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) poor management of the student loan program.

For the last 4 years, DOE-managed loan portfolios (Conduit or Put Loans and FDSLP Loans) have had shockingly high cohort default rates.

The DOE ruined the financial standing of several hundred thousand student loan borrowers during the transition to 100% direct lending.

At this point, only Congress can reverse these defaults and correct the situation for these victims and the institutions they attended that also suffered consequences of the DOE’s poor management of these loans. Students should have their credit repaired and all associated fees and expenses from the default status returned to the student or used to pay down the loan balance.