Tens of thousands of students who attended Corinthian College programs in California and online will be able to obtain debt relief, following a finding that the programs lied about their job-placement rates.
The finding, by the U.S. Department of Education and the California attorney general’s office, means that students who attended a WyoTech and Everest College program in California or an Everest online program between 2010 and 2013 won’t have to prove that they had been defrauded by the defunct for-profit college to receive loan forgiveness. Instead, they’ll simply need to show they attended a program covered by the agencies’ investigation.
Officials of the two agencies said the finding will allow the department to provide relief to more Corinthian students, more efficiently. The 85,000 WyoTech and Everest students join roughly 40,000 former students of Heald College campuses who are already eligible for an automatic loan discharge.
“While we can’t give students back the time they invested in Corinthian, the least we can do is give them the debt relief they deserve,” John King, who will become secretary of education later this year, told reporters on Tuesday.
‘While we can’t give students back the time they invested in Corinthian, the least we can do is give them the debt relief they deserve.’
But the expanded relief still leaves out thousands of borrowers who attended on-the-ground campuses in other states, raising questions of equity. All told, nearly 350,000 students borrowed to attend one of Corinthian’s Heald, Everest, or WyoTech campuses from 2010 to 2015. Corinthian sold many of its campuses last year, and announced that it was permanently shutting down in April.
Ted Mitchell, the under secretary of education, has acknowledged those equity concerns in the past. On Tuesday he told reporters that the department was continuing to investigate Corinthian programs in other states.
In the latest investigation, the department and the California attorney general’s office found that the programs in California and online had inflated their job-placement rates by 1 percent to 100 percent. One program claimed that it had placed all of its graduates when, in fact, it had placed none, the investigation found.
Borrowers who attended a Corinthian program can seek debt relief through one of two avenues. If their institution closed, they can apply for a “closed-school discharge”; if their institution was sold, they can file a “borrower defense” claim seeking to have their debts discharged on the grounds that they were defrauded by their institution.
As of November 4 the department had received 10,100 closed-school claims, and had approved roughly half of them, forgiving $70 million in student debt. It had also received 6,400 borrower-defense claims.
Both classes of claims are being reviewed by a “special master” whom the department named in June.
Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.
