Over the past month, the Higher Education Inquirer has chronicled the experiences of borrowers misled by predatory institutions—mainly for-profit colleges—through its Borrower Defense Story Series. These narratives shed light on the deeply personal consequences of institutional deception and a federal loan forgiveness process that is often slow, bureaucratic, and uneven in its outcomes.
The stories are as diverse as the students who tell them, but they share a common theme: individuals who sought to improve their lives through education but were instead left with debt, broken promises, and uncertain futures.
In the first story, “I Did Everything Right. And I’m Still Paying for a Degree I Never Got,” a single mother describes her experience at Chamberlain University School of Nursing. She followed every instruction, met every deadline, and committed herself to a profession in health care. Yet she never earned her degree. Despite this, she remains burdened with thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Her borrower defense application has yet to yield relief.
In “Anxiety & Interest (KH),” another borrower shares her journey with Kaplan University Online. Lured by promises of job placement and flexibility, KH soon realized that the school’s assurances were empty. The debt accumulated rapidly. After transferring to another college and completing her degree elsewhere, she applied for borrower defense, but the outcome remains unclear. Her story highlights the emotional and psychological toll of dealing with deceptive institutions and a broken loan forgiveness system.
The third story in the series, “Modern Indentured Servitude,” critiques the broader system of higher education finance. It describes how students—particularly those without wealth or institutional support—are drawn into debt relationships that limit their freedom, autonomy, and economic mobility. Rather than offering a pathway to security or upward mobility, college becomes a mechanism of financial entrapment.
In the most recent installment, “Fashion Gone Bad for a Private Student Borrower,” a former fashion student recounts how she took on private loans to attend a program marketed with glowing career outcomes. In reality, the education was minimal, job prospects were nonexistent, and her private loans—unlike federal loans—offered no path for borrower defense relief. The result was financial devastation with no recourse.
These stories are not isolated. As of April 30, 2024, over 974,000 borrowers had received more than $17 billion in loan discharges under the borrower defense rule. Many of these were through group claims tied to settlements involving institutions like Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, and DeVry. However, hundreds of thousands of other borrowers still await decisions, and many more are excluded entirely—either because they took out private loans, their schools were not included in settlements, or their claims have been delayed indefinitely.
The Borrower Defense to Repayment rule was intended to protect students from institutional fraud. But implementation has been marred by political interference, legal challenges, inconsistent enforcement, and an overwhelmed bureaucracy. The HEI story series captures what those numbers and legal filings cannot: the lived experience of people who were deceived, indebted, and left behind.
HEI continues to collect and share these narratives—not only to document harm but to advocate for deeper accountability, faster relief, and a transformation of the credential-based education economy that profits from the desperation of working-class students.
Sources
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/i-did-everything-right-and-im-still.html
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/fashion-gone-bad-for-private-student.html
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106530
https://standup4borrowerdefense.com
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/student-aid-policy/2023/10/24/colleges-concerned-about-rise-borrower-defense-claims
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