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Key Takeaways
- President Joe Biden’s administration will write off more than $6.1 billion in student debt of 317,000 former Art Institutes students.
- The move follows similar actions recently to forgive students who were said to be victims of “pervasive” recruitment methods at other for-profit universities.
- Since Biden took office, about $159 billion of student loans have been forgiven.
The Biden administration announced a plan to forgive more than $6.1 billion in student debt for 317,000 former students of The Art Institutes, on the premise that they were misled.
Students who attended these art colleges between Jan. 1, 2004, and Oct. 16, 2017, will have their loans canceled. The move follows multiple legal actions against the U.S. college chain for its use of “pervasive” methods to entice students. One of those methods included using the multimillion-dollar salary of tennis star Serena Williams, a previous student, to skew the average earning figures of potential graduates.
The U.S. Department of Education reviewed evidence from the attorneys general of Iowa, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, agreeing that the schools and their parent company, made “pervasive and substantial” misrepresentations about employment prospects and salaries.
“For more than a decade, hundreds of thousands of hopeful students borrowed billions to attend The Art Institutes and got little but lies in return,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a press release.
Latest Cancellation for Students at For-Profit Colleges
The action for students of The Art Institutes is similar to other debt cancellations for students at for-profit universities.
Students who were said to be misled by Everglades College, Lincoln Educational Services Corp., and American National University had $6 billion in student loan debt canceled. Attendees of the ITT Technical Institute (ITT) and Corinthian Colleges Inc. have also had their debts forgiven.
The cancellations are part of a broader push by Biden’s administration to relieve the debt burden of student loan borrowers. Since taking office, Biden has forgiven a total of nearly $160 billion of student loans for more than 4.6 million borrowers through different programs, according to White House figures. Of that total, more than 1.6 million borrowers had $28.7 billion of their student debt forgiven because they were “cheated by their schools,” according to the White House.