Though thousands of students who took out federal loans from 1986 to 1994 to attend Wilfred are eligible for loan forgiveness, only about 100 applied through the New York Legal Assistance Group. “They just took the money and ran,” said Ms. Rivera, who lives in a women’s shelter in Long Island City, Queens. Most eligible students who are defrauded by schools are unaware that their loans can be canceled, and the department has not necessarily told them. The Wilfred students are getting their loans canceled under a federal law that allows borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness if the schools they attended falsely certified them as eligible for loans. The former beauty school students whom Wilfred falsely certified years ago as being eligible for a federally guaranteed student loan will avoid that debate.

Source: New York Times August 09, 2017 22:01 UTC