California led the nation in 2020, outlawing a debt collection practice that sometimes kept low-income college students from getting jobs or advanced degrees. Any community college whose website still shows the unpaid debt warning is doing so in error, the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office said. When colleges choose to withhold transcripts, the burden falls more heavily on low-income students and students of color , according to the American Assn. In California, some community colleges used federal COVID relief money to forgive students’ debts. Transcript withholding was never an especially effective collection tool for schools, researchers have found.

Source: Los Angeles Times December 24, 2025 06:32 UTC