180 Maine tech school students to benefit from loan discharge
As part of an action by the U.S. Department of Education, Maine students of ITT Technical Institute have been approved for discharge of $2.7 million in federal student loan debt.
Nationally, the department will be discharging $3.9 billion dollars for 208,000 borrowers. In Maine, 180 borrowers who attended ITT between Jan. 1, 2005 and September 2016 will see repayment discharge.
No action on the part of the borrowers is required.
“Education should be an avenue to opportunity and financial stability. I’m gratified that my office could work with the U.S. DOE to ensure that Mainers who were defrauded by ITT Technical Institute will have their federal loans discharged,” Attorney General Aaron Frey said in a news release. “Hopefully this recoupment will allow wronged students to continue to pursue their career goals.”
The announcement is the latest federal action against ITT, which began when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed suit in 2014, accusing ITT of widespread and pervasive misrepresentations regarding job placement rates, transfer credits and programmatic accreditation.
Previous actions related to ITT have resulted in $1.9 billion in discharges for 130,000 students.
"It is time for student borrowers to stop shouldering the burden from ITT's years of lies and false promises," said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. "The evidence shows that for years, ITT's leaders intentionally misled students about the quality of their programs in order to profit off federal student loan programs, with no regard for the hardship this would cause."
The department found that ITT engaged in “widespread and pervasive misrepresentations related to the ability of students to get a job or transfer credits, and lying about the programmatic accreditation of ITT's associate degree in nursing,” according to a separate news release.
The department's findings were based on extensive evidence, including internal ITT policies and records; recruitment materials and brochures; recordings of interactions between ITT's representatives and prospective students; testimony from former students, employees, and administrators; investigative files and submissions from congressional investigators and state offices of attorneys general; and tens of thousands of individual borrower defense applications submitted by former ITT students.
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