By Marcus Hart
If you’ve got a friend, a cousin, a coworker who went to a for-profit college sometime in the 2010s and has been carrying student loan debt ever since wondering if the promises made to them at enrollment were ever going to be worth anything — I need you to send them this column, because there’s a real chance the answer just became yes.
On July 17, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit unanimously rejected the Department of Education’s latest attempt to appeal its way out of Sweet v. McMahon, the borrower defense class-action case that’s been working through federal courts since 2019. The ruling leaves the district court’s orders in place and confirms something borrowers have been fighting to get acknowledged for years: if the Department failed to decide your loan discharge application by the deadlines set in the settlement, you’re entitled to full relief — discharge, refunds on payments already made, and credit repair. No further review required. No more waiting.
The total settlement is now valued at roughly $23 billion, covering somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 to 500,000 borrowers who filed borrower defense claims after attending schools accused of fraud or deceptive practices. That makes Sweet the largest class-action settlement against the federal government in American history. The Department of Education has been sending discharge notifications out in waves — the most recent batch, roughly 30,000 borrowers, went out the week of June 15 ahead of a court-ordered deadline.
I want to sit with that number for a second, because it’s easy to read past it. Half a million people. Twenty-three billion dollars. And I’d bet the majority of people reading this column right now are hearing about it for the first time.
Why This Isn’t a “Student Loans Are Good or Bad” Column
I know exactly where a lot of my readers land on broad student debt forgiveness as policy — skeptical, and often for good reason. There’s a legitimate argument that blanket forgiveness shifts costs onto people who didn’t take on debt, or who paid theirs off through sacrifice, and that argument deserves a real hearing rather than a dismissal. But Sweet v. McMahon isn’t that debate. This is not a case about whether the government should forgive debt as a matter of policy generosity. This is a case about fraud — about institutions that allegedly lied to students to get them enrolled and government-backed loans disbursed, and about a federal agency that, under multiple administrations now, dragged its feet on adjudicating the claims those students filed in response.
This case spans three presidential administrations. That’s not a partisan talking point — that’s the actual court record. A Democratic administration and a Republican administration both, at different points, slow-walked or contested claims that a federal court has now said, repeatedly and finally, borrowers were entitled to. That’s not a story about one party being soft on accountability and the other being tough on it. That’s a story about institutional inertia protecting itself against individuals, regardless of who’s sitting in the Oval Office or running the Department of Education. If you care about government accountability — real accountability, not the version that only applies to the other side — this is exactly the kind of case that should get your attention, independent of how you feel about loan forgiveness as a broader policy question.
Who’s Actually Affected
The class covers people who had a pending borrower defense application as of June 22, 2022, or who received what’s called a “form denial” — a boilerplate rejection with no individualized review — between December 2019 and October 2020. If that’s you, or someone you know, the Project on Predatory Student Lending has published eligibility FAQs, and the practical next step is confirming your status rather than assuming either way.
I’d also flag this for the advocacy and reentry-adjacent professionals in my audience specifically: predatory for-profit college recruitment has historically targeted veterans using GI Bill benefits and working adults trying to change careers — two groups I write about constantly in this column. If you work with veterans or with people rebuilding after a rough patch, this settlement is worth knowing cold, because it may be the single most consequential piece of debt relief news most of the people you serve have never heard of.
The Larger Point
What strikes me most about Sweet v. McMahon is how quiet its footprint has been relative to its size. Twenty-three billion dollars is not a small number in any conversation about government spending — it’s a number that would dominate a news cycle if it were framed as a controversial new program. Instead, because it arrived as the resolution of a fraud claim rather than a legislative fight, it’s moved through the system with a fraction of the attention.
That’s worth noticing on its own. We pay enormous attention to government spending we’re being asked to authorize, and comparatively little to spending we’re already on the hook for because an agency broke faith with the people it was supposed to serve. Both deserve scrutiny. Only one is getting it.
If nothing else, let this be the column that makes you check. Twenty-three billion dollars changed hands because a federal court said the government owed it — not because Congress voted on it, not because an administration campaigned on it. That’s accountability working the way it’s supposed to, slowly, through the courts, regardless of who’s in power. More of that, please — from every administration, not just the ones we’re inclined to distrust.