By PAUL HAMMEL
Nebraska Examiner
LINCOLN — As part of a national effort to discharge student loans involving colleges that misled students, 1,340 Nebraskans will no longer be required to pay back their debts to one school.
The U.S. Department of Education announced this week that it will discharge all remaining federal student loans that borrowers received to attend ITT Technical Institute from January 2005 through the closure of the school in September 2016.
The discharges involve 208,000 borrowers nationwide who received a total of $3.9 billion in loans. The Nebraska loan forgiveness amounted to about $25 million.
An investigation by the federal agency found that ITT engaged in “years of lies and false promises” in order to profit off federal student loan programs, with no regard for the financial hardship it might create for students.
“The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to stand up for borrowers who’ve been cheated by their colleges, while working to strengthen oversight and enforcement to protect today’s students from similar deception and abuse,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in a press release Tuesday.
The department said that nearly $32 billion in loan relief has been approved for 1.6 million borrowers since Biden became president.
Attorney General Doug Peterson, in a press release Wednesday, said Nebraskans who borrowed money to attend ITT do not have to take any further action — their federal student loans will be automatically cancelled by the Department of Education.