A group of for-profit colleges have lost their bid to overturn a legal settlement that cancels $6 billion in student debt for more than 230,000 borrowers.
In a decision issued Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the colleges didn’t have standing to challenge the settlement that was approved in November 2022.
The settlement resolved a long-standing class action lawsuit over the Education Department’s backlog of hundreds of thousands of unprocessed applications filed under a process called “borrower defense,” which offers debt cancellation to students whose colleges use misleading advertising or otherwise commit fraud….