The Boston Globe46%
Federal government to wipe out student loans of 170,000 more defrauded borrowers 24%
By Stacy Cowley22%
8/3/2026, 5:33:40 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Representativeness Heuristic, Appeal to Emotion, and Confirmation Bias, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 19.2% saturation with 78 hits. Analysis detected 616 faulty-reasoning hits from 407 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 31.1% and a BS Rank of 24% (20,757 of 27,321 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 76.00% of the article peer group.
More than 170,000 federal student loan borrowers who said they were defrauded by their schools are set to have $11 billion in debt erased, after an appellate court sided with the borrowers and rejected a request from the Education Department for more time to review their claims.
The decision is the latest grant of mass relief in a class-action suit that was originally filed during President Donald Trump’s first term.
The suit centered on federal loans taken out by students who attended dozens of predatory for-profit schools.
The government settled the case in 2022, under former President Joe Biden, and forgave the student loan debts of nearly 300,000 borrowers who had become plaintiffs in the class action.
But the settlement required the government to keep reviewing fraud claims from borrowers who filed after the 2022 deal was announced.
The agreement set a deadline of early 2026: If the Education Department had not adjudicated the additional claims by then, they were to be automatically approved.
In late 2025, the Trump administration asked for an additional 18 months to review the cases.
A federal district judge rejected the request, and last month, a panel of three judges from the 9th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld his decision.
The total size of the class-action settlement has now expanded to nearly 500,000 borrowers, who will have debts totaling $23 billion wiped out.
That makes it -- by a substantial margin -- the largest class-action settlement in American history, according to the Project on Predatory Student Lending, the nonprofit group that represented the borrowers.
It is also, by their calculation, the largest financial settlement against the federal government.
Eileen Connor, the executive director of the nonprofit group, said she saw parallels between this case and the 1998 settlement that required tobacco companies to pay states more than $200 billion to settle dozens of lawsuits over the healthcare costs of treating smoking-related illnesses.
“Tobacco is a toxic product -- and a lot of times, these schools are peddling these loans, and they turn out to be toxic,” she said.
An Education Department spokesperson, Ellen Keast, said the original settlement “imposed an unrealistic deadline” on the department.
“The Department has complied in good faith with court orders,” she said, “and we believe the court erred in not granting our reasonable request.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Speakers
3speakers35%attributed speech265writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageProject on Predatory Student Lending
31 attributed words22% of attributed speech81% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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