In the past 15 years, students at schools such as Corinthian and University of Phoenix have taken out loans at drastically higher rates. What are they getting for their money?

In February, Patricia Ann Bowers told ThinkProgress that she owed about $57,000 in student-loan debt. The now-54-year-old mother was a student at Everest College-one of several institutions owned by the for-profit operation, Corinthian College. During her time there, Bowers’s son committed suicide. When she asked about taking time off, she was strongly discouraged and was assured that if she failed her current classes, she could retake them for free. But that wasn’t true, and after Bowers paid to repeat coursework, the school shut down leaving her with a mountain of debt, no degree, and near her federal borrowing limit.

Bowers is only one of the more than 10,000 Corinthian students asking the government to discharge their student loans in the wake of the school’s closure. So far, they have been somewhat successful, with the Department of Education agreeing to erase the debt of about 3,000 former students in the first wave of loan forgiveness. Together, all of the school’s students owe more than $3 billion.Continue reading→