Nearly 300 former Charlotte School of Law students are now eligible to have their federal loans forgiven. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says that includes former students who withdrew on or after December 31, 2016.
The Department of Education has a protocol for dealing with school closures. It forgives the federal loans of students who withdrew within 120 days of the school closing. But on Friday DeVos made an exception for Charlotte School of Law and expanded that window.
The for-profit school was forced to close last August, eleven years after it opened. At that point, the school had been operating for eight months without federal loan money. The department yanked that money shortly after the American Bar Association put the school on probation for its low bar passage rate and accepting too many unqualified students. So DeVos decided to nearly double the typical window for forgiving loans to December 31, 2016 .
That means nearly a dozen additional former students are eligible to have their federal loans forgiven.
“Several students, through no fault of their own, fell through the cracks as Charlotte School of Law closed. It’s important that they, too, are made whole,” Devos said in a statement.