The Corinthian 15:
Striking their Student Loans and Standing Up for Free College

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By Katherine Russell

A group of former students from the for-profit Corinthian Colleges have gone collective —and are seeking not only to erase their student-loan debt but also to spark a larger movement seeking free higher education in the United States. The group, known as the Corinthian 15, are decrying predatory student-loan practices by declaring a “debt strike” and by so doing have taken the first-ever stance of an organized refusal to pay their federal loans.

In the case of the Corinthian 15, the students are saying that because the company lied to them about job placement rates and payment rates—actions that have already been investigated in numerous lawsuits across several states—they will not pay the federal loans they took out. In a letter to the Department of Education, they call themselves “the first generation made poor by the business of education” and claim “even beyond for-profit schools, tens of millions of students are in more debt than they can ever repay.”

The action comes at a crucial mounting of student loan debt, which is now estimated at 1.3 trillion dollars owed by 40 million borrowers. More than 85 percent of this debt is owned by the U.S. government, which has continuously slashed education funding at the state and federal levels, thus forcing more students to borrow as tuitions increase sharply in a never-ending cycle of ballooning student indebtedness. The Huffington Post reported in 2012 that the cost of a college degree in the U.S. had increased 1,120 percent in 30 years.

With students now leaving college with an average of more than $25,000 in debt, a sluggish economy is further dragged down by their inability to purchase big-ticket items like cars and houses. In fact, student loan debt is fast outpacing all other consumer debt to such a degree that when—not if— it crashes, its reverberations will place the economy in a new recession of massive proportions.

Also noteworthy is a chilling trend of cradle-to-grave indebtedness. According to new data cited by the federal watchdog Government Accountability Office, more than half of federal student loans held by borrowers over the age of 75 were in default—resulting in record numbers of Social Security payments garnished thus bankrupting seniors. Sarita Gupta, executive director of union rights advocacy organization Jobs With Justice, points out in a recent congressional blog for The Hill that “it’s becoming increasingly impossible to age securely in America without incredible wealth, which is further and further out of reach for younger generations.” Given that scenario and the ramifications of escalating student debt, Sarita advocates a complete economic overhaul: “If our economy doesn't work for students, and it doesn't work for workers, and it definitely doesn't work for seniors . . . isn't it time for a different approach?”

In the meantime, movements are sprouting up all over the nation requesting that the government addresses the growing student-debt crisis. Rolling Jubilee, which calls itself a “strike debt project,” has abolished more than $13 million of student debt from Everest College— part of the Corinthian Colleges Inc. network and the target of several fraud investigations—with the larger goal of the complete eradication of student debt, as well as other forms of “predatory lending,” according to its website.

“Access to vital common goods, like education and healthcare, must be available for free, as they are in almost every other wealthy country,” their website states. In order to accomplish this goal, “debtors need to be able to organize together and use their debts as leverage.” As well as supporting Everest students in their actions for complete federal loan forgiveness, Rolling Jubilee has also launched the Debt Collective, “a platform for debtors around the country to find each other and fight back.”

A coalition of the Nation Magazine, Daily Kos, Working Families, Campaign for American’s Future and The American Federation of Teachers recently sent out a series of mass emails petitioning support of the Corinthian 15, as well as cancellation of all student loan debt. The idea of a blanket debt forgiveness—known as a jubilee— has been used throughout human history, from the Egyptian pharaohs to FDR’s New Deal, to level the playing field within an unjust economic reality.

For the Corinthian 15 and a growing coalition of organizations, the joyous relief of jubilee is not a far-fetched—or far-off— notion. According to Jen Kern of Working Families, a student-loan debt jubilee would cost less than the 2001 Bush tax cuts. 

As the Corinthian 15 write in their Department of Education manifesto, ”To current and former college students across the country, we say: we stand with you to demand the end of a higher education system that profits from all our dreams. Join our fight. We won’t pay.” To which the Rolling Jubilee proclaim on their website, “The debtor’s revolt has begun!”
More Information:


rollingjubilee.org
debtcollective.org
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Posted May 2015
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