While you cannot get a student loan cancelled due to the fact that you did not enjoy your time at a particular educational institution, there are some instances in which you can get a “bad school” debt cancellation for all or a portion of your student loans. In order to get this type of loan forgiveness, you need to be able to document that your school failed to meet certain universal requirements that the federal government requires of schools in order for their students to be eligible for student loans. If you are simply dissatisfied with the caliber of instruction or the quality of the learning environment, this is not grounds for student loan forgiveness. However, documentation of these poor circumstances can be used as a defense to collection, which we will discuss in another article.

In order to get a student loan debt cancelled due to problems with your school, you must meet some or all of the following criteria:

• Your school closed while you were enrolled or within 90 days of your withdrawal from classes.

This is only an option for loans taken out after 1986. Furthermore, the entire institution must have closed, making it impossible for you to complete the degree program in which you were enrolled. If the school simply closed the branch that was most convenient to you, then you are not eligible for this discharge. If you do qualify for a school closure loan discharge, you may also be eligible for refunds of part or all of the associated loan fees and payments that you have made up to this point.

Note: If you were on a leave of absence when your school closed, then this discharge program considers you still enrolled in the school and you may be eligible for forgiveness of some or all of your loans.

• You or your school were falsely certified.

False certification can mean a variety of things. It can mean that an accredited school admitted you without verifying that you had “the ability to benefit” from the education they were offering. Usually this means that you were admitted without a high school diploma or a G.E.D., or that the admissions test that the school administered to determine if students would be accepted was somehow unorthodox, such as answers were given out, too much time was allowed or the content simply was not challenging enough to indicate whether the test-takers could perform at a college level.

False certification can also mean that you were not able to benefit from the training program that you enrolled in due to a physical condition that prevented you from executing the training in its entirety. If a school accepted you in spite of this condition, then you may not be required to repay your student loans.

• Your identity was stolen.

If your identity was stolen and someone enrolled in school and took out student loans using your identity, you must conclusively prove using court documents that you were the victim of an identity crime. You must have reported the crime immediately. While you may not be able to get the loan discharged, it can be found “unenforceable,” which means that the lender cannot require you to pay and must report to the credit bureau that you are not liable for the debt.

As you can see, a “bad school” loan has more to do with schools allowing you to pay tuition under suspect circumstances than it does with a school actually having poor instruction or resources. If you feel that you did not receive a valid education at a school but do not meet the requirements for a discharge due to the problems described above, you do have some recourse. However, this process can be long and difficult, so we will address it in a separate article.