The Higher Education Industry Has a Receipts Problem. Over One Million of Them.

The federal government publishes a report on Borrow Defense to Repayment claims. It usually doesn’t get a lot of press, but recently, it’s been starting to get the press it deserves.

The January 2026 release documents every institution in the country that has generated at least one formal federal complaint from a former student who says they were lied to. The numbers are not a rounding error, and not a story about a few bad actors on the margins of higher education. They are a systemic record - more than one million claims received, nearly half a million still unresolved - of what happens when institutions prioritize enrollment over honesty.

We think everyone in this space should be sitting with that number. Not defensively. Seriously.

This Is Not Ancient History

It is tempting to read this data and conclude that the problem has been solved. The largest offenders - Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute, many of the Everest and Heald brands - are gone. Their closures were dramatic and well-covered. The for-profit sector took its lumps, and the thinking goes that the industry cleaned itself up.

We’d push back on that framing. The schools that generated the most claims weren’t operating in a vacuum. They were responding to incentive structures - federal financial aid dollars tied to enrollment, marketing models built around urgency and aspiration, admissions practices that prioritized conversion over fit - that still exist in various forms today. The brands changed. The underlying conditions did not all disappear with them.

And the institutions still processing claims aren’t all defunct for-profits from a decade ago. Purdue University Global has nearly 22,000 claims pending with no approvals yet. Walden University, Capella University, Grand Canyon University, and American InterContinental University each carry thousands of unresolved claims. These are schools that are open, enrolling students, and marketing programs right now.

What an Approval Rate Actually Means

When the Department of Education approves a borrower defense claim, it is not a sympathetic gesture. It is a legal finding: this institution made materially false representations, and those representations caused this student to take on debt they otherwise would not have.

With that in mind, consider what the approval rates in this data are actually saying. American Career Institute in Maryland: 92.7% approval rate. WyoTech in Wyoming: 87%. Altierus Career College - the rebranded successor to Corinthian Colleges - consistently above 85% across seven states. Everest College and Everest Institute, also Corinthian brands, posting similar numbers across more than a dozen locations.

Those figures don’t represent students who had bad experiences or unrealistic expectations. They represent cases where a federal adjudicator reviewed the evidence and agreed: the school lied, and the student has a right to relief. At 85-plus percent, that is not an exception. That is a pattern.

Chain Schools Made This a National Problem - But They’re Far From the Only Ones

One of the less-examined dimensions of this dataset is the geographic reach it reveals. Empire Beauty School appears as 44 separate entries across multiple states, with nearly 4,000 total claims. ITT Technical Institute: 29 entries, more than 58,000 claims combined. Sanford-Brown, Everest, Heald, Marinello - each running into the double digits for location entries, carrying thousands of claims that follow the chain across state lines.

The chain school model amplified the problem in a specific way. These weren’t regional schools that made local mistakes. They were national systems with standardized admission scripts, standardized marketing language, and standardized claims about what their programs would deliver. The harm scaled with the footprint. That’s not a recruitment failure. That’s a business model.

But it would be a mistake to read this dataset as a story that begins and ends with for-profit chains. The report covers more than 3,500 institutions - and the range is wide. Community colleges, regional state universities, private nonprofits, culinary schools, cosmetology programs, law schools, and graduate programs all appear in the data. Some with a handful of claims, some with hundreds. The through line isn’t institutional type or tax status. It’s the gap between what was promised and what was delivered - and that gap can open anywhere.

Chain schools were the largest offenders by volume. But no category of institution is absent from this list, and no institution should assume it’s immune.

What This Should Mean for Students and Families

The borrower defense program was created because the government recognized something important: that the decision to take on educational debt is only as good as the information it’s based on. A student who enrolls in a medical assisting program because they were told it leads to a specific salary range and a specific job placement rate has made a financial decision on the basis of those facts. If those facts were fabricated, the debt that followed is not a fair outcome.

What this data makes very clear is that the gap between what some institutions claimed and what they actually delivered was not small. It was large enough - and documented enough - for the federal government to agree, in hundreds of thousands of cases, that students had been genuinely wronged.

The schools with the highest claim volumes are largely gone. But the dynamic they exploited - a student eager to build a future, a program that sounds credible, marketing language that makes specific promises - is not gone. It exists wherever institutions are more focused on enrollment than on outcomes.

The most effective protection isn’t skepticism for its own sake. It’s asking better questions before you commit: What do graduates of this program actually earn, and where? What does early career look like - not in the best case, but typically? What are your options if this path doesn’t work out the way you planned? What does the credential get you, and what does it not?

Those questions are harder to answer than a brochure makes them seem. But they are exactly the right ones to be asking.