The Department of Education published a list of defaulted Health Education Assistance Loan (HEAL) borrowers in the Federal Register on October 29, 2026. The notice names 574 borrowers who were in default as of August 17, 2026, with each person’s last known city and state, professional field and amount due.

Most student loan defaults stay between the borrower, the lender and the credit bureaus. HEAL loan defaults are published by name under federal law.

This is the first HEAL default list in five years. Federal Student Aid last published the list back in October 2021. The five-year break spanned the Covid payment pause and the handoff of defaulted loan collections to the Treasury Department.

Why It Matters

Landing on the HEAL list can cost a health professional far more than a damaged credit report. Under the Public Health Service Act, Federal Student Aid shares the list with state licensing boards, hospitals, schools, professional associations and federal agencies on written request. The consequences go beyond the usual fallout from defaulting on student loans and could include potentially losing your professional license.

The HHS Office of Inspector General can also exclude a provider in default on a health education loan from Medicare and Medicaid, a serious blow for any practice that bills those programs.

A Congressional Research Service report notes that some state laws require a license to be revoked or suspended over HEAL defaults. Those penalties sit on top of the tax refund seizures any borrower with defaulted federal debt can face.

What Is A HEAL Loan?

HEAL was a federally insured loan program for graduate students in health fields. From 1978 through. 1998, private lenders made HEAL loans to students in medicine, osteopathy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, optometry, podiatry, public health, pharmacy and chiropractic, plus health administration and clinical psychology programs. New lending ended September 30, 1998.

The Department of Health and Human Services ran the program until July 1, 2014, when the Education Department took over servicing and collections. HEAL loans follow their own rules outside the Direct Loan program.

Who Is On The 2026 HEAL Default List?

The 2026 list totals about $92.7 million in defaulted HEAL debt, based on The College Investor’s tally of every entry in the notice.

The average balance is about $161,500, and the median is about $109,000. That average is roughly seven times the typical defaulted federal student loan balance, given the $179 billion owed by 7.8 million borrowers in default at the end of 2025.

Chiropractors account for 308 of the 574 names (or 54%) and owe $40.6 million combined. Podiatrists carry the highest average balance at about $249,000, and 30 borrowers owe more than $500,000. California accounts for 229 borrowers, or 40% of the list, followed by Texas, New York and Florida.

Those totals keep climbing because interest keeps accruing on defaulted student loans until they’re resolved.

The 2026 list is shorter than the 2021 version, but the balances are bigger. The October 2021 notice listed 671 borrowers owing about $98.3 million, an average of about $146,500.

Borrowers can get off the list by getting out of default, though the notice doesn’t say why roughly 100 names came off. The average balance still rose about 10%, and three borrowers now owe more than $1 million, led by a balance of about $1.79 million.

How This Connects

The HEAL defaulted borrower list arrives as the federal government prepares to restart involuntary collections across the entire federal student loan portfolio. The Education Department delayed wage garnishment and Treasury offsets on January 16, 2026. In March, the department signed an agreement that moved defaulted loan collections to Treasury.

On September 30, Treasury and the Education Department launched the Defaulted Loans Support Center, an online portal we covered at launch. Treasury says rehabilitation approvals rose 69% and consolidations out of default rose 95% in the partnership’s first months.

Officials haven’t announced a restart date for all borrowers. An October 19 report from The Washington Sun said Treasury could start contracting with private collection agencies as early as November. Once collections resume, defaulted borrowers face administrative wage garnishment and seizure of federal tax refunds.

To remember that collections won’t immediately impact borrowers in the SAVE forbearance. Time in forbearance is not default. The clock will start ticking once borrowers are forced to move to a new repayment plan and then don’t make payments. For the roughly 20 million other student loan borrowers be in repayment under other repayment plans, they face that risk today.

The HEAL statute has required this list all along, so the notice by itself doesn’t prove a new crackdown. Still, reviving a dormant naming tool in the same year Treasury takes over collections fits a clear pattern: the government is putting its collection powers back to work after the pandemic pause.

What’s Next

Borrowers on the HEAL list should contact Transworld Systems, the collector named in the notice, at 866-568-5978, or the Education Department’s HEAL team at HEAL@ed.gov.

Anyone in default on Direct or FFEL loans should use the window before garnishment and tax refund offsets restart to get out of default through rehabilitation or consolidation.

Watch for a Treasury announcement on private collection contracts, since some officials reportedly favor restarting collections during the 2027 tax filing season.

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The U.S. Department of Education finalized its Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rule on October 29, 2026, calling it the most significant overhaul of federal accreditor recognition in decades. The final rule publishes in the Federal Register on October 30 and takes effect July 1, 2027. Accreditors decide which colleges can offer federal financial aid under Title IV, and that aid totals more than $100 billion a year in Pell Grants and federal student loans.

The Department made no substantive changes to the proposed rule it released in August, even after receiving 7,051 public comments. The rule keeps the text a negotiating committee agreed to in May, and it carries out Executive Order 14279. President Trump signed that order in April 2025 as part of a set of executive orders aimed at higher education.

“These reforms will refocus accreditation on what matters most: student achievement, educational value, and academic excellence,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in the Department’s announcement. Kent also said accreditors have “effectively served as a cartel to protect their interests.”

Why It Matters

The transfer credit rules carry the clearest dollar figures for students. Department data in the rule shows 1.8 million federal aid students switched schools between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 award years. The roughly 60% who got aid at their new school received $8.8 billion, or about $8,300 each. Students who transfer colleges lose an average of 43% of their credits, according to a 2017 GAO report (PDF File).

Those lost credits cost real money. The Department estimates federal aid disbursements would drop by $3.8 billion a year if every credit students usually lose now transferred, and by $1.9 billion if half did. Retaking classes adds to the total price of a degree, and that price decides whether college is worth what you spend.

What Changes For Transfer Students

Starting July 1, 2027, accreditors must confirm that colleges follow new rules on transfer credit, one of the few levers that actually lower college prices. A school can’t reject credit because of where a student took the course, as long as that school’s accreditor is federally recognized.

Comparable undergraduate coursework must be accepted, or the college must give a written reason for each denied course. Students then get 15 calendar days to appeal any denial.

The rule also moves bad news earlier. If a student sends transcripts by the school’s posted deadline, the college must list the credits it will accept and the credits it won’t. It must also estimate the time and courses needed to replace the denied credits. That disclosure has to arrive before the student signs an enrollment agreement, registers or makes a payment the school won’t return under its refund policy.

Schools must post their transfer criteria and list their articulation agreements. They also have to explain how they award credit for prior learning, including credit for military service.

Other Changes In The Final Rule

The rest of the rule targets how accreditors operate, and that matters because an unaccredited institution can’t offer federal student aid. Here’s what else the Department finalized:

• Accreditor competition: Geographic limits on institutional accreditors go away, along with the “two-year rule” that slowed recognition of new accreditors. Colleges get an easier path to switch accreditors or use more than one.
• Outcome reviews: Accreditors must assess licensing exam results, completion rates and job outcomes. They also weigh economic returns against the total cost of attendance using federal earnings data. Families can run a similar comparison with the College ROI Calculator.
• Shorter programs: Accreditors can’t block short-term job training or degrees offered in less time than usual, as long as outcomes are comparable. That opens room for the three-year bachelor’s degrees nearly 60 colleges are pursuing.
• Professional licensing: Programmatic accreditors must separate from affiliated trade associations. They can’t restrict entry to a profession without “clear and convincing evidence” that the restriction protects the public. That provision drives the rule’s fight against degree inflation.
• Intellectual diversity: Accreditors must check that schools have a policy supporting intellectual diversity, including a measure of how students and faculty view the range of viewpoints offered. Accreditor decisions must be viewpoint neutral, with an exception for religious institutions.
• Probation and closures: Schools must tell current and prospective students about probation or other adverse accreditor actions within seven business days. That gives families an earlier look at the warning signs a college could close.

Some public commenters warned that lower entry barriers would help predatory schools win accreditation, the problem behind much of the for-profit college loan forgiveness list. The Department responded that statutory standards are unchanged and that the rule raises the bar on student outcomes. Its analysis also notes that few colleges switched accreditors after the 2019 reforms.

How This Connects

The accreditation rule fits a broader push to tie federal financial aid dollars to results. The Department already plans to cut federal loans to programs whose graduates don’t out-earn high school graduates, and accreditors will now weigh earnings against cost, too.

New graduate school loan limits and Workforce Pell Grants for short-term training both started July 1, 2026.

What’s Next

Accreditors can adopt the new rules early starting January 1, 2027, but they can’t impose new requirements on colleges before July 1, 2027. Agencies that applied for renewal before July 1, 2026, will still be reviewed under the old rules at 2027 advisory committee meetings.

A requirement that accreditors keep office space separate from trade associations won’t apply until July 1, 2028. Colleges are also working on the reform statements McMahon asked every school to publish by the end of 2026.

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Student Defense filed a class action lawsuit (PDF File) on October 28, 2026, against the Department of Education and Secretary Linda McMahon. The suit claims the department has refused to carry out a January 2025 decision that expanded closed school discharge eligibility for thousands of former for-profit college students.

Closed school relief is one of the federal student loan forgiveness programs borrowers can qualify for, but it only helps if the department processes it.

The 2025 decision covered campuses run by Career Education Corporation (CEC), Education Management Corporation (EDMC), and Education Corporation of America (ECA), plus Bay State College. Those operators ran brands like Le Cordon Bleu, the Art Institutes, Argosy University, and Virginia College, which show up throughout our for-profit college student loan forgiveness list.

The lead plaintiff, Kendrick Gaussoin, attended the CEC-owned Brooks Institute and was denied a discharge in August 2026.

Why It Matters

A closed school discharge cancels the federal loans a borrower took out to attend the school, and federal rules require a refund of payments already made on them. Borrowers without it keep accruing interest, and those in default face Treasury offset and wage garnishment on defaulted student loans.

A Government Accountability Office review found more than 1,100 colleges closed from 2010 through 2020, affecting about 246,000 borrowers. Only about 80,000 of those borrowers had loans forgiven through a closed school discharge.

Closures haven’t stopped, and our tracker of colleges closing in 2026 already counts nine (with more coming in 2027).

Which Schools And Dates Are Covered

Normally, a borrower qualifies for Closed School Discharge if they were enrolled when the school closed or withdrew within 120 days before closure. That window grows to 180 days for loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2020. Career programs follow the same rules, as our breakdown of trade school loan forgiveness shows.

The Secretary of Education can extend the date when a school closes under “exceptional circumstances,” which the department did for these four operators on January 16, 2025.

The decision also directed Federal Student Aid to notify eligible borrowers. It told the agency to pursue automatic discharges for closures between 2013 and 2020 when the borrower didn’t enroll elsewhere within three years.

Automatic relief has drawn legal fights before, which we covered in our look at whether automatic student loan forgiveness is legal.

How Gaussoin’s Claim Was Denied

Gaussoin enrolled at Brooks Institute in Ventura, California, in September 2014 and paid for it with federal student loans. He took an approved leave of absence after the fall 2015 term, and his last day of attendance was December 17, 2015. Brooks Institute closed in August 2016 before he could return. The leave put him outside the standard window but inside the May 6, 2015 date set for CEC schools.

He applied on August 23, 2026, citing the extended window. Eight days later, MOHELA, a servicer that has faced multi-state probes over its loan servicing, denied him on the department’s behalf. The letter said he “withdrew more than 180 days before the school closed” and never mentioned the 2025 decision. The complaint adds that his pre-2020 loans fall under the 120-day rule, so the letter cited the wrong standard.

Gaussoin owes nearly $22,000 including interest. His mother, Christine, owes about $28,000 in Parent PLUS loans for his schooling, and her application for forgiveness was also denied this month. Parent PLUS loans qualify when the student does, which matters given how few repayment and forgiveness options Parent PLUS borrowers have.

I qualify, but my application was denied anyway. Now I am a father of two, struggling to get by and still carrying debt for a school that failed me.” — Kendrick Gaussoin, in a statement

What The Lawsuit Asks For

The lawsuit claims the department violated the Administrative Procedure Act by refusing to process these discharges without public notice. It alleges the department has “not granted a single closed school discharge pursuant to the 2025 Decision” since January 2025. That claim echoes earlier suits accusing the Education Department of blocking student loan forgiveness.

The suit asks the court to:

• Certify a class of borrowers from covered schools who left on or after the extended date without a discharge
• Order the department to implement the 2025 decision and notify eligible borrowers
• Direct servicers to stop collection on class members’ loans until discharges go through
• Overturn Gaussoin’s denial and send his application back for approval

The Department cannot make promises to students and then pretend that those promises do not exist.” — Alexander Elson, co-founder and vice president of Student Defense

What The Education Department Says

The department told NPR it stands by how it has run the program. Spokesperson Ellen Keast said the Biden administration pursued “unlawful policies to shift student loan debt onto the back of every single hardworking American taxpayer.”

She added that a former undersecretary “used the stroke of a (digital) pen to inappropriately expand the closed-school discharge period.”

The department has lost related fights in court, including when the Ninth Circuit rejected its bid to delay loan forgiveness.

How This Connects

Gaussoin’s case follows another suit over Education Department loan forgiveness that borrowers say never fully processed. On September 24, 2026, the Project on Predatory Student Lending sued over $4.6 billion in cancelled loans the department still reports to credit bureaus. That case, Woods v. U.S. Department of Education, sits in the same D.C. federal court and covers group discharges for more than 1.5 million borrowers.

The two cases share more than a courthouse. MOHELA handled the lead plaintiff’s loans in both, and an FSA email cited in Woods admitted it had “not directed MOHELA to process your loan discharge.”

The Art Institutes appear in both cases, as one of the chains in the 2025 closed school decision and one of the schools in the Woods group discharges. The Art Institutes’ discharge status is tracked on our for-profit college student loan forgiveness list.

What Former Students Can Do Now

Check your school and last date of attendance against the table above. If you withdrew on or after your school’s extended date, you can still apply for a closed school discharge and cite the 2025 decision. Keep your transcripts and any denial letter, since eligibility turns on your enrollment dates.

Former students who were misled about costs or job prospects may also qualify for borrower defense to repayment, a separate type of student loan discharge.

A denial leaves you responsible for payments, so skipping them while the case plays out risks default. Borrowers already in default can get out of student loan default through rehabilitation or consolidation. If the court certifies the class, a single order would cover every eligible borrower without each one filing suit.

What’s Next

Federal agencies generally get 60 days after service to answer a complaint. The court will also rule on class certification, and any servicer guidance from the department would signal its next move.

We’ll follow the case in our student loan forgiveness news coverage.

The post Lawsuit Says Trump Administration Is Withholding Closed School Loan Discharges From Thousands Of Borrowers appeared first on The College Investor.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at Arizona State University released its fifth annual State of the American Student report in October 2026. Its verdict is blunt: six years after school closures, pandemic recovery has failed for most students.

Only 10.5% of students attend a district that has returned to 2019 performance in both math and reading, and Louisiana is the only state above 2019 levels in both subjects.

The decline started well before Covid, and the pandemic made it worse. CRPE director Robin Lake told The 74 that “things have been getting worse for a long while now.”

The report arrives as the Education Department hands K-12 programs to other agencies, which leaves states to carry most of the recovery work.

Why It Matters

Lost learning will likely become lost income for these students. Research cited in the CRPE report projects that pandemic learning loss will cut students’ lifetime earnings by 2% in the least affected states. In the hardest-hit states, the projected loss reaches 9%. That hit lands as more teens are already weighing work over college.

The students hit hardest are already leaving K-12. CRPE notes that nearly half of the students whose schooling was disrupted have moved on to college or the workforce, often without a chance to make up lost time.

Colleges have noticed too, and a growing list of schools requires SAT or ACT scores again. That matters because high school grade inflation makes a strong GPA harder to trust.

Where Recovery Stands In 2026

Average scores hide how unevenly recovery has played out. The CRPE data show the strongest students pulling ahead while struggling students fall further behind.

In 2024, 34% of eighth graders scored below Basic in reading, the largest share since NAEP began tracking that measure 32 years ago.

• The gap between top and bottom students is growing. Since 2022, the top 10% of eighth graders gained 3 points in NAEP math, while the bottom 10% lost 5.
• Much of the drop predates the pandemic. National achievement began falling in 2013, and pre-pandemic trends alone would have predicted 47% of the post-pandemic decline in eighth-grade math.
• Attendance hasn’t bounced back anywhere. Chronic absence rose from 15% before the pandemic to 23% in 2024-25, and no state has returned to pre-pandemic attendance.
• States are drifting apart. After two decades of narrowing, the spread between state NAEP scores in eighth grade has widened since 2019. An average Mississippi eighth grader is nearly two and a half years ahead of an average West Virginia eighth grader on demographically adjusted math scores.
• Younger students show some progress. Fourth-grade math variation between states returned to 2019 levels in 2024, and NWEA researchers say reading recovery has begun in grades K-8.
• Public confidence has collapsed. Gallup found 51% of adults satisfied with public education in 2019, compared with 32% in 2026.

How States Are Responding

Most states lack a clear plan. CRPE found only 13 states with a specific statewide goal for student learning, while 11 states have published no goal at all. That matters more now that the Trump administration wants to return education authority to the states.

Math is the weak spot nearly everywhere. Some 43 states have passed Science of Reading laws, but only 18 have passed a math law. CRPE also found that 37 states aren’t fully implementing any of ExcelinEd’s 11 recommended math policies.

That leaves a weak base for students headed to college or paying for trade school in technical fields.

How This Connects

Families don’t have to wait for their state to act. Since July 2025, 529 plans can pay for K-12 tutoring, testing fees, and curriculum, and the annual K-12 limit rose to $20,000 starting in 2026. And starting next year, 30 states have already opted into the new Education Freedom Tax Credit to provide more school choice.

Parents can start with their own child’s data. Ask the school for state test results and benchmark scores such as NWEA MAP, since a report card grade alone may not reveal a gap. Families who decide to pay for outside help can use 529 funds for private K-12 costs up to that annual limit.

A Coverdell education savings account can also cover K-12 costs, though its $2,000 annual contribution cap limits how far it stretches.

For teens leaning toward a trade instead, the new Workforce Pell Grant now covers short job-training programs that can lead to a paycheck faster.

What’s Next

CRPE plans a spring 2027 report that will score specific state policies against research on effective improvement strategies.

The federal school choice credit also begins in 2027, as the Education Department keeps shrinking and states absorb more of its work. Watch whether any state beyond Louisiana posts full recovery on the next round of NAEP results.

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The University of Maine detailed how its non-academic units will shrink their fiscal 2028 budgets in an October 21 letter from campus leadership. Academic Affairs, about half of UMaine’s budget, committed in September to cutting $10 million in base expenses. The rest of the university must cover a separate $9 million shortfall, and the letter says workforce reductions “will unfortunately be necessary” to get there. That puts the state’s flagship alongside schools like the University of Oregon, which closed a dorm while cutting $65 million.

Why It Matters

Students will feel some of these cuts directly. The letter lists fee increases, facility usage fees, and the sale of real property among the options some units may use, and UMaine expects to lean on one-time reserves again in FY28. Families tracking signs a college is under financial strain should note that combination of layoffs and reserve spending.

UMaine leaders blame declining enrollment, federal funding and policy uncertainty, tight state budgets, and rising operating costs. They also say compensation, tuition, University of Maine System shared services costs, and state appropriations sit outside the campus’s direct control. Rising operating costs are one of the forces that push college tuition higher every year.

Where The Cuts Land

Across all non-academic units, UMaine also plans to rely less on outside vendors, move some salaries onto external funding, centralize some functions, and automate manual tasks. Each listed unit is expected to grow its revenue by 1%, and an expanded agreement with existing partner Sodexo should bring more events and conferences to campus, including in summer. The math leans heavily on spending cuts. Only $1 million of the roughly $6 million comes from new revenue, a pattern similar to the University of Denver’s restructuring after a $30 million shortfall.

How This Connects

UMaine is the latest public university to cut its way through an enrollment and funding squeeze. Penn State targeted 47 programs for closure, mostly at its commonwealth campuses, and Syracuse posted its first budget deficit in years after missing its 2026 enrollment goal. Falling international graduate enrollment has also triggered layoffs at other schools this year.

What’s Next

The Cabinet will spend the coming weeks on the remaining $3 million gap, and UMaine will present its FY28 budget to the University of Maine System in January. Families should watch for fee changes for 2027-28 and can review Maine’s 529 plan rules to plan for any cost increases.

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