IT WASN’T LONG after Jessica Madison graduated in 2009 that she realized her student loans were a terrible mistake. She had borrowed $21,000 for a paralegal program at Everest College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the hope of building a more secure life, but instead she spent the next three years looking for a full-time job that never quite materialized. Thanks to interest, Jessica’s debt ballooned during that time, and there were months when she skipped bills and went without power to make her loan payments. Her “college problems,” as she and her fiancée, Izzy, called them, had put at risk everything Jessica thought a degree would unlock: a house, decent credit, economic stability.
The two had met online. Jessica was the sort of deep introvert who preferred making friends on the internet, where she could feel safe and anonymous. Under the screen name Lavoix inconnue—the unknown voice—she’d fallen in love with Izzy before they’d ever seen each other’s faces. Now they lived together on the Gulf Coast, and their quiet moments together—coming home from work to their cats and dog Pikachu, going on beach walks—were what made life special.
But in the years since they’d moved in together, Jessica’s debt loomed ever larger. Her loans were the sole reason she and Izzy were waiting to get married; she didn’t want to impose this burden on her future wife. In 2014, they held a small commitment ceremony by the water with a beach-themed cake, and changed their Facebook statuses to married—because in every way other than paperwork, they were. One day, Jessica imagined, they would make it more than Facebook official. Once the debt was a little smaller. Once she’d figured this out.
Her alma mater, Everest, was part of an empire of schools run by the billion-dollar Corinthian Colleges chain, which had long targeted single parents and other low-income students like Jessica with aggressive marketing. In the last two years, then–California Attorney General Kamala Harris and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had sued Corinthian for fraud, exposing the lying admissions officers and fake job placement rates that had duped hundreds of thousands of students like Jessica into
