The Price Paid For An Education
One of my friends owed almost $50K in student loans that he didn’t remember taking out. The reason he didn’t remember taking them out was because his school—which was a for-profit college that had since closed—convinced him to sign a document when he first enrolled—at age 17—which essentially gave them the right to take out loans on his behalf in order to pay his tuition. They used that to ruin his life.
They didn’t explain to him what the document was. They just got him to sign it amongst a flurry of paperwork. The school then took out several private loans with an exorbitant interest rate, and my friend just started getting letters out of the blue the year after he graduated. When he was in school, whenever those loans would show up on his student portal, they were just given a code number and classified as “financial aid”.
Therefore, he thought he was getting education grants. Apparently, this has happened to a lot of people, but he was told that there’s nothing he can do about it, especially since the school had closed. He contacted multiple entities to discuss the issue, and all of them said there was nothing he could do because he signed the contract willingly.