Kendrick Gaussoin near his home in Winsted, Connecticut. As part of a Biden-era change, Gaussoin’s federal student loans should have been erased.
Raquel C. Zaldívar for NPR
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Raquel C. Zaldívar for NPR
Kendrick Gaussoin remembers it very well: that August day, ten years ago, when his dream of becoming a professional photographer suddenly collapsed.
He was driving to the Ventura, Calif., campus of the Brooks Institute, the private, for-profit university where he was studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. When he pulled up, he was surprised to find classmates and friends crowding outside. The school doors were chained.
“It was very worrying,” he recalls. “Everyone was crying. Everyone felt like they had lost everything.“
Brooks had been suddenly shut down by its parent company, leaving Gaussoin and some of her classmates with enormous student debt and no clear path to a degree.
“I was completely discouraged,” Gaussoin remembers. “I pretty much gave up and spent the last nine years doing my best to move forward.“.
Now, however, Gaussoin is revisiting what happened to him at Brooks – and trying to get his student loans erased.
For more than three decades, federal law has required the U.S. Secretary of Education to forgive the debts of qualified borrowers whose schools suddenly close, a process known as “closed school discharge.” But a lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Department of Education claims the Trump administration is illegally refusing to fully follow all of the program’s rules.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Student Defense, a nonprofit borrower advocacy group, on behalf of Gaussoin and potentially thousands of other borrowers.
The Department of Education told NPR it is maintaining implementation of the program.
How does the exit from closed schools work?
According to a study by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office, between 2010 and 2020, more than 1,100 colleges closed, including Brooks, leaving 246,000 borrowers eligible for a closed school exit.
To qualify for a traditional discharge, borrowers must either 1) have been enrolled at the time of the closure or 2) have left school no more than six months before the closure.
Gaussoin’s school, the Brooks Institute, closed in August 2016. But in December 2015, he took an eight-month leave of absence to work as a photographer. As the school closed upon his return, Gaussoin’s leave placed him beyond the program’s standard look-back period. He had been away too long for his loans to be repaid.
But almost a decade later, in 2025, Gaussoin’s luck seems to be changing.
In the final days of the Biden administration, the Department of Education expanded the lookback window for borrowers who had attended several closed schools, including Brooks.
Under this change, any borrower registered on May 6, 2015 would be eligible for loan discharge and repayment of all previous payments. Gaussoin was suddenly eligible.
In an order dated Jan. 6, 2025, James Kvaal, then the department’s undersecretary, wrote that the administration was expanding the eligibility window because schools had been closed under “exceptional circumstances,” warranting more leniency toward borrowers.
Denials under Trump
Gaussoin became aware of the Biden era change over the summer. On August 23, 2026, he requested to be released from the closed school, noting in his application that he now fell within the new expanded look-back window. A week later, in a letter dated August 31, the Trump administration rejected his request for loan forgiveness.
In the rejection letter, Gaussoin was informed that he did not meet the traditional eligibility requirements before Biden. NPR asked the department why it seemed to ignore the Biden-era eligibility expansion, and Department of Education spokesperson Ellen Keast responded with this statement:
“The Biden administration has focused on implementing illegal policies aimed at shifting student loan debt onto the backs of every hard-working American taxpayer. Just days before leaving office, Biden’s former deputy secretary used the stroke of a (digital) pen to inappropriately extend the closed school release period for certain institutions targeted by the previous administration.”
Deeming this authority “illegal” is new for the Trump Department of Education.
In November 2019, during the first Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos used the same authority, citing “exceptional circumstances,” to expand the lookback window for borrowers who had attended the struggling Art Institute of Colorado and Illinois Institute of Art.
“Students have failed and deserve healing,” DeVos said at the time. “By forgiving these students’ loans…as well as extending the period of school closures, we hope that these impacted students will now have the tools and resources they need to complete their education.”
“Legally, the secretary has the authority to expand the (eligibility) window,” says Bonnie Latreille, a former senior official at the Federal Student Aid (FSA) office during the Biden administration. If the Trump administration now tries to ignore or quietly revoke this rule change, Latreille says, “then I think that raises legal issues.”“
Latreille worked at FSA as the Department of Education transitioned between the Biden and Trump administrations. She says a senior department official asked her not to immediately process exits from closed schools using the expanded analysis window without approval from the new Trump team.
NPR spoke with two other former department officials who corroborated Latreille’s story but asked that NPR not use their names because they feared professional repercussions if they spoke out.
In this week’s lawsuit, Student Defense attorneys argue that the Trump administration cannot simply ignore or abandon the changes made by the Biden era because those changes were made well within the department’s legal authority.
Several higher education lawyers not associated with the case told NPR that if the Trump administration wanted to undo these changes, it should do what the Biden administration did: develop a legal, reasoned explanation and then share it with the public.
The department did not respond to a request to share its legal justification for ignoring the Biden-era changes.
“It’s a joke, isn’t it?”
Unbeknownst to Gaussoin, Brooks had been in trouble for years. Founded in 1945, the school of visual arts was once highly regarded. But after it was sold in 1999, enrollment began to decline as borrowers accused Brooks of high-pressure sales tactics, lying about graduation and job placement rates, and misleading students about the high cost of the school.
Gaussoin’s mother, Christine Gaussoin, took out the Parent PLUS loan to pay for her son’s education. She says the school led her to believe its loans would be enough to cover Kendrick’s costs at Brooks. The plan was for him to remain debt free.
“Then I get an email from the counselor,” she recalls. “He says, ‘We need more money.’ And I was like, ‘I’m exhausted.'”
At the time, Christine says she was living on disability while recovering from a total knee replacement.
“Then Kendrick calls me and says, ‘I need you to write this letter that says I’m no longer in your care.’ I was like, “Really? He said, “Yeah. I’m going to take out federal loans so I can finish my studies.'”
Christine pauses, remembering this conversation. “What should a mother do?”
When Kendrick called her mother to tell her the school doors were closed, she remembers thinking, “This is a joke, right?” Really, it was a joke, because he had just taken out these federal loans, and I didn’t know what to say to him.
Over the past 10 years, Kendrick and his mother have both felt the weight of these loans.
He is now married with two young children and works for an online retailer. He has nearly $22,000 in student debt, including interest, but no degree.
“I worked hard trying to survive on minimum wage,” Kendrick says. “It was really hard.“
Christine says she also works in retail and owes about $28,000 that she fears she’ll never pay back, although technically her debts are also eligible for discharge under the Biden-era change. His request to leave the closed school was denied this month.
Christine says she regrets how she and her son fell for the promises of a failing school.
“The school promised us that this would be his ticket: to make as much money as possible (as a photographer),” she recalls.
Instead, a decade later, the Gaussoins’ school and unpaid debts are still holding them back.
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