Roughly 450,000 Americans who say their colleges lied to them are having their federal student loans cancelled, years after they first asked. Among them is Jessica Feindt, who lives near Flint, Michigan: she says she feels she should be happy, and mostly she feels anger at what the wait cost her family. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals removed the last obstacle on 17 July 2026, when it rejected the United States (US) Education Department's latest bid to delay a settlement known as Sweet v. McMahon.
No one in Feindt's family had studied beyond school before she signed up at the University of Phoenix, which advertised heavily around Flint. A recruiter assured her that Michigan graduate schools would accept its psychology degree; she borrowed federally on that basis, and the promise proved false; her claim went in during 2022. 'I'm really angry about all the years that my family suffered under these loans,' she told the American broadcaster NPR when the balance cleared.
