Over the past few years, demands to cancel student loans have picked up momentum nationwide. While the fight to relieve people from student loan debt is far from over, on Thursday there was one small victory: Student loan servicer Navient is paying out $1.8 billion to settle a lawsuit accusing the company of predatory behavior.
In 2017, a federal regulator and two state attorneys sued Navient, which had branched off from Sallie Mae only three years earlier. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s legal filing alleged that Navient mishandled loans, hid critical information in fine print, and overall “failed to perform its core duties in the servicing of student loans, violating federal consumer financial laws as well as the trust that borrowers placed in the company.”
