WASHINGTON —  The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday it is erasing $1.1 billion dollars in loans owed by 115,000 former students of the for-profit ITT Technical Institute. 

It’s part of a new initiative the Biden Administration is focusing on - in an effort to streamline the forgiveness process to give some borrowers relief after they didn’t receive the education they were promised.   

Andrew Clark, a 2010 graduate of Florida Coastal School of Law, said he still has about $180,000 in both federal and private student loans. 

“It’s something that causes a lot of stress and anxiety,” he said in an interview with Spectrum News. 

Clark, now working as a law clerk, is watching with interest as regulators accuse his alma mater of misconduct.

“The school has been under fire so to speak,” he said.

The Education Department recently made the school’s students ineligible for federal loans, accusing the school of operating “recklessly and irresponsibly, putting its students at financial risk, rather than providing the opportunities they were seeking.”

Clark believes he qualifies for loan forgiveness under a rule that allows students and graduates to seek such relief if their schools misled them or engaged in other misconduct.

“The way that they marketed themselves, and certainly the prices that they charged me while I was there," he said. "In terms of if they were using incorrect statistics or inflating or fudging the numbers, I would imagine they did that to me as well as everybody else."

The Department of Education is working to streamline the process for determining who is eligible for loan forgiveness because of fraud.  

“Since that rule has been identified, administrations, particularly this past Trump Administration, hamstrung applications and slowed down the process that is starting to be addressed by the Biden Administration,” said Cody Hounanian with the Student Loan Crisis Center. 

Houananian said borrowers who attended schools that have been shut down have the best shot at loan forgiveness. 

“It’s quite well documented, in some ways the government accepts the idea that these schools were operating fraudulently," he said. "Unfortunately, there are just so many predatory schools out there."

As for Clark, he is still trying to figure out if he qualifies for loan forgiveness. However, he says he wants students to learn from his mistakes. 

“What I wish I had done is done more research on the value of the degree from that school, the prospects for employment, the likelihood of a certain salary and how all those things match up with the expense of it all," he said.

For more information on whether you qualify for student loan forgiveness, head to the Department of Education’s website.

As of late April, Nearly 108,000 borrower defense claims are still pending, while about 137,000 have been deemed ineligible.