“We believe that within three years, the borrower will know whether or not there has been misrepresentation,” Diane Auer Jones, the Education Department’s principal deputy under secretary, said Friday on a call with reporters.

The new rules also eliminate the “automatic closed school discharge,” a program that wipes away the loans of students whose school closed before they could complete their degree. Students who do not transfer their credits elsewhere can apply to have their loans erased, but many do not know about the option and never apply.

The 2016 rules required the department to automatically eliminate their debts if the students did not enroll elsewhere within three years. That approach has contributed to the discharge of $222 million in loans owed by nearly 20,000 borrowers, according to Education Department data gathered by the National Student Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group.

The new rules from Ms. DeVos will cut debt forgiveness for borrowers by around $500 million a year compared with the 2016 rules if they were in full effect, the Education Department said in its draft of the changes.

The tightening of debt relief is the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to roll back Obama-era regulations aimed at for-profit colleges and universities. In June, Ms. DeVos officially repealed a rule that sought to crack down on for-profit colleges and universities that produced graduates with no meaningful job prospects and mountains of student debt they could not hope to repay. In 2018, the Education Department unwound a special unit detailed to investigate fraud in the for-profit sector.