Teachers pack their items outside of Everest College, in City of Industry, California, one of the shuttered Corinthian Colleges. Photograph by Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty

Last year, I met fifteen former students and graduates of Corinthian Colleges who had taken a remarkable action to protest the collection of their student debt. Corinthian, a for-profit institution that was, at the time, facing a financial meltdown and several lawsuits over alleged fraud in its recruitment process, had recently started shutting down or selling off its campuses. The students, calling themselves the Corinthian Fifteen, had organized a “debt strike,” refusing to repay their student loans even at the risk of going into default. Their argument was that the Department of Education shouldn’t collect on loans that students were misled into incurring, especially since they earned a degree that was all but worthless or, in some cases, found that their college had shut down before they could graduate.

The Corinthian Fifteen—and more than a hundred other Corinthian students who later joined the strike—were among the millions of students who enrolled at for-profit universities during the last ten years. Students who went to these schools have come to account for a disproportionate share of the country’s unpaid student-loan balance; they also default at higher rates than other students. So they have been bearing a particular burden in the broader student-debt crisis, which has, since 2010, seen student loans overtake credit-card debt and car loans as the second-largest form of outstanding debt in the U.S.

During and just after the recession, when jobs were scarce, getting a college education was touted—by the government, among others—as the most reliable path to well-paid employment. For some, for-profit colleges seemed to fill an important gap in the higher-education system, enrolling poor students and those from underrepresented ethnic minorities at higher rates than public and not-for-profit institutions. Concerns over the poor educational quality of some of these colleges didn’t seem to hurt enrollment much. Corinthian’s highest enrollment, of more than a hundred thousand students, was in 2010—not coincidentally, the same year that the unemployment rate peaked. Today, six per cent of U.S. higher-education students attend these schools; at the height of the recession, that number was considerably higher.

In the months after the debt strike began, Corinthian’s financial and legal pressures worsened; about a year ago, in early May, 2015, it filed for bankruptcy. At a press conference the next month, the Secretary of Education at the time, Arne Duncan, announced that his department would forgive federal loans for tens of thousands of people who had attended Corinthian schools. The department set up, for the first time, a system through which students could file paperwork with the government to argue that they shouldn’t have to repay their loans because they were defrauded into taking them out in the first place. Students who were left stranded, mid-degree, because of a campus closure could also petition for relief. “You’d have to be made of stone not to feel for these students,” Duncan said.

His announcement seemed to bring the whole upsetting scandal to a satisfying end. Nearly a year later, though, the Corinthian Fifteen—and most of the thousands of others in their situation—have yet to hear back from the Department of Education about the debt-relief petitions they’ve filed. According to a report issued by the special master responsible for sifting through all of the debt-relief applications, the Department of Education, as of late March, had received eleven thousand claims related to unlawful practices on Corinthian’s part and had approved just over two thousand; the others are still being reviewed and processed. The special master had also received more than eleven thousand claims that cited campus closures, and, by contrast, had approved more than six thousand eight hundred of them. The discrepancy appears to have to do with the complexity of investigating fraud-related claims versus those having to do with school closures. Looking into allegations of wrongdoing, the report said, required “extensive research.” In the meantime, the loans of those who applied for relief are in forbearance—meaning that the students won’t be punished for not paying—but continue to rack up interest.

Because the Department of Education has made several announcements about the circumstances under which it’ll grant debt relief, Ann Larson, who helped to organize the Corinthian Fifteen protest, and the strikers have made some educated guesses about who will be covered. Things don’t look great. By their count, six of the strikers expect to be eligible and seven don’t expect relief, while Larson is uncertain about a few others. Some who expect to be rejected took out loans before mid-2010, when the Education Department uncovered misbehavior at Corinthian; others attended programs that aren’t proven to have been affected by fraud. “Certain groups of students are being cut out of a relief program because the data just isn’t there to show that there was fraud,” Larson told me.

Nathan Hornes, who participated in the strike after studying business at a Corinthian college, is among the six who expect some relief. He told me, though, that he believes he will still be on the hook for most of his debt, because a large part was incurred before the 2010 cut-off date. Hornes has been working at a Smashburger fast-food outlet in Orange County, California, and was just promoted to general manager—which came with a one-dollar raise, he said, to twelve dollars and seventy-five cents an hour. Hornes told me that he’s committed to continuing his strike, but he assumes that if he learns that some of his debt will not be relieved, his forbearance for that debt will end. In that case, his strike will almost certainly put him into default, meaning his wages could be garnished. If that happens, he doesn’t know how he’ll survive. “I’m here working forty hours a week, trying to live on the bare, bare, bare minimum,” he told me. Getting a higher-paid job is tough without a degree from a reputable college. And going back to college is all but impossible when you’ve got tens of thousands of dollars of debt. I asked Nathan what he would be doing if he could pursue any career he wanted. “I haven’t really thought about that,” he said. “I’m so concerned that I’m going to start doing something I love”—and perhaps start to make some real income—“and then it’s going to get taken away from me.”

One of the lasting lessons of all this, for the Corinthian Fifteen and the other students who are in limbo, is the growing realization that the earlier push for higher education might have been at least partly misguided. The mantra, during the college boom, was that people should go to college, full stop—a notion that for-profit universities exploited in their recruitment tactics. But evidence suggests that the people who really benefit from secondary education are a subset of college-goers: those who attend public or not-for-profit four-year universities and, crucially, don’t drop out before getting a degree. It is true that people who complete four-year college degrees, in aggregate, have lower unemployment rates than high-school graduates. In 2010, their unemployment rate was 5.4 per cent, compared with 10.3 per cent for those with only high-school diplomas. But that year, for those who began a degree but didn’t finish it, the unemployment rate was 9.2 per cent—not much lower than for those who didn’t attend college. What’s more, research suggests that those who attend for-profit institutions end up with worse job situations, in terms of unemployment and wages, than those at public or not-for-profit colleges. And, even in cases in which college gives someone a better shot at well-paid employment, it’s not clear whether the improvement in future earnings is worth all the debt that is often incurred.