In the fall of 2013, Mallory Heiney returned from a mission trip to Guinea with a plan to go into health care. She enrolled in classes at a for-profit college called Everest Institute, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, expecting to graduate with a degree that would help her become a nurse. But, after less than a year, she said, her instructors stopped showing up. Corinthian Colleges, the company that owned Everest, had admitted that its finances were in trouble, and that it expected to go out of business; it later said it would shut down several campuses, including the one in Grand Rapids. Heiney graduated but felt she had learned very little. When she tells people where she went, she told me, she gets sympathetic looks. She said, “You go to school so they look at you and think, ‘Wow, this person must be educated’—not so they look at you and think, ‘Oh, this person went to Everest. They must be trash.’ ” Heiney’s student debts include more than ten thousand dollars owed to the federal government and more than ten thousand dollars in private loans; that’s what remains after she repaid some of the interest on her debts while she was in college, in part by selling her own plasma.

On Monday, Heiney and fourteen other people who took out loans to attend Corinthian announced that they are going on a “debt strike,” and will stop repaying their loans. They believe that they have both ethical and legal grounds for what appears to be an unprecedented collective action against the debt charged to students who attended Corinthian schools, and they are also making a broader statement about the trillion dollars of student debt owed throughout the country.

Corinthian was one of the world’s largest for-profit operators of colleges; at its height, in 2010, more than a hundred thousand students were enrolled in its schools, which operated under the names of Everest, Heald, and WyoTech, throughout the U.S. and part of Canada. These days, the company can hardly be said to exist. Over the past few years, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the attorney general of California, and the attorney general of Massachusetts have brought separate lawsuits accusing the company of all kinds of bad behavior: pressuring students into signing up for huge loans, misleading them about their prospects after graduation, and strong-arming them into beginning to repay their private loans before they had even graduated. Last year, Corinthian stopped filing financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and, earlier this month, the Nasdaq Stock Market sent Corinthian a letter informing its officials—those who remain—that the business would be delisted. All fourteen of Corinthian’s Canada campuses have been shut down. In the U.S., more than fifty campuses have been sold off; a dozen have been closed.

Corinthian’s downfall has come to be seen as a symbol of the ills of for-profit higher education—the false promises of employment, the mounting student debt, the aggressive collection tactics. But, for Corinthian students and graduates, the company’s failure has had more practical repercussions. Most Corinthian students cover their tuition by taking out federal and private loans. That debt, it turns out, is far more resilient than Corinthian itself. Students and graduates of the company’s schools are, by and large, expected to repay their federal student loans; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has negotiated for forgiveness of part of the private debt, but not all of it.

For anyone, student loans are burdensome; a recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the student-debt problem is so severe that it seems to be reducing the formation of new households (a phrase often used as a euphemism for young people moving out of their parents’ homes) and home ownership. Adding to that, students and graduates of Corinthian-owned colleges are finding that their degrees are all but worthless; when they try to transfer, they discover that other colleges won’t recognize their course credits and, when they try to get work, they learn that employers are not at all impressed by Corinthian coursework.

In December, a group of Democrats in the Senate, led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, wrote to the Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, calling on the Department of Education to “immediately discharge” the federal loans of at least some students who attended Corinthian. This wasn’t a toothless press stunt. The department, the senators noted, has the power to cancel federal loans for students who attended institutions that violated their rights. In fact, they pointed out, the department’s federal-loan agreements with students go as far as to spell this out, if in fine print: “In some cases, you may assert, as a defense against collection of your loan, that the school did something wrong or failed to do something that it should have done.” Earlier this month, the attorney general of Massachusetts made a request similar to that of the senators.

A spokeswoman said that the Education Department “shares the commitment” of the senators and the Massachusetts attorney general “to upholding the rights of students who may have been harmed by the actions of institutions that participate in federal student-aid programs.” She said that the department has been in touch with Senator Warren and the attorney general’s staffs and is working on a response. The Education Department doesn’t have jurisdiction over private loans, which amount to far less than federal ones; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which aims to protect consumers from private-debt troubles, is seeking full relief of the private Corinthian debt, but is meanwhile urging people to continue to pay off the loans.

The debt strike is at once an unusual and obvious protest strategy in response to the Corinthian debt. The current and former Corinthian students participating in the strike, who call themselves the Corinthian Fifteen (Heiney is among their most outspoken members), are publicly refusing to pay both their federal and private debt. With respect to the federal debt, they plan to file legal documents with the Education Department and with the servicers of their federal loans that assert the little-known right Warren and her colleagues describe in their letter. The strike is the result of an alliance between the students and an offshoot of the Occupy movement known as the Debt Collective. Last year, activists affiliated with the Debt Collective became acquainted with Corinthian students through a campaign to buy and “abolish” large amounts of private student debt—a stunt, which I covered, that was meant to shed light on the magnitude of the student-debt problem. Together, the Debt Collective organizers and some of the students came up with the idea for the current action, drawing on some of the power-in-numbers theories behind the labor movement.

Debt Collective volunteers—among them, lawyers and people who had dealt with the press—are giving legal, financial, and media support to the strikers, along with training in skills like financial literacy. In addition to committing time and energy, the strikers are assuming the considerable financial and social risks—lower credit scores, embarrassment—of making it publicly known that they don’t intend to repay their loans. (More than a fifth of borrowers of federal student loans go into default, but people who default tend not to announce their status publicly.) Ann Larson, one of the main Debt Collective organizers, talked to hundreds of Corinthian students, many of whom were put off by the potential financial repercussions of striking, not to mention the time commitment and the embarrassment. But she said that she hopes—and expects—that when the first fifteen strikers go public, others who have attended Corinthian campuses will be encouraged to join.

The stakes are high for the Education Department. Corinthian has said that its students have taken out more than a billion dollars in federal loans annually. Kevin Carey, a fellow at the New America foundation who studies higher education, told me that the Education Department is likely wary of setting a precedent that could inspire students who attended other troubled institutions also to seek loan forgiveness. “Drawing legally and logically defensible lines around this situation will be tricky for them,” he told me. Still, Carey said, “In this particular case, I think there’s a pretty strong argument that they ought to forgive a lot of the debt.”

Heiney recently began working as a home-health-care nurse—although, she said, “only after a five-hour interview explaining why my school doesn’t reflect my knowledge or patient care.” When I asked why she was willing to make such a public statement about not repaying her debt, she told me that she hopes to influence policy changes that would help future students. “In history, in the civil-rights movement, if everyone was afraid of their own personal repercussions, no progress would ever have been made,” she said.