The Education Department is wiping $150 million in federal student loans off the books, and has begun the process of informing thousands of borrowers that they no longer owe the government money because the schools they attended shut their doors.

The loan forgiveness, announced this week, applies to about 15,000 borrowers as federal education officials begin to carry out new rules that they fought in court for more than a year before giving up in October.

The department said it began notifying some of the borrowers by email on Friday that their loans would be discharged within the next few months. Any payments that the borrowers made toward a loan will be refunded, it said.

About half the borrowers attended Corinthian Colleges, a large for-profit chain that went bankrupt in 2015 after a deluge of lawsuits accusing it of predatory recruiting practices and false marketing. The rest attended one of the more than 1,000 other schools that shut down between November 2013, the start date for the automatic-discharge rules, and November 2015.