Amy Kennedy-Palma was a single mother working as the office manager for an ATM installation company in 2012 when she decided to go back to school.

"There wasn't a whole lot of room for advancement, and of course wanting to look out for the future of my son, I wanted to go back to school," she said.

Kennedy-Palma researched programs at the local community college in Battle Ground, Washington, located just 35 minutes north of Portland, as well as programs at Washington State University.

"What was really difficult for me at the time," she says, "being a working single parent, I took all the overtime I could possibly get. I needed to work and therefore needed a program with flexible hours because I couldn't sacrifice my paycheck."

That's exactly why Everest College, a for-profit school owned by Corinthian Colleges, appealed to Kennedy-Palma. It allowed students to complete the bulk of their work online, requiring students to be present in classes for only four hours each week.

Little did she know then that five years later she would be entwined, along with tens of thousands of other student loan borrowers like her, in one of the biggest scams in the history of higher education – one that saddled students with hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and one that elevated obscure higher education regulations, like borrower defense-to-repayment, to national prominence.

In fact, when she started at Everest, she was just excited by the possibilities.

"They were much more accommodating than the local community college," she says. "They were able to do flexible class times, and they preached this whole sell that they were going to make this a seamless experience."

Kennedy-Palma was particularly impressed, she says, by their career team, which she was told would connect her with potential employers, set up interviews for her upon graduation and ensure she nabbed a job making no less than $20 an hour. She was also relieved when Everest recruiters told her they would handle all of her student loan paperwork. All she had to do was sign a release.

And that's exactly what Kennedy-Palma did. A year later, she graduated from Everest's paralegal associate degree program, six months early. Eager to continue her education even further and earn a bachelor's degree, she enrolled immediately in the school's online criminal justice program.

Things seemed to be going fine until a year-and-a-half later – one term away from earning her degree – when Kennedy-Palma logged onto the school's website to finish some coursework and found herself locked out.

She called the information technology department, but no one answered. She called the main office and the line redirected to a recording: The school was closed, indefinitely.

"I tried to call for, like, two weeks and I wasn't getting anywhere," Kennedy-Palma says. At the same time, she started seeing media reports about Corinthian Colleges Inc., which the Department of Education placed on increased financial oversight in 2014 after it was found that the company falsified job-placement data it used in marketing to recruit students and allegedly altered grades and attendance records. By April 2015, the for-profit giant had shuttered all its campuses.

"I decided to do some legwork and logged into the Department of Education's federal student aid website, and that's when I first saw that I was $63,000 in debt," she says. "I can't even explain what that feeling felt like."

At first, Kennedy-Palma tried to find an attorney, but when no one would take the case – "this is not something you can fight," she says they told her – she began blaming herself.

"Shame on me for not doing my research."

From there, the situation worsened. When she tried to transfer her credits to Clark College, a local community college, she found that Everest hadn't been accredited and therefore none of her credits would be accepted.

"I wasted three and half years of my life," she says. "Paying for those credits, top dollar, as if I got the best private education in the world."

Finally, when Kennedy-Palma filed a complaint with Washington's attorney general's office, she learned about borrower defense-to-repayment, which outlines how student loan borrowers who have been defrauded can apply to have their loans forgiven. Toward the end of the Obama administration, Education Department officials streamlined the regulation in the wake of several investigations that found for-profit schools, including Everest, were misleading students about the value and cost of their degrees, as well as potential earnings and expected debt burdens.

When it comes to Corinthian schools specifically, the Education Department has made findings of fraud against more than 100 campuses, including its Everest campuses.

"I put together a 12-page document detailing my experience with Everest and how I felt defrauded," she says. "The Washington attorney general's office said the Obama administration was moving quickly to help students, so I waited my turn."

Today, Kennedy-Palma is still waiting, along with 95,000 other students who attended for-profit schools and have filed similar claims for debt relief.

While the Trump administration inherited about 65,000 of those claims, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has also paused the Obama-era regulation, calling for a regulatory reset and arguing it was crafted in haste.

In doing so, the Education Department has left borrowers in limbo, including those whose claims have already been approved but whose student loan debt has not yet been erased.

Moreover, according to a report last month from the Associated Press, the department is considering only partly forgiving loans of defrauded students instead of erasing their debts entirely.

"The new administration came in and everything was put on hold, which I expected," says Kennedy-Palma. "But here we are a year later and now they're saying they may not even grant us that relief."

She continued: "I have been waiting for two years to basically figure out why Everest was allowed to take out that many student loans without notifying me, why I'm expected to pay back money for a degree I can't do anything with and for credits I can't transfer anywhere. It's awful."

The renegotiation of the borrower defense regulation is currently ongoing. The panel wrapped the last day of its first of three three-day sessions on Thursday. The next two three-day sessions are set to take place in January and February.

Congressional Democrats are ramping up the pressure on DeVos and Education Department officials, warning them against limiting the amount of student loan debt relief to defrauded students and slamming them for putting corporate profits ahead of students and borrowers by delaying the borrower defense rule.

"For the tens of thousands of students and families still waiting for help, being stuck in limbo is causing tremendous mental and financial anguish," 26 Democrats in the House and Senate wrote in a letter to DeVos dated Tuesday. "The idea that borrowers may continue to be saddled with at least some of the debt they incurred to attend institutions that misrepresented information to them is simply unacceptable and does not pass the most basic test of fairness."

For Kennedy-Palma, now 31 and married and working as a paralegal for a local attorney, her student loan debt has prevented her from moving her credit score above 630, and any loans or lines of credit must be in her husband's name.

"I can't do anything," she says.

Her current job is not a reflection of her education, she stresses, crediting it instead to her networking skills and dogged determination.

"I don't even put my degree on my resume anymore," she says. "I had two attorneys straight up laugh me out the door."

During this week's borrower defense renegotiation, James Manning, the acting undersecretary of education, said the department would be moving swiftly on the backlog of claims.

It's still unclear, however, with the borrower defense renegotiation ongoing, how soon that help will clear student loan debt for borrowers like Kennedy-Palma.