It also brought worry and resignation to former students awaiting word on their applications for assistance. Jarrod Thoma, an Army veteran who filed a complaint in 2015 against DeVry University, was not hopeful.

He said he was particularly disheartened when Ms. DeVos hired a former executive from DeVry, which paid out millions to settle claims that it misrepresented its outcomes, to lead the department’s unit responsible for policing fraudulent and deceptive practices at colleges and universities.

“I feel like, because of the things that have been done around appointments and regulations, that I don’t even stand a chance,” Mr. Thoma said. “There’s just no way anyone is going to be held accountable if everyone is buddy-buddy.”

Policy experts said that the decision unfairly penalized students who had managed to succeed despite being swindled. It was unfair, they added, to change the discharge process midstream, especially for Corinthian Colleges students whose applications were handled by two different administrations.

“In other words, two students who attended the same program and were lied to in the same way by their school, and even who may have applied for a borrower-defense claim on the same day, could wind up with vastly different amounts of relief,” wrote Clare McCann, a federal policy expert at the New America Foundation and a former Obama official.

The new system, which Ms. DeVos said replaced an “all or nothing” approach, would determine loan forgiveness on a tiered system.

Students whose current earnings are less than 50 percent of their peers from a comparable program will receive full relief, and students whose earnings are at 50 percent or more of their peers will receive “proportionally tiered relief to compensate for the difference and make them whole.”