The Occupy Wall Street movement turned three years old Wednesday and it has a new target — the country’s more than $1.2 trillion in student loan debt.
The group’s Strike Debt initiative, run by Rolling Jubilee, announced Wednesday it has abolished $3.8 million worth of private student loan debt since January. The group spent $100,000 buying the debts for pennies on the dollar from debt collectors, and then just forgave the money instead of trying to collect it, CNN Money reported.
The debt Occupy bought belonged to 2,700 people who had taken out private student loans to attend the for-profit Everest College, which is run by Corinthian Colleges. The college had been the subject of several federal investigations and the college has plans to sell or close its 107 campuses due to financial problems, likely leaving its 74,000 students out in the cold.
“Despite Corinthian’s dire financial straits, checkered past, and history of lying to and misleading vulnerable students, tens of thousands of people may still be liable for the loans they have incurred while playing by the rules and trying to get an education,” a Strike Debt member told CNN Money in an email.
The group is only able to buy private student loans. The majority of the country’s student loan debts are backed by the federal government and have a different set of rules.
But Occupy says these tactics are not supposed to be a solution to student debt. Instead it is a way to raise awareness and to get student debtors to rally around a common cause, NBC reports.
“This isn’t just a stunt or a spectacle,” Astra Taylor, a member of Rolling Jubilee who has $45,000 in student loans, told NBC. “This isn’t a long-term plan, either. The point is to touch people where they are, and try to create a political awareness out of that.”
This is where, even though it has a new target, Occupy goes back to its highly unorganized and criticized roots.
Andrew Ross, a Rolling Jubilee board member and professor at New York University, told NBC that they need large groups of debtors to come together to make a big enough political statement to incite change.
Back in 2012, “we were trying to get a million student debtors to default as a political statement,” Ross said. “We didn’t end up making that happen. A million student debtors ended up defaulting, anyway, but not collectively, so it had no political impact.”
He said the group wants to organize and get people to band together to challenge the very existence of student loans and to advocate for free education in America.
