Nearly a decade after Brooks Institute shut its doors in Ventura, California, a federal lawsuit claims the government is still failing borrowers like Kendrick Gaussoin, who was left with almost $22,000 in debt and no degree to show for it. Gaussoin had taken an eight-month leave from the school in December 2015 to work as a photographer, and by the time he was ready to return, the campus was gone.
The nonprofit advocacy group Student Defense filed the lawsuit in federal court against the Department of Education on behalf of Gaussoin and, the group says, potentially thousands of other borrowers, according to NPR. The suit claims the Trump administration is illegally refusing to fully follow the rules of closed-school discharge, a long-standing federal process that, by law, requires the education secretary to cancel the debts of qualified borrowers whose schools close suddenly. Brooks Institute, a private for-profit college, announced its closure in August 2016; its campus closed completely effective October 31, 2016.
A Leave of Absence That Became a Lost Degree
Under the traditional closed-school discharge rules, borrowers must have been enrolled when their school shuttered or have left no more than six months before the closure. Gaussoin's eight-month leave put him just outside that window, a gap that has defined his case ever since. He has spent the past nine years trying to move forward after Brooks closed, according to the same NPR account.
A Biden-era policy change in January 2025 expanded the look-back window for borrowers from several closed schools, including Brooks Institute, making any borrower enrolled as of May 6, 2015 eligible for a discharge and a refund of past payments. Then-official James Kvaal wrote that the department expanded eligibility because the schools in question had closed under exceptional circumstances, the NPR report notes. That expansion should have covered Gaussoin's situation, since his leave began after that May 2015 cutoff date.
A Denial, Then a Lawsuit
Gaussoin applied for his closed-school discharge on August 23, 2026, and the Trump administration denied the request in a letter dated August 31, telling him he did not meet the traditional, pre-Biden eligibility requirements. The Education Department told NPR it stands by its implementation of the program, while Ellen Keast of the Trump Education Department has described the Biden-era expansion as an unlawful policy to shift student-loan debt onto taxpayers.
Bonnie Latreille, a former Federal Student Aid official, told NPR that the secretary has the authority to expand the eligibility window.
Brooks Institute faced lawsuits and investigations involving loans and hidden fees, and the school had overstated its job-placement rate. Founded about 70 years before its 2016 closure, Brooks was sold by Career Education Corp. to Gphomestay in summer 2015. The school experienced declining enrollment, according to NPR's reporting. By the time it announced its closure, enrollment had fallen from about 2,500 students in 2005 to just 250 registered for the fall 2016 term, per the Los Angeles Times, which reported the campus was set to close completely effective October 31, 2016. One Brooks graduate student told the paper that the sudden shutdown cost him everything at once: “All at once, he lost his degree, his health insurance and his job,” the Times reported, describing a student who was one semester short of finishing his master's degree.
A Pattern Beyond One Ventura Campus
The Gaussoins' case fits into a much larger pattern. More than 1,100 colleges closed between 2010 and 2020, leaving some 246,000 borrowers eligible for closed-school discharge, per NPR's reporting citing federal data. The scale of that wreckage has already forced the government's hand before: the Education Department confirmed it had provided automatic closed-school discharges to roughly 30,000 borrowers by January 2020, according to Student Defense.
There is precedent for eligibility changes involving closed schools. In November 2019, during the first Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced loan cancellations for students at certain Art Institutes locations and separately extended the closed-school window for 24 other Dream Center schools. More than 26,000 students had been enrolled across the Dream Center Education Holdings network before its schools began collapsing in 2018. Former students at the Art Institute of Colorado and the Illinois Institute of Art had sued the department and DeVos that October, and the department's subsequent action benefited 1,500 students who had taken out loans in 2018, according to Hyperallergic. DeVos said at the time that students who were failed deserved to be made whole.
Federal regulation spells out the basic obligation at stake: under 34 CFR 685.214, the secretary of education discharges a borrower's obligation to repay a federal direct loan when the borrower did not complete their program because the school they attended closed. For Gaussoin, that regulatory promise has so far produced no relief, and his challenge to how the rule applies is now before a federal court.
