Biden Cancels $6.1 Billion in Debt for Former Art Institute Students

The Biden administration on Wednesday canceled more than $6 billion in student debt for 317,000 people who attended the Art Institutes, a now-defunct network of for-profit colleges that President Biden said “knowingly misled” students.

After a review of lawsuits brought by state attorneys general against the schools and their parent company, Education Management Corporation, the Education Department found that the Art Institutes falsified job placement figures in advertisements and misled prospective students with inflated salary expectations.

In one case the department highlighted, an Art Institute campus in Florida appeared to have included the tennis star Serena Williams’s annual income in its graduate salary projections after she had attended classes there.

“This institution falsified data, knowingly misled students and cheated borrowers into taking on mountains of debt without leading to promising career prospects at the end of their studies,” President Biden said in a statement.

He also took a swipe at former President Donald J. Trump, whom he accused of ignoring the influence of predatory for-profit schools on students seeking what they believed were meaningful academic credentials.

“While my predecessor looked the other way when colleges defrauded students and borrowers, I promised to take this on directly to provide borrowers with the relief they need and deserve,” Mr. Biden said.

The president’s decision to cancel the student debt was another step in his pursuit of student loan forgiveness in the year since the Supreme Court struck down a far more ambitious plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in debt.

Mr. Biden said last month that he would make another attempt at large-scale debt forgiveness for more than 25