April wasn't the best month for Navient. The student loan giant came under fire from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as allegations of mishandling loans and defrauding students continued to snowball. New details from recently unsealed documents show that Navient, already facing lawsuits from attorneys general in Illinois and Washington, misled student-borrowers while attempting to secure more federally-backed loans, all the while approving subprime loans that defaulted at rates up to 92 percent.

The new revelations read like a student-debt fever dream. The charges included everything from alarming incompetences – mishandling and losing payments, ignoring instructions from co-signers – to more nefarious charges like steering students away from income-based loan repayment options, and targeting students likely to default.

As the Navient allegations build, the parallels between Navient’s practices and those employed by for-profit colleges are becoming uncanny. Take, for instance, Corinthian Colleges. The for-profit network faced charges of misleading students about employment rates, tuition costs, job opportunities and repayment options in a number of lawsuits over the last decade. Under pressure from debt-striking Corinthian students, national student labor organizations and legislators, the Education Department ultimately announced a loan forgiveness program for up to 80,000 affected students.

Navient is accumulating negative media attention, but none of it amounts to an existential threat. The company is, by comparison, getting off easy as legislators call Navient’s behavior “appalling” and Navient students speak out about being defrauded.

One part is missing, though: where are the student activists?

In 2015, as the Education Department inched toward loan forgiveness, national organizations – even those that professed to be decentralized, like Strike Debt, Rolling Jubilee, and the Million Student March – changed the tone of the education debate and put pressure on universities and the government to act fairly. Since then, those groups have gone largely silent on the national stage.

I took this issue to Annie McClanahan, the author of "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture," who argued that the move of student debt into the mainstream is in part to blame for the muted response.

“I suspect there’s been some internal struggle over how to deal with the movement’s semi-cooptation by mainstream politicians and media and, relatedly, over strategic differences – refusal and reform – and tactical differences.”

The tactics – debt strikes, the Jubilee’s debt buyoffs, and smaller-scale legislative efforts – have been both supplemented and complicated by legislative proposals from the Obama administration and then-presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, McClanahan said.

Part of the struggle, at this point, is generating support for a broader campaign after the clash with for-profit colleges. Mainstream politicians are happy to lend rhetorical support to students, but have typically stopped short of pursuing any concrete measures that would delegitimize the loan industry itself.

For her part, McClanahan is optimistic.

“I think it’s useful that student debt issues have been taken up by mainstream politicians – though it’s worth noting that that doesn’t always break down on obvious party lines, since candidate Trump’s proposals about student debt were actually much more progressive than candidate Clinton’s,” she said. However, there’s an important addition: "It remains to be seen what will happen when it comes to actual legislation.”

Even with a consensus on tactics and leadership, a campaign against Navient would be difficult. Corinthian Colleges was ordered to pay approximately $3.5 billion to an estimated 80,000 students, even though the repayment process is itself deeply troubled. Navient, on the other hand, is the nation’s largest student loan company, handling over $300 billion in federal and private loans.

However, as McClanahan pointed out, “regardless of whether we’re acting together or not, whether we’re visible or not, one in three of us is basically on 'debt strike' of some kind right now.”

“What if, for instance, all the students who attended the colleges and universities cited in the ‘Cuomo Probe,’ which detailed the way many colleges and universities were in cahoots with private lenders, joined a debt strike? Or what if debt strike moved from the for-profit colleges to the for-profit private student loan industry?" she asked. "What if the nearly 50 percent of private loan borrowers who take out private loans even when they still have federal loan eligibility – often because they’ve been misadvised – joined a debt strike against the banks? What if all students of color – a group disproportionately exploited by the private loan market, which often preys on them quite intentionally – all went on debt strike?”

Navient has, in response to the allegations, done what any giant loan company might do: it purchased nearly $7 billion in loans from JPMorgan Chase. And as Betsy DeVos’ Education Department removes rules protecting students from loan companies, the message to anti-debt organizations is loud and clear:

We need them now more than ever.

mw-fj611_hireme_zg_20170403145118.jpg