Despite pressure from the Democratic Party's hard-left fringe, President Joe Biden is correctly slow-walking proposals to grant relief for college graduates mired in student-loan debt. But one loan-forgiveness decision he took recently was spot on: to grant full relief to the 560,000 students defrauded by the for-profit Corinthian University.

Students who were scammed by Corinthian's diploma factory deserve to have their grievances addressed separately from others who knowingly immersed themselves in debt and got a legitimate college education in return. Someone who is swindled into buying a junk car with no engine is not equivalent to someone who buys a new car on credit then realizes the monthly payments are too high for the income the buyer is earning.

The $5.8 billion forgiveness program for former Corinthian students acknowledges that the university fabricated performance records, including job-placement rates. Corinthian far oversold the value of its diploma. Around 560,000 students took out federally backed loans between 1995 and 2015. Corinthian once boasted 105 campuses and had a peak enrollment of 110,000 students.

The scam came to an end after then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris sued in 2013. Now students will be able to get all remaining debt to Corinthian canceled, but they still must apply for reimbursement for debt already paid if they feel they were defrauded.

Inspired in part by Corinthian's seeming success, then-businessman Donald Trump formed his own for-profit university, which also wound up in court in 2013. After five years of litigation in which New York's attorney general labeled the enterprise "Donald Trump's fraudulent university," a federal judge ordered Trump to pay $25 million to former students.

The jury's still out, however, regarding other students who attended legitimate institutions and simply overborrowed. As a candidate, Biden proposed canceling $10,000 in federal loan debt per student for borrowers earning up to $125,000 a year. That was a hefty, $325 billion ask. A lot of graduates who fully paid their debts from decades past were justified in questioning why today's debtors deserve special treatment, especially at a time when employers are crying for help and wage scales are shooting up.

That argument runs up against the mathematical hard truth: More than 40 million Americans are grappling with student-loan obligations, with the bill reaching $1.7 trillion nationally. The student debt burden is hitting Black borrowers the hardest, the NAACP argues, saying that $10,000 in forgiveness amounts to a tepid "slap in the face." Some progressives are pushing for $50,000 in forgiveness.

Whatever the outcome, the administration would be smart to require all recipients of debt relief to undergo a specified financial-literacy training program — a good idea for Americans in general — so they can learn budgeting, financial self-reliance and making sure that any debt burden stays within realistic projections of future earnings.

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