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The day after the Education Department announced its largest group cancellation of federal loans, forgiving $5.8 billion in debt held by more than 500,000 former students of a defunct for-profit chain, Vice President Harris called it a milestone on a journey for justice for everyone who was defrauded by Corinthian Colleges.

Harris played a key role in investigating Corinthian while California attorney general. “In 2016, after we obtained the judgment against Corinthian, I said then that the least we could do was to give everyone Corinthian took advantage of the relief they deserved,” she said. “I said then that we would do everything in our power to help them.”

“Finally — and sadly it has taken this long — finally, that promise is fulfilled,” Harris said.

She described details of the for-profit chain’s predatory practices that she said had been “raising the hopes of people who worked so hard for the bit of money they had to pay to get into these programs.” Some of the degrees from Corinthian were so worthless, Harris said, “that they didn’t help a single student get a job.” Meanwhile, she said, the company was misleading prospective students and engaging in practices such as paying a temporary employment agency to hire students for short-term jobs — as short as two days — and counted those as successful job placements.

Harris said Corinthian targeted people it assumed wouldn’t fight back. It called its target demographic “isolated,” Harris said, “people with low self-esteem,” men and women who were “stuck.”