Not that this will help the guys that have lost money, but when paying for any form of training, try to pay for it via a credit card. This way you take up an agreement with the CC company who in turn take up an agreement with the training provider.
CDL providers wont usually pay any loans to the person direct, so if you explain this, they may be able to be flexible with this and make the cheque payable to the CC company.
There also seems to be a lot of guys with CDL's from barclays. Maybe its worth you all getting together and trying to point out that if they didn't only allow payment to the training provider, many would have only paid for training received?
Might be worth a try