Washington — Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student-loan company, has reached a settlement with a private-equity firm that promised last April to buy it, The New York Times reported.

Under the agreement, the proposed buyers—J.C. Flowers & Company along with JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America—will help Sallie Mae refinance about $30-billion in debt, the Times said.

The agreed-upon assistance is crucial for Sallie Mae, whose financial troubles have left it unable to issue new debt backed by its student loans. Those troubles have been exacerbated in large part by a crisis in overall global credit markets brought on by mortgage defaults.

The group of buyers, led by Flowers, had argued that it could escape from April’s $25-billion buyout deal because of language in the agreement that allowed the company to back out if Congress approved deep cuts in federal subsidies to student-loan providers. Congress did approve such cuts last September, and the two sides had been arguing since then whether those cuts were deep enough to trigger the escape clause.

The Times credits the settlement to negotiations with JPMorgan led by Sallie Mae’s newly appointed chairman, Anthony P. Terracciano, and chief financial officer, John F. Remondi. —Paul Basken