Limiting the damage predatory and fraudulent for-profit colleges can do to students was the single best thing former President Barack Obama did on education, so naturally, Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is determined to dismantle that good. It’s a perfect fit for DeVos: she gets to reverse Obama’s achievements and screw over the little people who had to borrow money to attend college. If it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the ways DeVos is making life worse for students and alums of predatory for-profit colleges, Mother Jones’s Edwin Rios has rounded up the key attacks on decency here.
DeVos is reportedly going to eliminate the gainful employment rule, which—if it had ever gone into effect—would have forced colleges to show that their degrees were actually worth something and that students were getting jobs and paying off their loans. If schools couldn’t show that, they wouldn’t have been eligible for federal student aid, which for-profit colleges rely heavily on. That rule change comes on top of DeVos moving to make it more difficult for students who have already been defrauded to get debt relief. Now, instead of showing that their schools engaged in illegal deceptive practices, students would have to show that their schools intentionally defrauded them—a much higher bar to clear—and DeVos would allow colleges to enforce mandatory arbitration, keeping students from even getting to court:
Proving a school’s intentions, especially outside of court, would be incredibly challenging for defrauded students. Under the Obama administration, they could simply show that a school had made misleading statements and misrepresented its job placement or graduation rates. Now, Ament says, students would have to meet an “insurmountable” standard—without the power to obtain internal records through litigation. “How would a student have access to internal emails between executives?” Ament asks. “In nearly all the cases that we’ve seen that the department’s granted, it’s rare that the student has been able to access that sort of evidence.”
The alternative for students would be going into default and then applying for debt relief—which means that the precondition to applying for relief would be risking your future credit rating.
On top of these proposed rule changes, DeVos has slashed the Education Department unit charged with investigating fraud from 12 staffers to three, and those three have other duties as well. If for-profit colleges are defrauding students, Betsy DeVos does not want to know about it. And if someone brings it to her attention, she does not want to do anything about it. And if young people are suffering under the burden of student loans they took out based on illegally deceptive practices, DeVos does not want to help them out.