Betsy DeVos to Create Permanent Underclass With Rollback of For-Profit College Rules
Make no mistake, these efforts are being driven by greed, plain and simple.
Betsy DeVos gets a lot of notice for her terrible anti-trans stances and her lessening of protections for victims of campus assault. Less reported is how she is also making moves to create a perpetually indebted and undereducated underclass. It’s a quieter way of undermining education in America, but it’s no less dangerous: the propping up of for-profit colleges that fail to provide a meaningful education but do a great job at taking student money and rolling back Obama-era protections for borrowers duped by those colleges.
At the same time, the Trump administration is working on other fronts to ensure that higher education is undermined by a profit motive. The president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is now apparently overseeing a White House special office dealing with higher education.
Make no mistake, these efforts are being driven by greed, plain and simple. And, like with other policies under the Trump administration, these changes will have a negative disparate impact on people of color—and veterans.
Earlier this month, Education Secretary DeVos scrapped an Obama-era regulation that required for-profit schools to prove that their students were able to get actual decent-paying jobs after their course of study. Known as the “gainful employment” rule, for-profit colleges fought it every step of the way, including multiple lawsuits. The rule packed quite a punch: Schools that were doing nothing but saddling students with debt could see their federal funding revoked.
Federal funding is vital to the for-profit college scheme. It takes public dollars and diverts them to private companies and leaves students on the hook. Roughly 200 for-profit colleges get almost all their funding from the federal government. They’re also a large percentage of the schools that failed the requirements of the gainful employment rule.
The worst of the for-profit schools get students in the door by falsely claiming they have very high rates of post-school employment. Corinthian Colleges famously claimed placement rates as high as 92 percent for one of their accounting programs in Florida when the rate of placement was actually 12 percent. (And lest you think that was limited to that program, they also claimed an 85 percent placement rate for a medical assistant program in Los Angeles when the actual rate of placement was zero.) Under Obama, the federal government fined Corinthian $30 million for that fake job data, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued them for using those same imaginary placement rates to get students to take out expensive private loans as well.
If these for-profit schools had to follow the gainful employment rule as instituted under Obama, they’d stand to lose $5.3 billion in federal funding over the next ten years. Now, that money will continue to flow to for-profit schools regardless of whether they’re deceiving students or are genuinely able to place students in the jobs for which they are ostensibly trained.
Under the Obama administration, students also at least had a possibility of some recourse if they were Continue reading: Betsy DeVos to Create Permanent Underclass With Rollback of For-Profit College Rules - Rewire.News
