At U.S. House Education Committee Hearing, DeVos Defends Cheating Some Defrauded Students by Only Partially Forgiving Loans
There was a lot going on last week—Judiciary Committee hearings on articles of impeachment, for example. Did you miss learning about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s miserable performance before the U.S. House Education Committee? As she defended her new “borrower defense to repayment” plan, DeVos didn’t seem to worry very much about the hundreds of thousands of students who have been defrauded by for-profit colleges, but she did seem to want to protect the reputation of the for-profit college sector.
DeVos was called before the committee to explain her department’s inexplicable failure to provide loan forgiveness for what DeVos herself said are “nearly 300,000 claims” by students who said they had been defrauded by their for-profit colleges. Many of the claims demanding loan forgiveness under what is called the “borrower defense to repayment” rule were filed by students at the now shut-down Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute. Both were shut down because they had lured students to enroll (and take on enormous debt) with fraudulent promises about what would turn out to be shoddy career prep programs.
The Associated Press‘s Colin Binkley explains: “The program, known as borrower defense to repayment, is meant to forgive federal loans for students whose colleges misrepresent the quality of their education or otherwise commit fraud. It was expanded under the Obama administration to help clear loans for thousands of students who attended Corinthian CONTINUE READING: At U.S. House Education Committee Hearing, DeVos Defends Cheating Some Defrauded Students by Only Partially Forgiving Loans | janresseger
