Now that the former head of the scam Trump University is the President of the United States, the landscape has shifted dramatically for America’s predatory for-profit colleges — the ones that have been systematically ruining students’ lives through a toxic mix of deceptive recruiting, sky-high tuition, low spending on instruction, and weak job placement.
These bad colleges seem ready for a resurgence, and a resumption of their abusive ways. If they succeed in that, the people who will suffer most are those whom candidate Trump most emphatically insisted he would help as president: the forgotten man and woman, the people living in what he still calls “inner cities,” and our military troops and veterans.
President Trump in office has pursued little besides his passive-aggressive tweet agenda, and the GOP Congress has failed to pass much legislation. But Trump’s cabinet heads are having a dramatic impact; they’ve pushed ahead with the agenda of the Koch brothers, big banks, and other special interests: dismantling a wide range of rules that protect workers, consumers, and the environment.
For her part, Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has, just for starters, now blocked the key Obama-era rules created to hold predatory colleges accountable for engaging in waste, fraud, and abuse with taxpayer dollars.
Last Thursday, speaking to the corporate front group the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has had many for-profit colleges as members, DeVos ratcheted up her previously polite criticism of the Obama gainful employment and borrower defense rules, sneering at them as “textbook overreach… solely to advance their administration-wide war on every type of organization they didn’t like.” DeVos made false claims about the Obama measures along the way.
There are honest, effective schools, and many great teachers, in the career education field. The point of these Obama rules is to channel federal aid and students to those schools, rather than to the dishonest, low-quality ones. The gainful employment rule would penalize career education programs that, year after year, leave graduates owing more in student loans than their income would allow them to repay. The borrower defense rule would: provide students defrauded or abused by their schools a process for having their federal loans cancelled, as the law already requires; prohibit schools from denying injured students the right to sue them; and place stronger requirements on financially irresponsible schools to put some cash aside in the event of collapse. Both rules, once implemented, should save taxpayers a lot of money, while helping students make better choices for their futures.
But the for-profit college industry has consistently rejected these reforms, and now they have friends on the inside. According to multiple Department career staff members, Robert Eitel, who previously worked for the predatory college companies Bridgepoint Education and Career Education Corp., and now is senior counsel to DeVos, is calling the shots on key issues related to for-profit colleges. A number of senior career Department officials who were dedicated to protecting against for-profit abuses have resigned or are planning their departures, after having been cut out of decision-making and seen their important work undone. The top two officials of the Student Aid Enforcement Unit, established last year to root out violations of laws and regulations, have both left the Department.