Documents obtained by NPR shed new light on a bitter fight between defrauded student borrowers and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
These borrowers — more than 200,000 of them — say some for-profit colleges lied to them about their job prospects and the transferability of credits. They argue they were defrauded and that the Education Department should erase their federal student loan debt under a rule called “borrower defense.”
DeVos disagrees: She says most student borrowers still got value from these schools and deserve only partial relief from their federal loans.
Now, internal Education Department memos obtained by NPR show that career staff in the department’s Borrower Defense Unit came down firmly on the side of defrauded borrowers.
The memos show this unit reviewed thousands of borrower complaints against now-defunct, for-profit colleges, including Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute. Just weeks before DeVos was sworn in as secretary, the unit recommended to the department’s political leadership that these borrowers deserve no less than full relief from their student debts.