Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is denying huge batches of relief requests from students whose schools defrauded them. Even those who aren’t denied are getting very little — or sometimes nothing.
When Albert Paul Cruz opened a letter from the Education Department last month, he saw the words he’d been waiting for: “We approved your claim.” The government finally agreed that he’d been defrauded by ITT Technical Institute, the defunct for-profit chain where he’d racked up almost $60,000 in student loans getting what he considers a worthless degree.
Then he scrolled to the next page and saw how much of that debt would be forgiven: zero. The department, the letter said, had concluded he suffered no financial harm.
“You’re acknowledging the school defrauded its students and claiming that didn’t hurt us?” said Mr. Cruz, who earned an associate degree in computer networking systems in 2010 but never worked in that field. “How is that even possible?”
The approval of claims without financial relief is the latest twist in longstanding efforts by defrauded borrowers to get help from the federal government through a program meant to assist former students whose schools offered sham degrees and empty promises.