- Agency to hold week of public hearings on misconduct rule
- Biden promised to scrap limits on college investigations
The Biden administration is taking the first steps this week to unravel former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s controversial policies that critics say had a chilling effect on victims of sexual assault on college campuses.
The department, now led by Secretary Miguel Cardona, also plans to rewrite Trump administration rules that limited loan relief to student borrowers and weakened accountability measures for vocational programs that performed poorly.
Cardona on Monday will kick off a week of hearings on Title IX campus sexual misconduct policies, followed by additional public forums later this month on student loan programs. Revisiting and changing those rules is likely to take years to complete.
New Title IX regulations will also be harder for a future administration to overturn, unlike Obama-era guidance that DeVos scrapped with the stroke of a pen.
College groups and advocates for survivors of assault have called for the Education Department to overturn the Title IX regulations DeVos put in place last year. Those rules narrowed the scope of sexual misconduct complaints that colleges and schools must investigate.