Blogocentric Formulations

This Just In - July 27

DeVos To Make It Tougher For Defrauded Students To Seek Debt Relief  
Written as part of "This Just In..."   for "Blog Harbor from The Talent Pond" 

I don't normally like to make grand sweeping statements, but here's one for your: Betsey DeVos is one of the absolute worst and most dangerous people Donald Trump has installed in cabinet-level positions. She's on par with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and (now-former) EPA chief Scott Pruitt in terms of the lasting damage she's causing by being so dogged about tearing down whatever Obama built. And while criminal justice reform and climate change are also very serious and very concerning issues, education has always been a priority of mine, in part because my wife is a special education teacher and I see the struggles first hand, and in part because without a better-educated population, how can we ever hope to avoid the mistakes of our past or improve the economic situations of those who are already struggling.

This article is about the latest DeVos lunacy, which is to gut the Borrower Defense to Repayment program. This program was designed to allow students to get relief from their student loans if they attended a school that misled you or misbehave. So, for example, if you attended a for-profit college that promised job training but you find out that job training isn't actually good enough to qualify you to get the job you thought you'd be getting, you can apply to have some of your student loan burden forgiven. If you attend a party school with a history of sweeping sex crimes under the rug and you get sexually assaulted and are so traumatized you have to drop out, you can apply to have some of your student loan burden forgiven.

Student loans are a real problem in this country. It's debt that you can't get discharged in bankruptcy, and college tuition has been increasing exponentially for years. Case in point, my last semester of undergrad studies at a state university in California cost me about $1,000 in tuition... and that was in 2004. By the time my wife graduated in 2006, that same semester of tuition was more than $1,400. Today, that same semester will cost you almost $3,000. College, even at a state school, is no longer an "everyone can afford to go and you can pay for it by working a minimum-wage job in addition to going to class" situation. Which means most students have to take out at least some financial aid in order to attend. And now we're making it harder for them to discharge that debt in the event that their school was negligent in protecting them or providing the services they promised? That's so gross.

But just in case you thought this might be a one-off case of poor judgment on the part of our education secretary, here are a list of actions DeVos has taken in her first year as Secretary of Education:

Rescinded sexual assault guidelines, which in most cases now impose a higher burden of proof on victims.

Rescinded guidelines that allow transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with.

Rescinded guidelines about which rights students are entitled to as part of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act.

Dramatically scaled back, and in many cases flat-out refused to further investigate, hundreds of civil rights complaints.

Refused to enforce protections for students against for-profit colleges that cannot show evidence of providing a curriculum that generally leads to gainful employment for its graduates.

Has provided leniency to predatory student loan lenders, which has allowed them to dramatically increase interest rates and payment obligations, making it harder for students to pay off their loans quickly. Oh, and her family assets include investments in some of these lending companies, BTW.

Let's also not forget that during her confirmation hearing, she couldn't answer basic questions about how public education works (probably because she's a billionaire and literally no one in her entire family has ever attended public school), she's on the record saying that public schools are a "dead end," thinks guns should be allowed in schools, called HBCs (Historically Black Colleges) "pioneers of school choice," which grossly misunderstands why HBCs were formed in the first place (because there was a time when black people weren't allowed to go to white people college!), refused to say whether the federal government should prevent private schools from receiving federal money if they're found guilty of discriminating against minority students, and has never even visited a lower-income or low-performing public school.

I'm so sick of this administration and it's policy of saving money by disadvantaging the most in-need communities in order to justify tax cuts and other giveaways to corporations. Trickle-down economics does not work. Just look at history; it's been proven over and over again. And the fact that our current education secretary is trying to ensure for-profit universities are protected and financially supported more than the students they're supposed to be educating just galls me.

If we continue to take advantage of students and rig the education system against them so that only the privileged have access, it's going to further exacerbate the income inequality that's already rampant in this country... and I worry that there will soon be an entire generation of keen minds that are capable of doing wonderful things for this country that aren't able to realize that opportunity because college is too expensive, too rigged against them, too inclined to put profits ahead of their actual mission of educating people. And, unfortunately, I don't think anything's going to turn around until we get a new administration and a new education secretary who's not hellbent on running public schools into the ground.