DeVos kills Obamaera college loan protection

The Trump administration has revoked an Obamaera rule designed to terminate federal funding to forprofit college programs that consistently left graduates with high student debt.

Department officials announced that the 2014 gainful employment rule will be rescinded effective July 1, 2020. The agency’s announcement said the rule focused too narrowly on graduate earnings and unfairly targeted forprofit colleges.

“The department’s rules should be designed to support all students and treat all schools fairly. The previous administration’s rule did neither,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Friday. “All schools should be clear and transparent about their outcomes and all students should have a full range of information available. We’re committed to making that happen.”

Instead of punishing schools that leave students strapped with debt, DeVos has promised to publish earnings data for all college programs as part of an update of the department’s College Scorecard website. DeVos has said it’s a fairer alternative that lets students decide for themselves whether a school meets their standards.

Under the rule, certain vocational programs could be cut off from funding if the average debt ratio of their graduates stayed above a certain limit for two out of three straight years. It was created under President Barack Obama amid widespread complaints of fraud against forprofit chains including Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute. Both chains collapsed under pressure from Obama officials.

But before any schools lost funding, DeVos moved to delay the rule in 2017 and a year later began the process to revoke it. A federal judge ruled last September that the delay was illegal, but the department never took steps to enforce the rule, citing a dispute with the Social Security Administration that has left the department unable to access earnings data.

Friday’s announcement drew quick condemnation from Democrats and borrower advocates, who had lobbied the department to revise the rule rather than remove it entirely.

Sen. Patty Murray, DWash., the top Democrat on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said the repeal is “a gift to predatory programs and forprofit colleges that want to take unsuspecting students for a ride.”

“If Secretary DeVos had students’ best interests at heart, she would withdraw this repeal immediately and reinstate the commonsense and effective consumer protections put in place by the Obama Administration,” Murray said.

The chief of the National Student Legal Defense Network said the decision proves that DeVos “only cares about protecting forprofit colleges, no matter how many students they swindle.” “Scrapping these common sense regulations will lead to students racking up debt for worthless degrees, while DeVos props up failing and predatory schools with billions of dollars from taxpayers,” President Aaron Ament said. But the move was welcomed by the Career Education Colleges and Universities, a lobbying group that represents dozens of forprofit colleges.

“This standard is universally fair and applies to all students, in all programs, at all schools, regardless of sector — something that previous administrations did not do,” said Steve Gunderson, president of the group.