Trump Education Department Concludes First Term Having Quietly Restored For-Profit Colleges' Right To Defraud Students Without Federal Concern
WASHINGTON. The Trump administration concluded its first term Wednesday having successfully completed a four-year project to relieve the for-profit college industry of the burden of being scrutinized by the federal government, ending a brief Obama-era interlude in which colleges that had defrauded their students could be made to repay the federal loans those students had borrowed.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who resigned twelve days before the term concluded in stated objection to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol while continuing to be credited with the tenure's regulatory achievements, oversaw the rescission of the "borrower defense" rule that had allowed defrauded students to seek loan forgiveness, the elimination of the "gainful employment" rule that had withheld federal aid from for-profit programs whose graduates could not earn enough to repay their loans, and a federal court ruling that the department was in contempt for continuing to collect on the loans of Corinthian Colleges students after a judge had ordered it to stop.
"There is a real distinction between the obligation to repay a loan and the obligation to repay a loan that was procured through fraud," said one source within the administration, who explained that the department had elected to focus its enforcement attention on the former. The official added that the department's posture toward for-profit chains had been recalibrated to recognize that strict oversight tended to inconvenience the operators of for-profit chains.
The department's Office for Civil Rights significantly reduced enforcement actions across the term, withdrew Obama-era guidance directing universities to investigate reports of campus sexual assault, and finalized a new Title IX rule narrowing the definition of harassment and granting accused parties additional procedural protections in disciplinary hearings, an arrangement department officials described as restoring due process and survivor advocates described as discouraging reports.
In a series of court filings, the department intervened on the side of for-profit institutions in cases brought by state attorneys general seeking to recover money on behalf of students whose institutions had since collapsed. The department's legal positions on the question of whether large-scale fraud constituted grounds for federal loan forgiveness aligned in several material respects with the legal posture earlier taken by Trump University, the for-profit operation the president had personally co-founded and had personally settled for $25 million in defrauded-student claims shortly before his 2017 inauguration.
At press time, the incoming Biden administration was reviewing roughly 200,000 backlogged borrower defense claims, many filed under criteria the previous administration had described as a guard against meritless petitions and the federal courts had described as effectively denying all petitions.