March 9, 2022

With our nation currently over $30 trillion in debt, it is no surprise that the majority of Americans oppose Democrat proposals for free college or blanket forgiveness of student loan debt. Over 80 percent of Americans do not have student loan debt, and rightly question why they should be asked (or forced) to pay the debts of people who voluntarily took on student loans and failed to pay them back. Loan forgiveness is also a massive transfer of wealth to the more affluent, families, and individuals making well above the median income.

Having been forced to drop plans for free community college out of their original spending proposal, the Biden Administration is now ramping up efforts to turbo-charge an obscure regulation called “borrower defense to loan repayment” (BDR) to keep pushing a key component of the free-college agenda. Even further, Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) has sharpened this political tool to advance the left’s ongoing war against career and for-profit colleges, as Washington’s entrenched education bureaucrats all but ignore the broader failures afflicting higher education.

CASE warned back in November that Biden would expand BDR in order to furnish hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for student loan forgiveness, even when such claims for debt cancellation were based on the most flimsy or non-existent premises.  And right on cue, last week the DOE announced it would be forgiving 72 million dollars in debt for approximately 1,800 students at DeVry University.

Assisting DOE with this backdoor giveaway were their friends at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) who actively promoted this handout on their website with splashy copy that reads like a winning sweepstakes letter. The FTC blog post urges DeVry students apply for loan forgiveness and encourage their fellow students to do the same. The FTC even makes a special plea to those who already received a cash settlement from an earlier FTC claim to seek full loan forgiveness.

The Biden Administration would have you believe that these efforts are long overdue measures to ensure that schools are held accountable, yet the application of BDR since its inception has been limited exclusively to for-profit and career-centered institutions, never for the benefit of the millions of students who attended taxpayer funded state schools or community colleges and did not receive the education they were promised.

With our nation still short millions of trained and skilled workers, Biden’s DOE is further undermining our nation’s economy by seeking to bankrupt the schools from which tens of thousands of students have successfully graduated and moved on to fulfilling careers and high-paying jobs. The administration has made it abundantly clear this is not about accountability and more about picking winners and losers, thinning the herd of schools that don’t fit the approved template of the status quo education establishment.

The Department of Education under Presidents Obama and Biden has long tried to pin the blame for every failure of American higher education on career colleges, choosing to enforce accountability measures on the basis of tax status. CASE’s landmark BDR report suggests that what we are witnessing now is more of the same, and the continuation of an outrageous political agenda within the DOE.

A recent report from Texas Public Policy Foundation highlights how willfully negligent the DOE is acting in failing to address major problems across the higher education spectrum. TPPF scholars broadly applied Gainful Employment, a metric that currently only applies to for profit institutions and career-oriented education programs at public and non-profit schools. What their study found is that a full 89 percent of schools that don’t meet the standard were more traditional 4-year state universities and non-profit institutions. So as DOE engages in their transparent campaign to scorn and vilify valuable career-training schools such as DeVry, they do nothing as the colleges they hold as ‘exemplary’ are overwhelmingly failing the grade.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent under the guise of holding institutions of higher education accountable, yet the DOE by its own actions is creating a situation whereby millions of students stand to be herded into institutions of higher learning that fail to receive any significant DOE oversight. This is the opposite of accountability.

Sunlight has exposed the abuse of power at DOE, its false claims of acting in the best interests of students, and the ongoing damage they are inflicting upon American higher education through their selective enforcement of student claims. It is clear that they are now the ones who, above all others, must be held accountable.