It’s good to know that Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, joined the small minority of Republicans who opposed Trump’s conspiracy to overthrow the United States government. But when it comes to her views on education, including the appalling abuses of veterans, single mothers, and other students by for-profit colleges, DeVos is no hero.
If you want to understand how aggressively DeVos, and the ex-for-profit college executives who ran the Department of Education (ED) for her, tried to deny loan relief to scammed students of Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, and other predatory schools, and also how the Biden administration has been slow to remedy these abuses, read this powerful new brief from lawyers representing the deep-in-debt former students.
The lawyers, from Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending and California’s Housing & Economic Rights Advocates, lay out a shameful course of events that began soon after Trump and DeVos came to power:
As soon as … DeVos took office in February 2017, ED began adopting a series of policies that had a singular purpose: to delay, obstruct, and avoid the agency’s duty to fairly and timely resolve BD applications. ED sought, and soon achieved, a complete halt to the process of even assessing, let alone granting, BD claims.
In May 2017, according to the brief, DeVos signed a memo from James Manning, then the Acting Under Secretary, “which recommended that no additional claims should be…
