FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 25, 2020 CONTACT: Alexis Goldstein, alexis@ourfinancialsecurity.org Halt to Student Loan Collections Must Go Back Further, Include All Borrowers Statement from Alexis Goldstein, Senior Policy Analyst, Americans for Financial Reform: Education Secretary DeVos’s announcement that some forced collections will be halted is
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund applauds the news that a court has rejected the for-profit college industry’s attempt to stop the 2016 Borrower Defense rule. Today, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia sided with students over Betsy Devos’s attempts to let abusive for profit schools rip them off with impunity.
“The proposed Borrower Defense rule sacrifices students’ rights in order to line the pockets of executives at for-profit colleges, an industry that has shown time and again that it will use taxpayer dollars to deceive and defraud its own students.” said Alexis Goldstein, AFR’s Senior Policy Analyst. “With this rule and its extreme and absurd barriers to relief, Devos effectively tells students that if a school scams them, they’re on their own.”
“The news of the Department’s scheme to grant only partial relief to scammed students is just one more piece of an abundance of evidence that the Trump Administration and the DeVos Department of ED care more for the proprietary institutions that break the law than they do for the students they defraud,” said Alexis Goldstein, Senior Policy Analyst at Americans for a Financial Reform. “For Secretary DeVos, it’s predatory companies first, students last.”
The Department of Education’s decision to end information sharing with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a betrayal of students and a boon to loan servicers with a history of preying on those students.
AFR joined 29 other individuals and organizations representing students, consumers, veterans, servicemembers, and civil rights to send a letter to Education Secretary DeVos raising concerns around the questionable sale of EDMC to the Dream Center Foundation.