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Tag Archives: Student Lending
Joint Letter: AFR, 55 other orgs support the PROTECT Students Act
Americans for Financial Reform joined 56 other organizations to express strong support for the PROTECT Students Act. This legislation would enact important protections for students and taxpayers
against predatory colleges that cheat students and leave them with large debts they cannot afford.
It also includes a far-reaching set of reforms to hold predatory colleges accountable
to both students and taxpayers.
News Release: Court Sides with Students Over DeVos’s Pro-Corporate Agenda
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.
News Release: Frotman Resignation from CFPB Highlights Mulvaney Betrayal of Students
With regard to student lending, just as in other areas, instead of holding harmful actors accountable, Mulvaney is suppressing exposure of wrongdoing, and undercutting enforcement of the law. AFR thanks Mr. Frotman, and his colleagues, for their good work, and deplores these changes.
Letter to the Regulators: AFR Submits Comment on Borrower Defense NPRM
“The Proposed Rule is a brazen attempt to dismantle more than 20 years of borrowers’ rights to a defense to repayment on their loans when schools break the law. This dismantling will do nothing more than unleash a new wave of waste, fraud and abuse. This country teaches people that education is a path to a better life. For far too many years, allowing Title IV funds to flow to institutions engaging in fraud has turned this dream into a nightmare for their students. If the Department continues down this path of dismantling the right to a borrower defense, its legacy will be condemning students to lives full of poverty, while allowing executives of predatory proprietary institutions to become wealthy at their expense.”
AFR/CRL Poll: Bipartisan Majorities See $1.5 Trillion Student Debt Burden As Crisis
Majorities of American voters across parties believe that the student debt burden – now at $1.5 trillion – represents a crisis for the country, according to a new poll. The survey also found widespread concern with efforts by Mick Mulvaney, the Trump official installed at the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to gut the agency’s student lending office.
AFR/CRL Polling Memo: Majority of American Voters in Both Parties See “Crisis” In Student Debt Load
A new polling memo from Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending documents the widespread agreement among American voters that the student debt burden, now at $1.5 trillion, is a crisis.
AFR Statement: Department of Education’s Proposed New Borrower Defense Rule Sacrifices Students to For-Profit Industry Greed
“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.”
AFR Statement: AFR Criticizes Mulvaney Move to Manipulate Research, Curb Student Advocacy
“What Mulvaney is really interested in is not serious research, but information that advances the interests of the Wall Street banks and predatory lenders he serves.”
AFR Statement: DeVos’s Education Departments is Predatory Companies First, Students Last
“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.”