Saturday, September 30, 2017

Helping for-profit colleges

The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to help them out. It will do so as of October 16 by suspending a 50-year-old ethics law that prevents employees from receiving money or owning a stake in for-profit colleges. These colleges do quite well from 'educating' veterans, as the G.I. Bill pays them hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition every year. The agency plans on doing this despite the fact that no public hearings have been scheduled and no public comments have yet been submitted. Could this be the result of several officials who worked in the for-profit college industry having joined the Education Department, which administers and polices the federal student loan program and the industry.

Why this change is needed is hard to figure out as the existing law allows waivers for individuals or even classes of individuals, like those teaching courses. Invoking the waiver also requires public hearings.

And a report issued in July by the director of the agency’s Education Service found that financial issues involving tuition and fees were by far the leading complaint among students who had called the agency’s G.I. Bill hotline since 2014.

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