Betsy DeVos is an unmitigated disaster as the secretary of the Education Department. Generally, it’s her complete lack of knowledge about education that gets her in hot water. But this time, there appears to be outright corruption at hand.
DeVos assigned the former Dean of DeVry to the team investigating for-profit colleges last summer. That is a conflict of interest, and not at all acceptable.
But now DeVos and that DeVry Dean went a step further and shut down that investigation entirely. Shortly after she hired the for-profit former Dean.
Coincidence?
DeVry has run afoul in federal investigations before:
“DeVry, Career Education Corp., and Bridgepoint have a history of run-ins with federal regulators, including the Education Department. The department settled with DeVry in 2016 over unsubstantiated job placement rates, and in 2016, DeVry paid $100 million as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for misleading ads about employment success rates and income levels.”
DeVos named former DeVry dean Julian Schmoke Jr. to run enforcement team:
“…In August … making him head of the team charged with policing fraud in higher education.”
And now less than a year later the team is disbanding:
“DeVos has been slowly loosening federal checks on controversial for-profit colleges, one regulation at a time, since she took office. But her department just took a huge and dangerous leap forward, gutting the team tasked with investigating predatory practices in higher education and effectively squashing several investigations already in progress, according to a New York Timesreport this past weekend.”
For-profit colleges have it built into their name. They are all about their bottom line. Leaving them unchecked is dangerous, and so is DeVos. The experiences of students who have been financially gutted for that bottom line are numerous.
Susie Madrak reports on her experience attending a for-profit school for Crooks and Liars:
“The worst six months of my life was spent working at one of the largest for-profit ‘colleges.’ Any sleazy practice you can think of, they did. I didn’t find out until they were shut down by the feds that they were already operating under a federal order to stop the practices. (They ignored the order.)
Here is what I learned, and I want to spread the word: Don’t allow anyone you care about attend for-profit colleges. They lie about the value of their degrees (one of the reasons I did poorly was that I refused to lie), most employers won’t hire you, and it will cost you a fortune for a worthless piece of paper. One of the reasons so many of them now offer four-year programs is because their crappy credits aren’t transferable anywhere else.
They are scams.”
DeVos is a disgrace to the Department of Education. Her tenure there bears no interest in protecting the education of America’s children. This new move to insert foxes into the henhouse to oversee the chickens is a blatant example of her priorities.
Featured Image By Coyot via Pixabay/CC-0.
