Today the Trump Administration announced that it would try to halt the new “Defense to Repayment” regulation put in place last year. This means that the vast majority of former for-profit students who are fighting for relief are getting screwed over by the same administration that promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington and look out for working Americans.
As we have said before, this could only happen because the Obama Administration refused to cancel the debts of defrauded students, drawing out the process to protect itself from critics who have no problem with tax cuts for the rich but throw a fit whenever regular people make a demand.
Both political parties support allowing private interests to profit from higher education.
Everybody benefits from education--our own and those of our fellow humans. If our country was truly democratic, we would have free public higher education for everybody. Student debt would be unthinkable, as would for-profit colleges.
Instead, we have ever-rising tuition, $1.4 trillion in student debt, and corporations that make hundreds of millions of dollars a year by promising to train working-class folks for jobs that don’t exist. And we have Department of Education that protects these corporations’ rights to profit without protecting students’ rights to education.
Even if we can’t have free education, basic rule of law requires cancelling the debts of those who were defrauded. But because our government is run by wealthy people who use it as a tool to extract wealth from the rest of us, we can’t even have rule of law without a fight.
Mark our words: we will fight today’s decision, in court and elsewhere. We will fight alongside others - people in debts of all kinds - who are impoverished by our extractive economic system.
We see quite clearly that Secretary DeVos does not care about students. But we also see clearly that she is not the only person who made today’s decision. Our bigger fight is against the profiteers who have stolen our futures.