Two advocacy groups and 19 state attorneys general slammed U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos with separate lawsuits Thursday that seek to force DeVos to scrap plans to delay enforcement of an Obama era rule meant to protect student loan borrowers from predatory colleges.
While supporters of the lawsuits say they are critically important for defrauded students, the Department of Education shot back that the lawsuits are “ideologically driven.”
“With this ideologically driven suit, the state attorneys general are saying to regulate first, and ask the legal questions later — which also seems to be the approach of the prior administration that adopted borrower-defense regulations through a heavily politicized process and failed to account for the interests of all stakeholders,” said Liz Hill, deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education.
The Career Education Colleges and Universities — or CECU, the main lobbying group for for-profit colleges — sounded a similar tone.
“This is what we call political harassment,” said Steve Gunderson, president and CEO of CECU. “It is not like the Department doesn’t check their legal authority before taking action.”
The attorneys who brought the lawsuits say they’re about protecting students from predatory schools.
Julie Murray is an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group — one of two organizations that jointly filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Massachusetts students who attended for-profit colleges. Murray said the lawsuit seeks to get the court to tell the Education Department that is must implement the Borrower Defense rule “now, so that student borrowers who are protected by the rule can take advantage of its benefits immediately.” That was the intent of the Obama administration when it implemented the rule, Murray said.
