President Trumps campaign to lessen the federal
regulation burden of the private sector has hurt consumers. That perhaps was
the real reason for the campaign. Its
obvious that Trump cares about corporate profits, but little about fairness and
protection for average American consumers.
Here’s the latest White House move to hurt consumers through
“deregulation
Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos “ formally
moved Friday to scrap a regulation that would have forced for-profit colleges
to prove that the students they enroll are able to attain decent-paying jobs,
the most drastic in a series of policy shifts that will free the
scandal-scarred, for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the
Obama era.
In a written announcement posted
on its website, the Education Department laid out its plans to eliminate the
so-called gainful employment rule, which sought to hold for-profit and career
college programs accountable for graduating students with poor job prospects
and overwhelming debt. The Obama-era rule would have revoked federal funding
and access to financial aid for poor-performing schools. . . .
But in rescinding
the rule, the department is eradicating the most fearsome accountability
measures — the loss of federal aid — for schools that promise to prepare
students for specific careers but fail to prepare them for the job market,
leaving taxpayers on the hook to pay back their taxpayer-backed loans.
The DeVos approach
is reversing nearly a decade of efforts to create a tough accountability system
for the largely unregulated for-profit sector of higher education. In recent
years, large for-profit chains, which offer training for everything from
automotive mechanics to cosmetology to cybersecurity, have collapsed under
mountains of complaints and lawsuits for employing misleading and deceptive
practices.
The implosions of ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian
Colleges generated tens of thousands of complaints from student borrowers who
said they were left with worthless degrees. The Obama administration encouraged
the expansion of public community colleges as it forgave at least $450 million
in taxpayer-funded student debt for for-profit graduates who could not find
decent jobs with the degrees or certificates they had earned.
The regulations
passed in the wake of those scandals remade the industry. Since 2010, when the
Obama administration began deliberating the rules, more than 2,000 for-profit
and career programs — nearly half — have closed, and the industry’s student
population has dropped by more than 1.6 million, said Steve
Gunderson, the president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, the
for-profit industry’s trade association.”
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