GOP Present "Education" Bill Dismantling Protections For Students From Predatory For-Profit "Colleges"

We are overwhelmed during the past week with the tax scam bill, Alabama Senate election, CHIP defunding, and Trump's Muslim Ban being upheld temporarily.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress begin work last week to gut and rewrite of the laws that govern our nation's higher education system.  It is now known as "Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act."

The Republican goal is very simple.  It is NOT to work on behalf of our citizens and our students, to further their education, their lives, and their futures.  Instead, they are seeking to dismantle landmark Obama regulations that protect students from predatory for-profit colleges and provide relief from repayment of student loans for those who earned worthless degrees from scam universities.

...the bill’s efforts to roll back the Obama legacy will divide Congress and the education community along partisan lines. Two of the Obama-era regulations of for-profit colleges and universities — called “gainful employment” and “borrower defense” — are being rewritten by Betsy DeVos’s Education Department. Under the House bill, they would be repealed and blocked from readoption.

There's more within this 542 page bill written by Republicans who are beholden to the for-profit schools that fund their campaigns and lives.

A lesser-known, more complex “credit hour” rule [will be eliminated]. Policy experts say the undermining of university credits would be among the most consequential provisions in the bill, illustrating how in their haste to erase Obama’s regulatory legacy, Republicans could disrupt a higher education system that is considered the best in the world.

Scam for-profit schools charging our nation's young people tens of thousands of dollars create "classes" that are very short yet offer high amounts of credits. This allows their students to learn little, graduate quicker, and pay the schools more.  Yet these students are not learning in this fradulent 9-credit classes, graduate with a worthless degree, and rack up significant debt.

The coveted “credit” has become the standard measure for virtually every element of higher education, from schedules to degree requirements to financial aid qualifications. In 2011, the Obama administration issued rules that set minimum requirements for awarding college credits after finding that lax oversight allowed for-profit institutions to inflate credit hours for each class, speeding up degrees and bringing in more financial aid dollars guaranteed by federal taxpayers.

A 2010 Education Department inspector general’s investigation found that one for-profit school awarded nine credits for a 10-week course, significantly more than the traditional program’s average of three credits for a 15-week course.

For-profit schools are not only scamming students, saddling them with debt, but directly committing fraud on all taxpayers.

...the bill calls for repealing a requirement that for-profit institutions get at least 10 percent of their revenue from nonfinancial-aid sources. That rule was issued because some for-profit colleges were signing up students that did not have the means or ability to complete a degree or find gainful employment. They would then secure the students loans guaranteed by the federal government, knowing that the inevitable default would be covered by taxpayers.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/us/politics/house-republican-higher-education-bill-obama.html