January, 2018
Washington -- For shame that this New York Times' article should appear on Martin Luther King Day.
The article, "Black Colleges Swept Up in For-Profit Crackdown Find Relief From DeVos," in no uncertain terms tells how such colleges are putting their own narrow interests ahead of the thousands of student loan borrowers – black, white, and everyone else – whose lives and those of their families may be ruined by unscrupulous institutions. And there is no need to read between the lines to see how the for-profit lobby is willing to exploit financial weakness in the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) sector for its own ends.
The irony, and hence the shamefulness, is that black, low-income student loan borrowers are disproportionately at risk everywhere and stand the most to gain by maintaining a tough rule against fraud in the so-called defense to repayment regulations. This is well known and made even more evident with a new Brookings Institution study that presents meaningful, disaggregated data and analyses by race, income, and sector.*
Unfortunately, the NYT headline is not a surprise. For-profit schools and predatory lenders for decades have exploited issues in the HBCUs toward their own ends. So have many in Congress, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have accepted political contributions for looking the other way when it comes to matters of supporting students, families, and taxpayers as opposed to those who would profit from taking advantage of them.
Presidents know how to do this, too. Ronald Reagan, facing uncomfortable questioning about why he announced his 1980 presidental campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, (where three civil rights workers were murdered) assembled the HBCU presidents in the Oval Office for a photo-op to show that the campaign event was a coicidence and had nothing to do with race. Donald Trump did the same within days of his inauguration, at which time his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, announced that HBCUs were exemplars for her school-choice agenda.
If anyone wants to help HBCUs, rather than exploit them cynically, there is a program in the Higher Education Act, Title III, Part B, that can do so. HBCU representatives at the table in current negotiated rulemaking should tell Secretary DeVos and her departmental negotiators: no more. The way to help us is to put funds into Title III, not by using us cynically to advance the agendas of others who would exploit borrowers, especially the black low-income.
____________________________
* The Department of Education for many years has resisted meaningful analyses of institutional and borrower behavior when it comes to distributions of federal grants and loans. In 2002, while at the Department, I found unsettling evidence of discrimination by both race and class, but the Department made no effort to follow up. Unfortunately, the Institute of Education Sciences and its research component, the National Center for Education Research, does not look into such questions, so it is up to private organizations like Brookings, New America, The Century Foundation, and others to do the work. This represents an undermining of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), which requires federal departments to measure and evaluate the results of their own programs.
