Washington -- It's supposedly a national scandal, how the rich and famous cheat to get their children into elite colleges. The real scandal is that we pay so much attention to it, while ignoring the plight of thousands of students and families who followed the law and have been cheated out of student benefits actually due them. The scandal is the scandal.
To be sure, the rich cheaters in the so-called Varsity Blues scandal deserve what's coming to them, including jail time if that's in store. If there's any doubt, Caitlin Flanagan, writing in The Atlantic, erases it. She is especially hard on the lawyers and high-flying investment professionals who knew the rules but violated them anyway. Heaven knows what else they do in professional life to cheat.
Meanwhile, The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a welcome departure from their usual beats, let reporters Michael Vasquez and Donald Bauman tell the under-covered stories of upwards of half a million student victims of closed colleges:
"All across the United States..., the lives of students and their families have been plunged into unexpected crisis. A Chronicle analysis of federal data shows that, in the last five years, about half a million students have been displaced by college closures, which together shuttered more than 1,200 campuses. That’s an average of 20 campus closures per month. Many of those affected are working adults living paycheck to paycheck, who carried hopes that college would be their path to the middle class.
"When a college fully goes out of business, there is no easy fix for the people caught in the crossfire. Closures can be both traumatic and financially ruinous for students — many of whom are single parents...."
Most of the colleges going out of business are for-profit schools that should never have been allowed to participate in federal programs in the first place. Millions of federal dollars intended for these students are missing. The U.S. Department of Education, staffed at the top levels by former executives of these colleges, is dragging its feet in cancelling the student-loans of their victims, although required by law to do so.
So half a million lives have been disrupted, but there's no major media scandal because no celebrities or elite schools are involved in what is prosaically called, in higher education circles, the Borrower Defense matter.
There is an equally troubling scandal in the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, under which borrowers are entitled to have the balance of their student loans cancelled after ten years of work in public service jobs. This one is at least getting a catchy headline in the New York Times:
Your Student Loan Servicer Will Call You Back in a Year. Sorry.This program, with tens of thousands of victims, is foundering because the same officials at the Department of Education who are unwilling to help closed-school victims are also in no hurry to see anyone get benefits under PSLF. Credit NYT reporter Ron Lieber for staying on top of this.
Congress, unfortunately, is not up to holding the Department of Education's feet to the fire on either of these administrative calamities. Congressional hearings, with rare exception, have been almost genteel, focusing on what curative might be found legislatively for the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, rather than what should be done right now to investigate corruption and racketeering at the Department of Education. There's much to investigate if there's a will to do it.
Here is a suggestion for both justice and proportionality in the Varsity Blues, Borrower Defense, and PSLF scandals. The Department of Justice should, as a condition of settlement with the rich and famous Varsity Blues perpetrators, require that they pay substantial fines to the non-profit charities representing the Borrower Defense and PSLF victims. That way, lawbreakers who tried to rig the college admission system would be aiding those who only tried to get ahead by following the rules.
That would be a satisfying measure of justice, maybe even better than jail. It would give the Varsity Blues perpetrators an opportunity for redemption as part of contrition. It would be good for the country.
This is not without precedent. For example, as part of a settlement with DOJ, Bank of America made contributions to charities in 2016 as part of a larger settlement.
Which charities would be appropriate beneficiaries of Varsity Blues fines, to help Borrower Defense, PSLF, and similar victims of higher education predators? Here's a start: National Consumer Law Center; Veterans Education Success; Project on Predatory Student Lending; Public Citizen; National Student Legal Defense Network; and the Student Borrower Protection Center.
Short of moral leadership from a Secretary of Education who could repair the damage from all three scandals – it won't happen under the current one – this might be the next best alternative.
