Recently, someone filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Education. How many Borrower Defense claims have students filed against the University of Phoenix (UP), the requester asked, and how were these claims resolved? DOE's FOIA Service Center zipped back a reply, and the response is interesting. More than 69,000 UP students filed Borrower Defense claims against the for-profit school over the past seven years.  Almost 20,000 of these claims were denied, and ZERO have been approved. Borrower Defense claims are complaints filed by students with D ..read more

 Dahn Shaulis posted a provocative commentary yesterday on Higher Education Inquirer. He reported on the recent settlement of Sweet v. Cardona, a class-action lawsuit accusing the U.S. Department of Education of mishandling borrower defense claims.  In essence, the plaintiffs claimed they took out federal student loans to attend schools that misrepresented their offerings or violated various state laws.  As Shaulis pointed out, nearly all the schools affected by the lawsuit are for-profit colleges. Under the settlement terms, DOE will cancel federal student-loan debt owed by 200 ..read more

 Everything Everywhere, All at Once. That's a good description of the Department of Education's handling of the federal student-loan program. By any measure, the program is a disaster. Even before COVID, the program was in crisis. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos admitted in a 2018 speech that only one out of four borrowers were paying down the principal and interest on their loans. And she reported that about 20 percent of borrowers were either delinquent on their loans or in default. But why dwell on evil tidings?  Shortly after Betsy resigned from the Trump administration, her spee ..read more

 The academic job market is terrible right now--especially for people with newly minted PhDs in the humanities or social sciences. A person who graduates with a doctorate in those fields might be tempted to take the first job offer rather than wait for an offer from a more prestigious university or one that pays a higher salary--an offer that might never come. That could be a big mistake. Before taking any academic job, young profs must investigate the university's retirement plan. Why? Because retirement programs at universities differ widely from state to state. Here are two cautions fo ..read more

 General Motors found a cash cow when it created GMAC, its lucrative auto financing arm. People said that GM evolved from being a car maker with a finance company to a financial institution that also made automobiles. We might say something similar about the nation's public universities. Once, they were educational institutions that offered varsity sports. Now they are becoming sports franchises that educate students as a side business. Let's look at Louisiana State University, the Pelican State's flagship public university. According to Tiger Rag, "the Bible of LSU Sports," LSU's footbal ..read more

  The Baton Rouge Advocate published an editorial a few days ago titled "Get ahead in colleges like LSU, without all the hard work."  The editorial quoted Benjamin Haines, a graduate student at Louisiana State University, who has discovered that many LSU students arrive on campus without the basic skills they should have learned in high school. "In my anecdotal experience as a teaching assistant at LSU," Haines wrote, "many young college students aren't equipped with the requisite writing or literary tools necessary to produce passable writing, a product of a failing secondary educat ..read more

 Education Secretary Miguel Cardona says people with college degrees earn one million dollars more over their lifetimes than people who only get a high school diploma. You're nuts, then, if you don't go to college. Unfortunately, Secretary Cardona's cheerleading pitch for higher education is only partially accurate. For example, people who attend for-profit colleges don't do so well. According to a Brookings report published a few years back, nearly half (47 percent) of the people who attend for-profit colleges default on their student loans within five years of beginning repayment ..read more

 As Education Secretary Miguel Cardona observed recently, college graduates, on average, make about one million dollars more over their working careers than people who only have high school credentials.  I'm sure that's true, but that fact doesn't mean that all college programs lead to higher incomes or that all programs are reasonably priced. Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, performed a valuable service by creating a dataset that compares program-level debt with earnings outcomes for more than 45,000 postsecondary programs. This dataset calculat ..read more

Like a repentant boozer who promises to give up drinking, the Department of Education pledged to modernize its neanderthal student loan program. Unfortunately, like a chronic drunk, DOE simply can't clean up its act. DOE's own Inspector General audited the Department's modernization efforts and issued a report last week.  The audit concluded that DOE bungled its modernization job.   Typical of a government document, the Inspector General's report is written in govspeak and is almost incomprehensible.  Here's just one sentence from the audit report, which I urge you not to ..read more

According to Techopedia, the term “whack-a-mole” describes a process "where a pervasive problem keeps recurring after it is supposedly fixed." That's a great description of what the Department of Education is doing with the federal student-loan program.  It's playing whack-a-mole. Here's DOE's latest fun-house trick to create a "safety net" to "permanently fix a broken student loan system." The Department is going to revamp its Rube Goldberg system of income-based repayment plans into a new program that will make college damn near free for millions of college students. As DOE spokespe ..read more