Betsy DeVos heads to court to protect shady schools like Trump U from students they rip off

“Tens of thousands of former students who say they were swindled by for-profit colleges are being left in limbo as the Trump administration delays action on requests for loan forgiveness,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday. “The Education Department is sitting on more than 65,000 unapproved claims as it rewrites Obama-era rules that sought to better protect students. The rewrite had been sought by the industry.”

Rather than allowing defrauded students to quickly recover lost funds, which is what President Barack Obama’s administration advocated, DeVos and her team are slow-walking the process in court. Also, under the Obama rules, for-profit schools would have been forbidden from demanding students agree to not sue the colleges.

DeVos has opted to protect for-profits schools instead of protecting the at-risk consumers who borrowed money.

Who ran perhaps the most famous for-profit fraud school in America? Donald Trump, of course.

“Roughly 7,000 people were scammed out of their life savings by Trump University, including single mothers and veterans. Trump ended up settling related lawsuits for $25 million,” as Shareblue Media recently noted.

In August, DeVos picked a former associate dean at DeVry University, as head of the department’s enforcement unit.

“This is a joke, right?” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, since DeVry remains at the center of the controversy regarding pro-profit schools defrauded students.

A billionaire and major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign, DeVos is an established opponent of public schools, and her family has donated millions of dollars to organizations that fight against civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

During a May budget hearing on Capital Hill, she refused to say whether she would ensure states did not discriminate against LGBT and other vulnerable children at schools receiving federal monies.

Moves like that is are why DeVos and her agenda are so unpopular with parents, according to a new poll by the American Federation of Teachers and Hart Research Associates. It found that by nearly a two-to-one margin, parents familiar with DeVos do not support the job she is doing. Black parents disapprove of her by nearly a four-to-one ratio. That’s an extremely high negative rating for a cabinet secretary who has only been on the job for half the year.