Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, a few years ago, a woman who works in my office in Chicago--who actually cleans up the office in the evenings-- was so excited when she learned that her daughter had been accepted to college. It was a dream come true for a woman who had immigrated to the United States, taken some of the hardest, most menial manual jobs in the hopes that her daughter, one day, would have a better life.
She sat down with my chief of staff in Chicago to tell her about the details, and immediately, we knew there was much more to the story. Her daughter had been accepted not just to another college or university; she had been accepted to a for-profit college in the Chicagoland area. The for-profit colleges and universities are notorious. The numbers tell the story, two separate numbers: 9 percent of all postsecondary students go attend for-profit colleges and universities--University of Phoenix, DeVry, very well-known names--9 percent of students go to those schools, but 33 percent of all of the federal student loan defaults are students from for-profit colleges and universities.
Why? Why is this one category of higher education so notorious for students starting and ending up deeply in debt to the point where they cannot pay it back? Well, the reasons are simple and very obvious. They overcharge the students, and they undereducate them. They make promises that are wild and cannot be kept. They give them courses of doubtful value and do not tell them that any credits that they have earned at these for-profit schools cannot be transferred to city colleges, community colleges, or universities.
So the students are stuck. At some point, some will quit piling on the debt and just basically walk away. All the promises and all the jobs and careers that were supposed to come from this are never going to materialize. It is a classic fraud, and sadly, our government is part of that fraud. You see, we recognize the accreditation of those schools. We tell that cleaning lady and her family that these are good schools and universities. The Federal Government does that and offers Federal loans to these students to go to these schools.
Is it any wonder that the students and their families think they are doing the right thing for their future? The Federal Government gave a stamp of approval. Well, what happens when those schools reach the end of the line? What happens when those same for-profit colleges and universities go bankrupt? The students are in a terrible position, deeply in debt with courses that are meaningless, with their lives compromised, and nowhere to turn.
We decided long ago to create an opportunity for these students to get out of this dilemma--one that we share in by accrediting these schools--something called the ``borrower defense,'' which allows these students, if they were defrauded, to discharge their federal student loans and get on with their lives.
Today, hundreds of thousands of students--who were defrauded by their for-profit colleges--are desperately waiting for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to discharge their Federal student loans under a provision in Federal law known as borrower defense. Congress created the borrower defense provision to ensure students' lives are not ruined by their schools' misconduct and deception.
In 2014, for-profit Corinthian Colleges collapsed. It left more than 70,000 students nationwide with worthless credits they could not transfer and mounds of student debt. The students had been lured into those Corinthian schools with false promises, inflated placement rates and income projections. We know that for a fact. We have the data to show they were lying to the students about what graduation from Corinthian could mean in their lives.
Over the last 5 or 6 years, nearly every other major for-profit college, nearly every one of these have faced Federal or State lawsuits and investigations for predatory practices similar to Corinthian Colleges. The result has been hundreds of thousands of defrauded students across America who are seeking discharges to which we say they are entitled under Federal law.
Secretary Betsy DeVos has allowed more than 200,000 borrower defense applications to pile up at the Department, nearly 11,000 from my own State of Illinois. But listen to this, Secretary DeVos has not approved a single claim for more than a year, 200,000 applications stacking up at the Department of Education, not one approved.
So who are some of these borrowers that are languishing? What is their story? Let me tell you about two of them.
One is Jessica from Tucson, AZ. Jessica attended the Art Institute of Tucson from 2009 to 2012. It was owned by the failed for-profit Education Management Corporation, EDMC. Heartbreakingly, Jessica says: ``I have experienced unbelievable amounts of stress and depression due to this situation. I have been placed on anti-depressants and anti- anxiety medication over the years and been through therapy . . . I have self-harmed and contemplated suicide, because I feel so trapped and unable to recover or move forward. I have a general feeling of worthlessness, because I feel like my potential has been squandered.''
She went to the Art Institute of Tucson, and her experience has led her to this desperate situation. She tried to harm herself. Instead of a bright future, she is left with a mountain of debt and nothing to show for it but deep financial and psychological pain. She says, ``Every aspect of her life has been affected.''
And so, is Secretary Betsy DeVos trying to help Jessica? No. Secretary DeVos is making it worse. Jessica submitted her borrower defense application almost 4 years ago in 2016. She has waited for this period of time to hear anything from the Department of Education. What is their excuse? I mean, if someone writes a letter to my office and does not get a reply and they come back to me and say, Are you going to answer this, Durbin, we send a reply. We try to do it promptly with everybody.
How can Secretary DeVos be holding these things up for years, while the students see the mountain of debt growing? As she waits, Jessica's loans are in forbearance, where they continue to gather interest, meaning that the total amount owed continues to grow. She is just 1 of 4,518 borrowers from Arizona who are stuck waiting for Secretary DeVos to use the authority that Congress gave her to discharge fraudulent loans
I also want to tell you about Jonathan from Colorado--3,600 defrauded borrowers are waiting for relief. Jonathan from Westminster, CO, attended DeVry University--sadly a Chicago-based for-profit school-- studying to be an electronics engineer.
He is a father and a husband who was trying to provide more for his family, so he took out student loans that sounded like an investment. He currently owes almost $100,000 in outstanding Federal student loans from attending DeVry, twice what he was told his education would cost.
Of his debt, Jonathan says, ``My credit has been destroyed. I couldn't repay these loans in two lifetimes, even if my degree had any value to employers.'' Sadly, it doesn't. Employers don't even recognize his degree.
Jonathan says:
My student loans are the millstone around my family. The debt I owe has made my kids not want to attend college at all. They see no value in it; their own father has an engineering degree but he can't get hired anywhere because his school was a scam.
Those are the words of Jonathan from Colorado.
So not only has this fraudulent school taken away his future by burdening him with a worthless degree and piles of debt; in many ways, it affects his children's future.
Jonathan applied for a borrower defense discharge in 2017, nearly 3 years ago. He has been waiting to hear from Secretary Betsy DeVos. Secretary DeVos's failure to provide him with relief, he says, ``has caused [him] to lose faith that the government will actually protect students like [him].''
Secretary DeVos has cruelly ignored defrauded borrowers like Jessica and Jonathan, but what is more is that she is trying to make it almost impossible for future borrowers like them to secure the relief that Congress intended by rewriting the rules.
In August, Secretary DeVos released a new version of the borrower defense rule that places unreasonable burdens on borrowers to attain relief. The result is that the Department estimates the DeVos rule will deny nearly $11 billion in relief to borrowers compared to the current rule.
In September, I introduced a resolution in the Senate to overturn the DeVos borrower defense rule. Forty-two of my colleagues have joined me in cosponsoring it. I plan to bring the resolution to a vote on the Senate floor where it only needs a simple majority to pass. At that time, my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will have a choice: Will they stand with Secretary DeVos's actions--or, I should say, lack of actions for 3 or 4 years--will they deny help to defrauded students, or will they stand with young people like Jessica and Jonathan, trying to get their lives back together and trying to get Congress to implement the one law it passed that could help them? It is a choice that seems pretty easy for most American people when they hear this scenario described to them.
A recent opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News criticized Secretary DeVos for siding with ``for-profit colleges that have defrauded students'' and ``illegally [denying] student loan debt relief to thousands of students.'' Even in Alaska, hundreds of borrowers are waiting for borrower defense discharges.
Nationally, Americans agree that these defrauded borrowers deserve relief. In a 2016 New America poll, 78 percent of Americans said that students should have their Federal student loan debt discharged if their school deceived them. That is pretty basic, isn't it? If you were cheated, you ought to be taken care of.
When you break the numbers down by party, 87 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans--vast majorities--supported relief for these students. So when it comes time to vote on my resolution to overturn the DeVos borrower defense rule denying relief to defrauded borrowers, I hope my colleagues will stand with students and the American people.
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Mr. DURBIN. Harris), the Senator from Minnesota (Ms. Klobuchar), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), the Senator from Massachusetts (Ms. Warren), and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.
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