Providing for Congressional Disapproval of Rule Submitted By Department of Education Relating to ``Borrower Defense Institutional Accountability''

Floor Speech

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Mr. TAKANO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Under Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education has abandoned its responsibility to put students first and hold predatory, for-profit colleges accountable. The Department has rolled back protections for students seeking a foothold in the middle class through higher education.

In what amounts to a giveaway to predatory, for-profit colleges, Secretary DeVos has dismantled a crucial protection for students who were defrauded by shady institutions that saddled them with student loan debt, provided them with subpar education, and issued them useless degrees.

Borrower defense to repayment was intended to provide full student loan debt forgiveness to defrauded students. But Secretary DeVos has issued a new rule which makes it harder for students to prove that they were defrauded and fails to provide students with the full student loan debt relief that they are legally entitled to.

Now, to make this even worse, she eliminated protections for students whose schools shut down, shut down before they completed their programs, leaving them burdened with loans and often without the ability to transfer their credits elsewhere.

240,000 students--nearly 42,000 students from California--are waiting for relief, suffering emotional and financial hardships in the process. Many of these students attended the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges, an institution that even my Republican colleagues have agreed was in the business of defrauding students.

These students did everything right, but they were deceived by a slew of false promises from for-profit institutions that only saw them as a boost to their bottom line.

Secretary DeVos is using the power of her office to defend a shady industry. Today, we are here to send a clear message: We Democrats stand with America's students who should be relieved of student debt unjustly accrued.

Ms. FOXX of North Carolina.

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