Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. DeLAURO. Madam Chairman, I rise in opposition to this legislation which will enable even more fraud and abuse in the for-profit college industry.

Right now, many for-profit colleges are engaged in the same sorts of predatory lending schemes that we saw in the housing market. According to Holly Petraeus at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, recruiters from for-profit colleges have been signing up marines with serious brain injuries, marines who cannot even remember what they signed up for, in order to inflate their profits.

According to a 2009 Pew study, even though only 1 in 14 students, or 7 percent, attend these proprietary schools, they make up nearly half, 44 percent, of the default rate on student loans.

So, if anything, we need more comprehensive oversight over for-profit colleges. Instead, this bill repeals regulations that are already on the books and makes it easier for the institutions to commit fraud at the expense of students and taxpayers.

What the bill does is it overturns regulations for awarding the Federal student aid that are aimed at ensuring accountability and reducing fraud. It removes the ability of the Secretary of Education to define a credit hour without providing an alternative. It removes the Federal Government's ability to protect students from being overcharged and ultimately overcome by costly student loans. By getting rid of the State authorization requirement, it opens the door to billions of taxpayer dollars going to institutions that are openly flouting the law. It's about manipulating credit hours in order to receive more Federal aid.

Instead of deregulating for-profit colleges, we should be working to ensure that these institutions are fulfilling their obligations to their students. We should work to fix the real problems that students face right now: growing student debt and the upcoming interest rate increase on student loans. This bill will only cause more fraud and abuse in a sector that is already rife with it, and I urge my colleagues to oppose it.

Ms. FOXX. Madam Chairman, I would like to point out that this bill, again, has bipartisan support.

We have a letter from the National Governors Association, which talks about the need to strengthen higher education, not give more Federal control; and a letter from the American Council on Education, signed by Molly Corbett Broad and 98 institutions from across the country, mostly public and private institutions.

This is not a for-profit or a public issue. This is all institutions of higher education who are concerned with this issue.

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