Trump’s education secretary overrides department findings on defrauded student borrowers: report

Although the Trump Administration has had a high turnover since 2017, one of the people who has remained is Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Trump’s education secretary, from 2017 to late 2019, has had more than her share of critics; some of them include college students, and a December 11 report by Cory Turner for NPR describes DeVos’ battle with recipients of student loans who say there were defrauded.

Turner reports, “These borrowers — more than 200,000 of them — say some for-profit colleges lied to them about their job prospects and the transferability of credits. They argue they were defrauded and that the Education Department should erase their federal student loan debt under a rule called ‘borrower defense.’”

DeVos, however, disagrees with the students, asserting that they did receive at least some value from their educations and that they deserve partial relief for their student loans but not total relief. And she is not swayed by some newly released memos from 2017 .