Lawsuit says DeVos should be forced to cancel loans for students at closed campuses

A lawsuit filed Tuesday against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asserts that the Education Department — as required by an Obama-era regulation — is failing to cancel student loans for borrowers whose schools closed before students could earn their degrees.

DeVos had sought to cancel the entire regulation, which governs the circumstances under which borrowers can have their debt erased. But in a ruling last month, a federal court said the regulation must take effect.

During the Obama administration, officials argued that students should not be responsible for often crushing debt when they did not get the education they were promised, sometimes bilked by for-profit schools and deceptive marketing. DeVos argued that the Obama rule made it too easy for students to cancel their debt and said she intended to replace the rules with her own version to take effect next year. That process fell behind schedule, and the earliest the new rules will hit is July 2020.

In the meantime, the federal court said DeVos cannot simply ignore the version put in place by her predecessor.

Under one provision, the Obama rule directed the Education Department to proactively cancel debts of students whose schools or campuses close before they get their degrees. It did not require that students apply for or request the cancellation.

The suit was filed Tuesday by Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, a nonprofit legal service and advocacy organization, in US District Court for the Northern District of California. The housing group is represented by the National Student Legal Defense Network, which has challenged a series of DeVos moves.

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

People who attended school on about 1,400 campuses that closed between November 2013 and November 2015 may be eligible for immediate debt cancellation, the legal network said. Students are eligible for the immediate relief if they have not reenrolled within three years in another school that participates in the federal student loan program. So students in schools that closed after November 2015 still have time on the clock to reenroll and are not eligible for the automatic debt relief.

The legal defense network estimated that if the rule were fully implemented, it would result in $250 million in cancelled debt, spread across tens of thousands of borrowers.

‘‘The Department of Education seems determined to deny student borrowers the financial relief to which they are entitled,’’ said Aaron Ament, president of the network.

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Why This California College Student Is Choosing to Stand Up for Her Beliefs on Gender

A 20-year-old student senator at the University of California Berkeley says she didn’t expect the intense opposition she received for voicing her Christian beliefs on sexual identity and gender.

Although Isabella Chow, a junior, has the support of the school’s College Republicans chapter, her own student party cut ties with her and other students and organizations are demanding that she resign from the Senate or face a recall.

“I didn’t expect it at all, I’ll just put it that way,” Chow told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Tuesday.

“I expected there to be opposition, I expected there to be disagreement,” she said, “but I didn’t expect that a place that claimed to be so inclusive and tolerant would turn its back on me so quickly.”

Her offense? Chow chose not to vote Oct. 31 on a measure decrying consideration by the Trump administration of a legal definition that says a person’s gender is what his or her sex was at birth. She was the only one of 20 senators to abstain on the measure, which also backed organizations that promote the LGBT agenda.

Student-run CalTV and school publications Chow represented also abandoned or “disaffiliated with” her, she said.

In a statement on Facebook explaining why she abstained, Chow first said discrimination “is never, ever OK.”

But, she said, “where this bill crosses the line for me is that I am asked to promote a choice of identities that I do not agree with to be right or best for an individual, and to promote certain organizations that uphold values contrary to those of my community.”

Chow, who is from Gilroy, California, about two hours outside of San Francisco, told The Daily Signal that she fears funding for Christian groups on campus is threatened. A piano recital where she was supposed to play was cancelled because professors said, “You can’t perform when we are all afraid of protesters showing up at the door.”

At a protest Wednesday, Chow said, people yelled at her for three hours, swearing and demanding that she resign. Through that experience, she told The Daily Signal, “a big part of me was reminded that as a Christian, I needed to stand by what I said.”

That means not only standing by her beliefs about gender and sexuality, she said, but “loving the LGBTQ community and accepting all of them as valid and significant and loved.”

Chow was elected to the student Senate as a candidate running with the party Associated Students of the University of California. She had support from fellow Christian students and the “publications and media” crowd involved in journals, magazines, and CalTV, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Over 1,000 persons have signed a petition demanding that Chow resign from student government or face a recall. She also has faced pushback on social media.

Matt Ronnau, president of the Berkeley College Republicans, told The Daily Signal in an interview that his organization stands by Chow. “We support Isabella 100 percent,” Ronnau said, calling her treatment “incredibly unfair. She expressed very clearly … and decided to abstain, and then the Queer Alliance Resource Center [an LGBT rights organization] came out and basically said she was attacking them and really muddied what she said up,” he said.

The group “painted her to be this huge evil person when really she’s not,” Ronnau said.

Harini Shyamsundar, editor-in-chief and president of The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, told The Daily Signal in an email that the paper declined to publish an op-ed by Chow explaining her decision to abstain because it “did not meet the paper’s editorial standards. We could not publish it in our opinion section, even opposite our own editorial,” Shyamsundar said. Shyamsundar did not explain further, including what she meant by failure to meet editorial standards.

Manu Meel, CEO of BridgeUSA, a nonpartisan student club at UC Berkeley, told The Daily Signal in an email that while he and the organization did not support Chow’s stance, her opinions should still be respected.

“Millions of Americans share Senator Chow’s perspective,” Meel told The Daily Signal, adding: Rather than silencing her perspective, we must constructively engage her perspective and create the necessary spaces for those discussions to occur on campus. A democracy cannot thrive if we silence individuals that we disagree with, even if those disagreements are based on identity. In a democracy, progress is achieved when consensus can be forged because ultimately, we are one people united by a common commitment to advancing and protecting the rights of all citizens.

Meel also said students should focus on having a productive discussion about differing viewpoints. “As students on a campus that has a legacy of strengthening democracy, we can set an example for how difficult issues like the one being discussed here should be resolved,” Meel said. “We must take the opportunity to resolve our differences at a time when polarization and partisanship define the political landscape.”

Ryan T. Anderson, a senior research fellow in American principles and public policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that opinions based on scientific fact should not be seen as hateful or bigoted.

“The best biology, psychology, and philosophy all support an understanding of sex as a bodily reality and of gender as a social manifestation of bodily sex. Biology isn’t bigotry,” said Anderson, author of the book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”

“How absurd that a student has become a social outcast simply because she declined to support the manifest falsehoods of transgender ideology,” he said.

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A Better Way to Spend Our Education Dollars

With the recent release of a study on education spending, many are reiterating a hackneyed conclusion: that the U.S. needs to funnel more money into schools.

The study, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, compared human capital, or the quality of a country’s workforce, in different developed countries. Human capital is important, the study explains, because countries with greater human capital experience faster economic growth per capita—meaning more jobs, better wages, and more affordable goods and services.

The researchers determined the quality of a country’s human capital by looking at years of educational attainment, student performance on tests, and health factors. Based on these indicators, the study found that the U.S. dropped from a 6th place international human capital ranking in 1990 to a 27th place ranking today.

“The decline of human capital in the United States was one of the biggest surprises in our study,” said Dr. Christopher Murray writes. “Our findings show the association between investments in education and health and improved human capital and GDP—which policymakers here in the U.S. ignore at their own peril.”

In response to the study, some media outlets are now calling on the U.S. to spend more on education. But they’re mistaken: The issue isn’t how much we’re spending, it’s how we’re spending. So before we run to our checkbooks, let’s remember that investment doesn’t always mean spending more—it often means spending better.

The study offers some insight into how the U.S. can be smarter in its spending. The 10 countries found to have the greatest human capital were Finland, Iceland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea, Norway, Luxembourg, France, and Belgium.

If spending is America’s problem, then these top-performing countries should be the biggest education spenders out there.

But they’re not.

Of these 10 countries, only two—Norway and Luxembourg—spend more than the United States on education, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For example, Finland, the study’s top performer in terms of human capital, spends $2,425 less than the U.S. on primary education, $2,602 less on secondary education, and $16,426 less on tertiary education per student.

So if spending is not the problem with education, what is?

The report reveals that, in terms of human capital, the best performing countries are not investing more than the United States—they’re investing in different education programs.

Finland, for example, provides advanced vocational training programs, where students can complete core curriculum coursework while participating in publicly-financed, on-the-job training programs of their choice. Today, 45 percent of Finnish high school age students are enrolled in such programs, one of the highest vocational education enrollment rates among member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Iceland, the number two country in human capital, also offers a vocational education track for students, as do Denmark, the Netherlands, and other top-performing countries.

The United States would do well to learn from our friends abroad who are making vocational training accessible to students. Introducing education savings accounts in states across the country would offer students needed professional learning opportunities without increasing the price tag for U.S. taxpayers.

Education savings accounts increase access to vocational training by making public funding portable.

Today, to fund elementary and secondary education, the United States spends $11,762 per student annually. This funding is largely directed to public schools. In 2017, for example, only 0.3 percent of U.S. education spending went to vocational training.

But with education savings accounts, parents could spend the $11,762 that the government budgets for their child’s education on learning programs of their choice. At parents’ requests, participating states would direct public funding into a verified education savings account. Parents could then access the funds with a government-issued debit card to cover authorized education costs, such as vocational learning programs.

Students using education savings accounts to pay for skills training would benefit from greatly-improved employment opportunities. After all, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that technical occupations will account for one-fifth of all new jobs by 2026. And the Finnish example suggests that successfully incorporating vocational training programs could increase student educational attainment and training, improving human capital and per capita economic growth—making the U.S. richer and more productive in the process.

The United States must stop pouring more tax dollars into a failing education system without improving the system itself. Taking a cue from international leaders in encouraging vocational training through the use of education savings accounts would help us do just that.

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