Saturday, June 3, 2017

Betsy DeVos should resign as Education Secretary and Trump should replace her with a junkyard dog

Betsy DeVos should resign as Secretary of Education in the Trump administration. I say this for two reasons:

First, Ms. DeVos is too nice a person to be President Trump's Secretary of Education.


No matter what you think of her politics or her education philosophy Betsy DeVos is not a toxic person. She did not deserve to be shut out of a public school, as District of Columbia protesters tried to do shortly after she took office.

And she did not deserve to have students boo her and turn their backs on her when she spoke at a college graduation exercise this spring. If I were her, I would tell the whole wide world to stick the Secretary of Education's position where the sun doesn't shine and go home to Michigan and spend time with my grandchildren.

Second. Betsy DeVos knows next to nothing about higher education policy.

The federal student loan program is in meltdown, destroying the lives of millions of people and undermining the integrity of higher education. Numerous small private liberal arts colleges are on the verge of closing; law schools are admitting students of a lower and lower quality, and huge swaths of the for-profit college industry are defrauding their students--or, at the very least, they are gouging their customers. The federal student loan program bears a big share of the blame for this dismal state of affairs.

Betsy DeVos knows next to nothing about the student loan crisis. She has shown no capacity to deal with this enormous problem, and she has already made a number of missteps. For example, she hired some empty suits from the for-profit sector to advise her--the wrong move, in my opinion.

Trump needs to hire a junkyard dog to run the Department of Education

President Trump needs to gracefully accept DeVos' resignation, praise her extravagantly in a tweet message, and then appoint a junkyard dog to replace her.

By junkyard dog, I don't mean a vicious person or an unethical person; I mean a tough person.  The next Education Secretary needs to be tough enough to confront the for-profit college industry, tough enough to handle higher education's legions of lobbyists, and tough enough to get rid of the student loan guaranty agencies that have amassed billions of dollars in cash hounding distressed student loan debtors.

The next Secretary of Education needs to be tough enough to tell the public the truth about the student loan crisis, which is this: Millions of people have taken out student loans they will never pay back.

What a junkyard dog do if  appointed Education Secretary?


  • First, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's 2013 report, A Closer Look at the Trillion, needs to be updated. How many people have defaulted on their loans, and how many are delinquent? How many are not making payments because their loans are in deferment or forbearance? How many are in income-driven repayment plans (IDRs) and making monthly payments so low that their payments don't cover accruing interest?
  • Second, the new Secretary should endorse the Democrats' bill to protect student loan defaulters from having their Social Security checks garnished.  This is a small matter in terms of the overall student loan crisis, but symbolically, such a move would signal that the Trump administration is not completely heartless.
  • Third, the Education Secretary should cancel the performance bonus program for DOE's student-loan bureaucrats. James Runcie, Chief Operating Officer for the student loan program, received $430,000 in bonuses--an outrage. The new Secretary of Education should fire everyone who got a performance bonus.
  • Fourth, the DOE Secretary needs to streamline the process whereby students who file administrative claims based on the closed-school rule or the so-called borrower defense can have their claims resolved quickly.
  • Fifth, DOE's junkyard dog should dismantle all the student loan guaranty agencies, starting with Educational Credit Management Corporation. While the termination process is taking place, DOE should stop paying the agencies' attorney fees to hound suffering student borrowers in the bankruptcy courts.
  • Sixth, the Secretary of Education, as junkyard dog, should revise Lynn Mahaffie's 2015 letter outlining when DOE will not oppose bankruptcy discharge of student loans to clarify to the federal courts that DOE supports a bankruptcy discharge of student loans under the same terms that apply to other unsecured consumer debt.
Obviously, any Secretary of Education who attempts to carry out the agenda I outlined will need to be tough as a junkyard dog. Betsy DeVos is not a junkyard dog, and I mean that as a compliment to her.


The next Secretary of Education should be a junkyard dog.
References

Lauren Camera. Protesters Disrupt DeVos School Visit. U.S. News & World Report, February 10, 2017.


Rohit Chopra. A closer look at the trillion. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, August 5, 2013.

Erica L. Green. Bethune-Cookman Graduates Greet Betsy DeVos With Turned Backs. New York Times, May 10, 2017.




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