House version of COVID relief bill modifies 90/10 rule for for-profit colleges. Critics say the change may cause some for-profits to close

 The House of Representatives passed a $1.9 trillion relief bill a few days ago, and the legislation is now before the Senate. House Democrats inserted a provision that would modify  an obscure statute that requires for-profit colleges to obtain at least 10 percent of their revenues from non-federal student aid.

The purpose of the 90/10 rule is to require for-profit colleges to obtain at least a small part of their income from non-federal sources. As a recent paper by the Veterans Education Project noted:

The rationale for the [90/10] policy is that a worthwhile educational provider should be able to attract other sources of revenue beyond federal grants and loans, and that students should be willing to put some of their own money toward their education (i.e., “skin in the game”).

 Or as Representative Bobby Scott (D-Virginia) put it, the rule requires for-profit institutions to “show some semblance of attraction to people.”

Under current law, GI Bill benefits--federal student aid for veterans--are not counted as federal student aid under the 90-10 rule. Thus, for-profits can get 90 percent of their revenue from federal student aid and get additional federal money from veterans' benefits without violating the 90/10 rule. 

The House version of the COVID relief bill would change the way the 90/10 rule is calculated by including veterans benefits as federal student aid.  The Wall Street Journal criticized the measure, pointing out the rule change would cause 87 for-profit schools to fall out of compliance with federal regulations and perhaps close.

I disagree with the Wall Street Journal. For-profit colleges have a long and well-documented history of providing overly-expensive, often substandard services to students.  As the Brookings Institute reported recently, for-profit schools enroll only 10 percent of postsecondary students but account for half of all student loan defaults.

Moreover, on average, for-profits are four times more expensive than community colleges, and black and Latino students are overrepresented in this low-performing education sector. Indeed, some research suggests that a for-profit college education may be no better than no college education at all. 

Tightening the 90/10 rule is a modest reform. All it will do is require for-profits to find more non-federal operating funds than they are required to have now.  

If the Senate includes the modified rule in its version of the COVID legislation, some for-profits may indeed close. We should not mourn their loss.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D. Virginia)

It's Magic! Betsy DeVos' Department of Education allows Grand Canyon University to call itself non-profit while its parent company reports profit margin of 27 percent

David Halperin, the nation's best investigative reporter on the for-profit college industry, wrote an article recently on Grand Canyon University, which has been advertising itself lately as a non-profit university.

Well, sorta. As Halperin explained, Betsy DeVos' Department of Education "has blessed a series of troubling deals that allow a [not-]for profit college to be 'serviced by connected for-profit companies."

To what purpose?As Halperin reported:

The non-profit school benefits from the elimination of the for-profit stigma, reduced regulations, elimination of taxation, and eligibility for more state and charitable grants. Meanwhile, the for-profit, and its owners and executives, get to siphon off a lot of the revenue, much of it from taxpayer-funded grants and loans.

Thus in the fairyland world that Betsy DeVos has created, Brian Mueller wears two hats. He is president of Grand Canyon, a non-profit entity. He is also CEO of the university's parent for-profit corporation, Grand Canyon Education.  GCE trades on NASDAQ at $115 a share and reported a profit margin of 27 percent at the end of 2018.

Mueller conducted an earnings call to his investors recently in which he complained about non-profit colleges warning potential students not to enroll at a for-profit college. Through DeVos' mumbo jumbo, Grand Canyon can now call itself a nonprofit college, which has boosted its enrollment.

As Mueller boasted: "They see our ad & call Grand Canyon and within 72 hours everything is done. Applications filled out. Transcripts evaluated. Financial aid is done. They go to our website, they see who Grand Canyon is and say, 'this sounds good,' and they start."

As Halperin accurately observed, "the Donald Trump-Betsy DeVos Department of Education . . . has done everything possible to eliminate rules that protect students and taxpayers from predatory college abuses."

In fact, according to a Century Foundation report, which analyzed colleges with large online enrollments, Grand Canyon only spends 17 percent of its tuition money on educating students (as summarized by Halperin). Some non-profit!

I once thought that DeVos was simply incompetent and making decisions that benefited for-profit colleges out of ignorance. But DeVos knows exactly what she is doing, and she must know that the for-profit college industry as a whole is committing economic rape on unsophisticated young people, including first-generation college goers.

In a November speech, DeVos admitted that the student-loan program is in crisis. This is what she said:

• The federal government holds $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loans, one third of all federal assets.

• Only one in four federal student-loan borrowers are paying down the principal and interest on their debt.

• Twenty percent of all federal student loans are delinquent or in default. That's seven times the delinquency rate on credit card debt.

Of course, the for-profits aren't responsible for all the carnage in the student-loan program, but they are responsible for a lot of it. Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis, writing for the  Brookings Institute, reported awhile back that the 5-year default rate for one cohort of students who attended for-profit colleges was 47 percent! Several for-profits have been shut down in a shower of fraud allegations.

But even for DeVos, this latest scheme, which allows a college to call itself non-profit while its for-profit parent reports a profit margin of 27 percent, is outrageous.

President of Grand Canyon University and CEO of Grand Canyon Education.

Cooking the Books: Federal Reserve Bank Says $166 Billion in Student Debt is Delinquent, But the Crisis is Worse Than That

Most Americans have confidence in what the Federal Reserve Bank says about the national economy. I know I do. But when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that $166 billion in student debt is delinquent, it vastly understated the enormity of the student-loan crisis.

In its most recent quarterly household debt report, the Fed pegged total outstanding debt at $1.46 trillion as of the end of December. According to the Fed, about 11 percent of that debt ($166 billion) is delinquent or in default. That's a startling number. But the picture is far bleaker than that.

Just two months ago, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos stated publicly that only one out of four student borrowers (24 percent) are paying down the principal and interest on their loans. "As for FSA's portfolio today," DeVos said, "too many loans are either delinquent, in default, or are [in] plans on which students are paying so little, their loan balance continues to grow." In total, DeVos admitted, "43 percent of all loans are currently considered 'in distress,'" and 20 percent of all federal student loans are delinquent or in default.

DeVos also implicitly acknowledged that the federal government is cooking the books by classifying a lot of student debt as performing loans even though millions of people are not paying them back. "Only through government accounting is this student loan portfolio counted as anything but an asset embedded with significant risk," DeVos observed. "In the commercial world, no bank regulator would allow this portfolio to be valued at full, face value."

In addition to the millions of people who have defaulted on their loans, millions more are in various plans that allow borrowers to skip their loan payments without being counted as defaulters. As of last summer, 7.4 million people were enrolled in long-term income-based repayment plans who are making payments so low that interest continues to accrue on their loans.

Think about that: 7.4 million people whose loans are labeled as performing even though their loan balances get larger with each passing month. You can label that scenario any way you like, but we're talking about 7.4 million additional defaulters.

The Department of Education has been scamming the public for a quarter of a century regarding student-loan defaults. For years, it only reported the percentage of loans that defaulted within two years of entering repayment. To keep their default rates down, colleges encouraged their former students to enter into economic-hardship deferments, which excused them from making payments without officially putting them in default.

Then DOE began reporting three-year default rates, which showed defaults ticking up slightly to the neighborhood of 11 percent. But the Brookings Institute (in a paper written by Looney and Yannelis) reported in 2015 that the 5-year default rate for a recent cohort was 28 percent--more than double the three-year rate.

In other words, for a cohort of borrowers that the Brookings researchers analyzed, more than one out of four student borrowers was officially in default after five years. According to the same Brookings report, the five-year default rate for students who attended for-profit colleges was 47 percent--nearly half!

Of course, loan default rates vary some from cohort to cohort, but there is no sign that the percentage of student borrowers paying off their loans is going up. In fact, the data show the opposite.

In short, the Fed's recent report may be technically accurate but it understates the magnitude of the student-loan crisis. When the Department of Education finally comes clean and gives us some accurate figures, I think we will find that half of all outstanding student loans are not performing--about 20 million borrowers with collective debt totally three quarters of a trillion dollars.