Sweet v. DeVos: A federal judge calls Education Department's Borrow-Defense process "Kafkaesque"

In 2019, a group of student-loan debtors filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. 

Claiming to represent more than 100,000 student-loan borrowers, the plaintiffs accused DOE of issuing "blanket refusal[s]" when students tried to have their student loans forgiven based on claims they had been defrauded by the for-profit colleges they attended. 

More particularly, the plaintiffs accused DOE of “stonewalling” the fraud-claims process and allowing more than 200,000 fraud claims to languish for eighteen months.

In October 2019, Federal Judge William Alsup certified the lawsuit as a class action (Sweet I); and on May 22, 2020, Judge Alsup approved a preliminary settlement proposal that would end the litigation (Sweet II). 

Under the terms of the proposed settlement, DOE pledged “to decide claims and notify borrowers within eighteen months of final approval and implement relief within twenty-one [months].” DOE also agreed to be penalized if it delayed its decisions.

The plaintiff students apparently believed DOE would process the fraud claims in good faith based on a review of each individual claim. But they discovered that DOE denied almost all claims by sending a form letter that told petitioners their requests were denied based on “Insufficient Evidence.”

As reported in Forbes, borrowers accused DOE of "skirting the spirit of the settlement agreement, by essentially, arbitrarily denying relief to everyone." DOE admitted that since April 2020 it had denied 94% of all borrower-defense claims. 

When DOE’s behavior came to Judge Alsup’s attention, he was not happy. As he explained in his order, DOE’s form letters did not explain why students’ claims were almost uniformly rejected.

  Although individuals could request reconsideration of their individual denials, they had no basis for doing so since DOE gave no reason for the rejections.  Indeed, Judge Alsup observed, “the borrower’s path forward rings disturbingly Kafkaesque” (Sweet III, p. 5).

In fact, it is hard to read Judge Alsup’s opinion without coming to the conclusion that Betsy DeVos’s DOE was determined to deny relief to almost everyone who claimed to have been defrauded by a for-profit college.

As Judge Alsup pointed out, DOE had processed fraud claims expeditiously during the Obama administration. In the final 19 months of President Obama's second term in office, DOE processed 32,000 borrower-defense applications and approved 99.2% of them (Sweet III, p. 9).

But in 2017, President Trump took office and appointed Betsy Devos as his Secretary of Education. DeVos's DOE slowed down the borrower defense review process dramatically. In fact, over an 18-month period, DOE did not issue any decisions on borrower-defense claims (Sweet III, p. 3).

Then, in December 2019, while litigation was pending, the DeVos DOE speeded up its review process and decided 16,000 cases in one day. In contrast to the 99 percent approval rate during the Obama administration, President Trump's DOE denied 95% of the borrower-defense claims (Sweet III, p. 3).

Judge Alsup’s order canceling the proposed settlement was issued less than a month before the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump was defeated, and DeVos resigned her post as Education Secretary in January.

In short, there is a new sheriff in town. Let us hope Miguel Cardona, President Biden’s Secretary of Education, will resolve student-loan borrowers’ fraud claims quickly and in good faith. The Obama administration determined that most of these claims are valid--that most claimants were ripped off by for-profit colleges.  Surely the Biden administration will come to the same conclusion.

References

Adam Minsky. Dept. of Education Tells Court It Has Denied 94% of Loan Forgiveness Applications, Forbes.com, Sept. 14, 2020.

Sweet v. DeVos [Sweet I], No. C19-03674 WHA, 2019 WL 5595171 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 30, 2019) (granting motion for class certification).

Sweet v. DeVos {Sweet II], No. C19-03674 WHA, 2020 WL 4876897 (N.D. Cal. May 22, 2020) (approving preliminary settlement).

Sweet v. DeVos [Sweet III],  No. C19-03674 WHA, 2019 WL 6149690 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 19, 2020) (refusing to approve settlement agreement).

Bye-bye, Betsy!

140 people a day die from opioid overdoses, but 3,000 people a day default on their student loans

Approximately 52,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2015. That's an average rate of  around 140 deaths a day. In fact, opioid overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under age 50.  If we continue at this rate, a half million Americans will die from drug overdoses over the next ten years--roughly nine times as many Americans as were killed in the Vietnam War.

But let's compare the opioid crisis to the student-loan disaster.  Last year, 1.1 million Americans defaulted on student loans; that's an average rate of 3,000 people a day.  Obviously, defaulting on a student loan is not as serious as dying from a drug overdose. Nevertheless, the consequences of student-loan default are catastrophic.

First of all, a student-loan default triggers penalties and fees that are attached to the unpaid debt, making it less likely that the debtor will ever pay off his or her student loans. Secondly, student-loan defaulters cannot take out more student loans to obtain additional education or training. Third, unlike most unsecured loans, student loans are very difficult to discharge in bankruptcy.

In short, people who default on their student loans run a good chance of becoming lifetime debtors who will never improve their economic circumstances. In other words, a student-loan default is often the equivalent of an economic death sentence.

People who attend for-profit colleges have the highest student-loan default rates. A Brookings Institution report documented that almost half of the people in  a recent cohort who borrowed money to attend a for-profit school defaulted within five years.  Another analysis reported that three out of four African Americans who attended for-profit colleges eventually default on their loans.

In my opinion, a good case can be made that the student-loan catastrophe is causing more harm than the opioid epidemic.  Around 44 million Americans have student-loan debt; that's about one American in five. College-loan indebtedness is hampering people's ability to buy homes, save for retirement, and purchase health insurance. Without question, millions of Americans would have been better off if they had never pursued postsecondary education because the indebtedness they took on degraded the quality of their lives rather than enhanced it.

And Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has has made the student-debt crisis worse. Again and again, she has made decisions that favor the corrupt for-profit industry at the expense of struggling student loan debtors, even debtors who were defrauded by for-profit colleges.

To its credit, the Obama administration crafted regulations whereby students could apply to the Department of Education to have their student loans forgiven if they were defrauded by the college they attended. Thousands of students have applied for loan forgiveness based on fraud claims, including students who borrowed money to attend two bankrupt for-profit institutions: ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges.

The Obama regulations were to have taken effect on July 1, 2017, but Betsy DeVos stopped the implementation of these regulations, saying she feared students would get "free money." She then appointed a panel of experts to draft new regulations, which won't be approved until next year. In fact, under the DeVos scheme, defrauded students will not be able to move forward on their claims until 2019 at the earliest.

And it appears that many students will not get complete relief from their loans even if they can prove they were defrauded.  DeVos is talking about giving partial relief based on a formula that will compare the defrauded student's earnings to the average earnings among people who participated in similar educational programs.

The cynicism of this approach is shocking. First of all, by delaying the administrative process until 2019, DeVos is giving fraud victims only three options for handling their oppressive student debt. First, they can continue making loan payments on educational experiences that are worthless to them. Second, they can enter income-based repayment plans that will set monthly payments so low that the interest on their debt will continue to accrue, making their total indebtedness grow larger. Or third, they can default on their loans, which will ruin their credit and cause their debt to grow larger from fees and penalties that the debt collectors tack on to their original debt.

DeVos's tactic is nothing more than sneaky manipulation to aid the for-profit industry, which does not want fraud claims to be examined. If Congress had a moral compass and some courage, DeVos's behavior would lead to a formal resolution calling for her resignation.

Unfortunately, Congress is as beholden to the for-profit colleges as Betsy DeVos. The for-profits have used lobbyists and strategic campaign contributions to buy Congress's silence; and at least a few of our federal representatives (Senators Olympia Snowe and Dianne Feinstein, for example) have personally profited from ties to the for-profit college industry.

And thus our elected representatives are willing to allow millions of lives to be destroyed and the integrity of higher education to be degraded rather than reform the federal student-loan program.  In sum, Congress is willing to tolerate human suffering that may exceed the harm caused by opioid addiction.

References

Maria Danilova. DeVos may only partially wipe away some student loans. Detroit News, October 28, 2017.

Josh Katz. Drug Deaths in America are Rising Faster Than Ever. New York Times, June 5, 2017.

Tamar Lewin. Questions Follow Leader of For-Profit Colleges. New York Times,May 26, 2011.

Ben Miller. New Federal Data Show a Student Loan Crisis for African American Borrowers. Center for American Progress, October 16, 2017.

Bob Samuels. The For-Profit College Bubble: Exploiting the Poor to Give to the Rich. Huffington Post, May 25, 2011.

The Wrong Move on Student Loans. New York Times, April 6, 2017.