For Profit - Part 3: The Evidence is Clear
episode
Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
36 min
1 speaker
1 chapter
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Hey everyone, I'm Jen Hatmaker, host of the For the Love podcast. Every week I'm joined by my dear friend Amy and we dive into the good stuff. So it's real stories, honest conversations, super inspiring guests who help us make sense of life and love and faith and just this whole messy middle. We talk about career pivots, we talk about parenting teens and young adults, dating again, hello. and just all the ways we're still becoming. We laugh, we sometimes cry, we definitely learn, and we certainly don't take ourselves too seriously. So whether you are chasing purpose or you're rebuilding or maybe just trying to keep your plants alive, there is a seat for you at our table. New episodes drop every week. So hit subscribe and come hang out with us on For the Love.
Last week on Campus Files. I called the phone number on the ad for Brooks and then he started asking me questions about my life. Not much money is spent on education. A lot of the money goes to advertising and recruiting. I enter my recruiter's office and he is angry and he turns to me and he goes, I am so sorry. These people are liars. The for-profit college industry ran wild in the 2000s. 50% of our income went to these loans for many, many years. Gaming borrowers from these schools is by design. It's intentional.
My experiences with education have been life-changing, and it was really a surprise to me to find out how different other people's experiences could be. That's Eileen Connor. If you've listened to Campus Files for a while, you'll recognize Eileen from our past episode, Trojan Chorus. In that episode, we covered how her organization, the Project on Predatory Student Lending, also known as the PPSL, sued USC after they allegedly ripped off students by partnering with a for-profit company to offload a chunk of their courses I knew that there were so many resources going into advocating on behalf of schools. It just felt like somebody needed to be the legal resource and like the passion standing up for students because they were the ones who weren't being considered at the table.
In 2015, just a couple years after the PPSL was founded, there was a crisis in the for-profit school industry. A crisis which brought attention to a little-known law. A law which offered a crucial escape hatch for people like Mike and Ashley, who you heard earlier in this series. It's called borrower defense to repayment, or more simply, borrower defense. In this third and final part of our for-profit mini-series, we're going to take a look at borrower defense, what it is and why it's important. Because it is important. In many ways, the future of for-profit schools as a whole are tied to the future of borrower defense. And right now, there's a battle playing out in the courts and the federal government.
A battle which may determine the future of this industry for decades to come. I'm Ian Mont. This is Campus Files, for-profit part three. The evidence is clear. Over the last few episodes, you've heard about for-profit schools and the ways they've manipulated students, leaving people like Mike and Ashley buried in debt for years. But during all that time, there was a lifeline available, one neither of them knew existed. It's called borrower defense. And if they knew about it, it could have changed everything. This provision in the Higher Education Act for Borrower Defense has been part of the direct lending program ever since it came into being as a demonstration program in the early 1990s. So what is Borrower Defense? Well, you can think of it as basically like a refund. The law allows students who take out a loan to have that loan forgiven if they chose to take it out based on lies and deception. It's exactly what happened to Mike and Ashley. They could have applied to have their loan canceled, but neither of them knew the law existed.
In fact, there were less than 100 students who tried to use the law between 1994 and 2015. And that's because the sort of deceptive practices that Borrower Defense was designed for weren't so widespread when the law was created. So it was kind of forgotten about. And there weren't many lawyers focused on the issue at the time. But that would change as for-profit schools grew. Here's Eileen.
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Chapters
1 chaptersSpeakers
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