For over a decade far-left activists have been plotting a framework for mass student debt cancellation —a costly, unilateral action that the nation’s highest court struck down for violating Constitutional powers. First fomented under the Obama Administration, the scheme was incubated by progressive think tanks, staffed and often formed by loyalist bureaucrats that present themselves as independent student advocates, but are anything but. Their interest was never students; it has always been about achieving mass debt forgiveness and, by extension, eliminating for-profit enterprises from serving higher education.
This liberal movement received a big boost starting in 2017 with the patronage of the John & Laura Arnold Foundation. The billionaire mega-donor’s deep pockets provided the financial resources for these nascent organizations to begin testing and honing their tactics to debase and discredit career colleges and other successful education vendors, which threatened their goal by providing students with alternative options to higher education. The organizations’ lawfare strategy refuses to accept that nonconventional schools and servicers actually offer students—particularly minorities, low-income, first-generation, and other non-traditional students—options better suited to their unique learning needs.
President Biden’s election in 2020 provided these sleeper cells the regulatory authority to finally expand their strategies, by then dialed in, into the channels of government policymaking. Former Obama officials flooded into the Biden Department of Education, equipped to begin immediately implementing their debt cancellation and anti for-profit agenda. As the Administration proudly advertises, it began on “day one” to initiate its vision to eliminate student loan debt.
At the same time the Department of Education maintained its network of advocacy organizations knowing these seemingly independent groups would provide the political cover necessary to achieve its mission. A revolving door between the Department and the organizations created a bench of likeminded experts for the Department to fill its ranks and a landing pad for its bureaucrats when they could be better utilized in the advocacy space. Most importantly, though, the Department’s proxies filled a role it could not—to harass, litigate and smear career colleges and higher education businesses, which the Administration loathes.
The latter role proved especially imperative following the Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down the Administration’s first attempt at student loan forgiveness—a decision that the Department of Education almost certainly anticipated. Leaning on the Sweet v. Cardona settlement, the Department resorted to its Plan B—attack career colleges and the vendors that support innovative programming. By putting these schools and vendors out of business, or sufficiently sullying their reputations, the Department knew it could forgive their students’ debt, thereby at least demonstrating some progress on its loan cancellation promise.
The strategy worked, and with blood in the water the Administration has doubled down on its tactics. The Department of Education’s significant budget and staff increase requests for its Federal Student Aid Enforcement Office are clear indications of its intent to throttle up its lawfare campaign against career colleges, higher education vendors, and, as the MOHELA case demonstrates, any non-federal government entity that does not conform to the Administration’s bidding. The ultimate goal is backdoor student loan forgiveness.
The Administration’s tunnel-vision mission has come at huge expense to students and taxpayers. The Department of Education’s diversion of resources contributed to the failed FAFSA rollout, which has left hundreds of thousands of high school graduates uncertain about their post-secondary plans and which will likely result in significantly fewer students, disproportionately from minority and low-income families, attending college next year. Worse still, the Administration’s relentless assault on career colleges, OPMs, student loan servicers, and other education vendors is eliminating good higher education options and pigeon-holing students into conventional colleges and universities, a model that is widely recognized as failing.
Meanwhile, as the Administration turns a blind eye to hateful protests on college campuses around the county, enrollment at and Americans’ confidence in conventional higher education is at record lows. Yet, the Department of Education is intent on vesting even more power in these same college administrators who— because they stand to gain if the Administration can get it done— share a commitment to student loan forgiveness and eliminating for-profit enterprises from higher education.
Students, especially minorities, low-income earners, women, veterans, and first generation college-goers, honest graduates working hard to repay their loans, and taxpayers are the victims in the Department of Education’s, and its proxies’, higher education shakedown. Congress and the public must demand accountability to stop the assault. Otherwise, students will continue to have fewer and fewer pathways to a college degree and career success, and the U.S. model of higher education will continue its downward spiral.