BETSY DEVOS/EDUCATION: “When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos began rolling back regulations to curb the predatory practices of for-profit colleges, critics seethed that the Trump administration was throwing yet another lifeline to a rapacious industry — in this case, one that sees vulnerable undergraduates as nothing more than moneymaking targets.
Henry N. Tisdale, the president of the small campus of Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C., disagrees.
Since the Obama administration announced that it would establish a smoother pathway for students to claim that they had been misled by their colleges, Mr. Tisdale said he has feared an expensive legal battle over the smallest leaflet advertising a service on campus…
Mr. Tisdale and his counterparts at other small, historically black colleges and universities are among an unlikely cohort of supporters for Ms. DeVos’s effort to tighten a wide-ranging regulation that offers federal debt relief to students who were defrauded or deceived by their higher-education institutions…
Ms. DeVos’s plans to overhaul the Obama-era rules for student borrowers reached a crucial stage this week, as a committee convened to renegotiate the regulations began debating the burden of proof students would have to meet to win claims against institutions.
The Education Department has proposed that students establish ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that institutions misled them, compared with a ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard applied under the Obama administration. Students would also have to prove that institutions had an ‘intent to deceive,’ ‘knowledge of falsity’ and ‘reckless disregard’ that resulted in financial harm to borrowers.”
-Erica L. Green, “Black Colleges Swept Up in For-Profit Crackdown Find Relief From DeVos,” The New York Times online, Jan. 12, 2018