A jury trial is set to begin Tuesday in federal district court in Alexandria, VA, of a long-standing whistleblower lawsuit filed by former U.S. Department of Education civil servant Jon Oberg against the student lender and collection agency Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA). This case may at last provide a public verdict regarding the notorious
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This was the week that the President of the United States told voters to choose an accused pedophile and disgraceful bigot to be Alabama’s next U.S. senator. Trump can’t sink any lower.  Or can he? I’ll be letting you know next week. Since 2017, Republic Report‘s “Trump Terrible 10” has ranked the week’s 10 most disgraceful figures
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A tangled web of for-profit connections adds up to more bad news for struggling students. For-profit college chain Career Education Corporation (CEC) announced last week that William D. Hansen has joined the company’s board of directors. It’s a disturbing validation by Hansen, a former top Department of Education official under George W. Bush, of a predatory
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I got a call from Bernie Bernstein of the Washington Post, offering me $300 to keep writing this feature. I was caught off-guard and blurted that I would probably still write it even without the money. I really regret that. But I’m thankful this week that we’re at 10 months out of 48 and we
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A filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission by troubled Bridgepoint Education raises questions about the company’s continued compliance with a federal law requiring for-profit colleges to obtain at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than Department of Education-provided student grants and loans. Bridgepoint’s access to other funding was placed in
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When Betsy DeVos announced she would repeal and replace the Obama administration’s rules to protect students and taxpayers against predatory for-profit colleges, one of the signs that she was stacking the deck was the announcement that her Department of Education would select not the traditional two, but instead four, representatives of for-profit colleges to be
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The U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos this week began the process of dismantling the rules issued under President Obama to constrain the predatory abuses of for-profit colleges. At the end of the troubling first day of what’s called negotiated rulemaking, members of the public were given an opportunity to speak. I was
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Staff of the U.S. Department of Education this morning refused to let attendees live-stream its negotiated rulemaking meeting, the first in a series of sessions where the Trump-DeVos department is aiming to roll back Obama-era rules to protect students and taxpayers from predatory practices by for-profit colleges. It then actively resisted proposals from negotiators representing
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