August 2, 2018

DeVos Aide Tailors Decisions to the Predatory Colleges That Employed Her

In discussions early this year, members of a U.S. Department of Education team led by senior adviser Diane Auer Jones told executives from Dream Center Education Holdings (DCEH), run by CEO Brent Richardson, to publicly represent that two of the company’s Art Institutes schools remained accredited, even though the schools’ accreditor had written the company
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July 25, 2018

New Trump-DeVos Loan Relief Rule Trashes Students’ Rights, Aids Predatory Colleges

The Betsy DeVos Department of Education, about an hour ago, released a proposed rule to repeal and replace the 2016 Obama borrower defense regulation, which was aimed at cancelling federal student loan debts for people who are ripped off by predatory colleges. The new DeVos rule represents a complete negation of the important reforms in
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June 30, 2018

Dream Center Closing Numerous ex-EDMC Campuses

A leak out of the North Carolina higher education system confirms what insiders have been telling me, and online rumors have indicated: Dream Center Education Holdings (DCEH) plans to shut down many of the Art Institutes and other campuses it acquired last year from faltering for-profit college chain EDMC. An email obtained by the Raleigh
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June 19, 2018

Trump and DeVos Trashing of Obama College Rules Will Hurt Students

Today Alexis Goldstein of Americans for Financial Reform and I met with officials of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Education as part of the process of developing a Trump administration regulation that would repeal and replace the Obama administration’s gainful employment rule, which was aimed at protecting students
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May 24, 2018

The Defining Higher Ed Abuse of the DeVos Era

Troubling conversions of predatory for-profit colleges into corrupted non-profits benefit wealthy insiders — and harm students and taxpayers Below are comments I plan to deliver today to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI).  Members of the committee, good morning. Mr. Gunderson and Carl Barney, Mr. Juhlin’s boss, have
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May 16, 2018

Inside a For-Profit College Conversion: Lucrative Ties, Troubling Actions

The once for-profit Art Institutes are now run by the non-profit, faith-based Dream Center. But they’re connected to the new Woz U and a web of for-profit companies — raising questions of conflict of interest and legal compliance.  On the phone, Brent Richardson, the CEO and co-chairman of the new non-profit Dream Center Education Holdings
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April 29, 2018

Senators to DeVos: Aide Diane Jones Has Significant Conflicts of Interest

  Ten Democratic senators wrote to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos late last week that Diane Auer Jones, who formerly worked for a number of controversial for-profit colleges, has a “significant number of conflicts of interest and appearances of impropriety” in her current role as DeVos’s senior policy advisor. The senators charge that Jones “has a
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March 19, 2018

The Mysterious Deal to Take DeVry University Private

  Who owns the private company that is buying 30,000-student DeVry University, which gets some $400 million a year from taxpayers, and how do they plan to run the school? No one is saying.   In December, one of the largest for-profit education companies, Adtalem Global Education, formerly known as DeVry Education Group, announced that
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