June 5, 2019

DeVos Effort To Save College Accreditor ACICS Is On Shaky Ground

When Diane Auer Jones, Betsy DeVos’s top higher education aide, testified last month before a House Oversight subcommittee, among the deceptive statements she made was her suggestion that a federal court decision compelled the Department of Education to reinstate the controversial for-profit college accreditor ACICS as a validator of schools’ eligibility for federal student grants
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May 22, 2019

What I’m Telling Congress Today About Betsy DeVos

I’m testifying today before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy about the for-profit college industry and how it has been addressed by the U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos. Other witnesses at the hearing will include Acting Under Secretary Diane Auer Jones, who is DeVos’s top higher education aide. You
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May 16, 2019

DeVos Department Denies Directing Dream Center to Deceive

In a new letter to Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and other members of Congress, Diane Auer Jones, Betsy DeVos’s top higher education aide, reaffirms the Department’s claim that it never advised Dream Center Education Holdings to publicly misrepresent its accreditation status — contrary to an allegation made to me last year, and reaffirmed again to
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February 15, 2019

Betsy DeVos Caused A For-Profit College Meltdown and Now She’s Doing Nothing for the Students

Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos owns the ongoing, awful meltdown of the chains of career colleges — the Art Institutes, Argosy University, and South University — formerly operated by for-profit Education Management Corporation. Yet now, as campuses across the country have devolved into chaos, faculty and staff have lost their jobs, and students are
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January 16, 2019

DeVos Department Bars State Attorneys General From Key Panel

The Betsy DeVos Department of Education acted Wednesday morning to block a representative of state attorneys general from serving on a panel charged with negotiating wide-ranging new rules governing higher education. Although consumer advocates have shown that the new regulations would create opportunities for bad actors to engage in more waste, fraud, and abuse at
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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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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 6, 2018

Another For-Profit College Lobbyist To Join DeVos Education Department

Politico reports today that Diane Auer Jones is joining Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education Department as senior policy adviser to the secretary. Jones has been working at the U.S. Department of Labor since November, and worked in the George W. Bush administration as assistant secretary for postsecondary education. But in between, Jones was, from 2010 until 2015, senior
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