Schneiderman: I’ll sue you. This time Betsy DeVos for not enforcing for-profit school oversight rule

ALBANY — State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is suing the Trump administration, yet again, this time setting his sights on the U.S. Department of Education, alleging that the department is breaking federal law by not enforcing a statute meant to hold for-profit schools accountable for the future of the students who pay for their services.

Schneiderman announced Tuesday he and 18 other state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the Department of Education for delaying enforcement of parts of the Gainful Employment Rule which monitors a higher education program’s graduates’ debt-to-income level.

“From delaying student loan forgiveness to exposing students to misconduct by abusive schools, Secretary DeVos and the Department of Education have put special interests before students’ best interests,” Schneiderman said. “Failing to implement the Gainful Employment Rule leaves students vulnerable to exploitation and fraud. If Washington won’t defend students against predatory for-profit schools, we will.”

The Gainful Employment Rule was created under President Barack Obama in 2015 and released its first set of data to the public in January 2017.

“Since their creation under the previous administration, Gainful Employment regulations have been repeatedly challenged by educational institutions and overturned by the courts, underscoring the need for a regulatory reset,” DeVos said in June. “We need to get this right for our students, and we need to get this right for our institutions of higher education.”

The rule requires schools to provide the department with information about the program’s average debt load, the loan repayment rate of all students who enroll in the program, the percentage of students who graduate from the program, the number of graduates who obtain employment in a field related to the program and the average earnings of graduates.

The data is then released to the public as a resource for future students to find quality institutions.

DeVos announced June 30 that the department would give for-profit institutions more time, until July 1, 2018, to comply with the overly burdensome, as she terms it, rule, with the original deadline being this past July.

DeVos since has extended deadlines for institutions regarding the rule.

The coalition of attorneys general argues the delays have no legal justification and the department’s actions are arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion.

The first set of data released by the department under then Education Secretary John King Jr. found the typical graduate of career training programs at public colleges and universities earned far more than the graduates of comparable programs and for-profit institutions, nearly $9,000 more on average.

The department also found that nearly a third of students who graduate with a certificate from a for-profit institution earned less than what a full-time minimum wage worker typically earns in a year.

DeVos may be soft on for-profit schools since coming to public service from being a strong advocate for parents having more school choices, including her backing of public-private charter schools.

Schneiderman’s office is no stranger to protecting people from predatory for-profit schools after suing Trump’s for-profit real estate seminar program, illegally self-referred as Trump University, for fraud after promising many benefits of the program that never came true.

The program sold itself as a real university, but never had a license, promised to provide instructors handpicked by Trump who would provide consumers with instruction in Trump’s own real estate techniques, which was found to be false, provide graduates with a support program, but continued to ring consumers dry with new programs, such as the Trump Elite mentorship program, and consumers were unable to make money after graduation.

“More than 5,000 people across the country who paid Donald Trump $40 million to teach them his hard-sell tactics got a hard lesson in bait-and-switch,” Schneiderman said when his office announced the lawsuit in 2013.

Since then Trump fought the lawsuit tooth-and-nail until he won the presidency when he settled the suit with a $25 million agreement.