OPINION:
Since taking office, the Biden-Harris administration has turned its Department of Education against students and their families in a way that few could have imagined. Under the helm of Miguel Cardona, a long-time ideologue, the administration repurposed the Federal Student Aid (FSA) Office of Enforcement into a cudgel against career colleges, online programs, and successful higher education vendors that do not align with the administration’s woke agenda. And now, students are paying the price.
In 2012, amid the frenzy of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a cadre of Obama-Biden career loyalists latched onto a budding radical idea: government-provided free college and mass cancellation of student debt. They began feverishly drawing up blueprints that could be implemented under a Hillary Clinton administration. Then they ran into a problem. Hillary didn’t win.
But the story didn’t end there. Following Donald Trump’s surprise election, these ideologues flocked to a handful of select special interest groups. Purporting to be “student advocates,” these organizations continued to develop their plan for free college, which received a boost when it caught the attention of billionaire donor John Arnold.
In late 2020, this network of ideologues notched the opportunity to finally implement their scheme with the election of President Joe Biden. Pressured by the poles of his party, then-candidate Biden had tepidly committed to the notion of student debt cancellation. And with his ascension to office these veterans of the Obama-Biden administration flooded back to their old haunts—this time quietly behind the helm of the Department of Education.
Much of the ground had already been seeded. While masquerading as student advocates, these groups had courted influential state attorneys general, who were recruited to build state support which would be necessary to generate public morale. This recruitment included dictating closed-door meeting agendas, buying drinks for government officials, even critiquing dinner menus.
When President Biden assumed office, his disdain for career colleges and other unconventional routes to a post-secondary degree were well-known enough. No one expected the Biden-Harris administration to be friendly, even though these options had grown significantly in popularity and enrollment, particularly among young people who didn’t fit the traditional college student mold. But few could have anticipated the lengths the President’s network of cronies would go to put these schools out of business.
Upon taking office as Education Secretary, Cardona crowned Richard Cordray, the controversial head of the partisan Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), as the new head of FSA. Almost immediately, he began to weaponize the office and its resources against career colleges. He relaunched the Department’s Enforcement unit, which was established by President Obama to ostensibly oversee all federal education funds, but in truth it served as a vehicle to investigate and penalize career colleges. And Mr. Cordray steered it as such with aplomb.
Mr. Cordray staffed up the FSA with a network of like-minded loyalists, many colleagues from his tenure under President Obama. These hires, all ideological leftists, split into two camps: The first, his team from the CFPB, now restaffed in the Department of Education, and the second, a posse of activists from state attorneys general offices and outside activist groups. This cohort brought the political will and legal knowhow to leverage the tools and might of the federal government against higher-ed schools and businesses they disdained.
Employing a sue-and-harass model that Mr. Cordray honed at the CFPB to bring disfavored industries to heel, he began applying the same litigious tactics on career colleges. Between 2021 and 2023 he initiated six investigations, all against career colleges. Ten of the 13 schools that the Biden-Harris Department of Education has fined are career colleges, as are a disproportionate number of those it has used the Sweet v. Cardona settlement to penalize and silence.
When schools “take advantage of students, we intend to hold those individuals accountable,” Mr. Cordray boasted in 2023. Unsaid was that his sights were aimed narrowly at career colleges, with the purpose of propping up conventional state-run and public universities.
This search-and-destroy mission initiated under Mr. Cordray has resounding consequences for students. The administration’s utterly failed rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is a glaring example. By diverting his office’s resources away from this critical project—which was authorized by Congress to streamline the student aid process—Mr. Cordray caused delay after delay, which has put hundreds of thousands of high school seniors’ college plans in jeopardy.
All Americans are better off with Mr. Cordray’s departure, but we all must be vigilant for which ideological bureaucrat will fully take his place. The administration’s last budget requested a doubling of its FSA Office of Enforcement and seeks to exclude career colleges from receiving Pell Grant funds. Congress must continue its oversight responsibilities and rein in this unaccountable office and rogue Department.
Stopping the Biden-Harris administration’s higher education shakedown will take a total house cleaning at the Department of Education—either by Congressional oversight or new leadership in the White House. Its leaders and the public speak up before more doors are closed to students.
• Thomas Jones is the president of the American Accountability Foundation.
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