U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy are teaming with five of their Democratic colleagues in reintroducing the Students Before Profits Act, a bill designed to protect students who attended for-profit colleges from predatory lending and deceptive marketing practices.
Currently, for-profit colleges enroll 10 percent of all postsecondary students, but account for 35 percent of all student loan defaults. The legislation would authorize enhanced civil penalties on institutions and their executive officers if they engaged in fraudulent marketing to prospective students while giving the Department of Education “broader discretion” on whether the owners or executives of these colleges should assume personal liability for losses associated with Title IV federal financial aid funds, as well as determining if these schools should be disqualified from participating in financial aid programs.
Murphy authored the bill when it was first introduced in 2015. The impetus for the reintroduction of this bill, according to the senators, was a decision by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to name Julian Schmoke, a former dean at for-profit DeVry University, to run the department’s student aid enforcement unit.