Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made no secret of her disdain for a program intended to forgive the federal student loans of borrowers who were ripped off by schools that defrauded their students. Then, after a class-action lawsuit made it impossible to stall any longer, her agency built what amounted to an assembly line of rejection. The department aimed to process 5,000 applications a week, the documents show — a standard that required agency employees to adjudicate claims that could stretch to hundreds of pages in less than 12 minutes. Agency employees rejected claims against hundreds of schools for not including written evidence that borrowers were never required to submit. And the department frequently disregarded its own findings of wrongdoing by schools when reviewing claims from their students.

Source: New York Times March 19, 2021 19:21 UTC