We’re very excited that the Biden administration has is taking important and long overdue steps to cancel some of these loans that these students had. Unfortunately, veterans that might have used the GI Bill are being left out. And that’s largely because it’s two different types of money. The money that’s being canceled, the loans that are being canceled are coming from the US Department of Education, whereas veterans who might have used the GI Bill that’s at the US Department of Veterans Affairs and that’s not covered, which is unfortunately something that we’re looking to change.
Unfortunately, a lot of these students were lured in on the promise of opportunity. I mean, in America, a lot of folks know that education is the pathway to a good future. And that’s what these students were sold. Unfortunately, in this case, I had nothing to back it up. They weren’t teaching the students the right things. They weren’t giving them a quality education. And the brand wasn’t really recognized among many in corporate America. And so, unfortunately, these students, when they graduated, if they graduated, found out that their degree was essentially worthless.
ITT Tech is what I like to call a scam factory. It is one thing to take a bit of a risk and a gamble within higher education and hope for a better future. But unfortunately, in this case, we saw that across the board. That opportunity just did not exist. And that was part of the promise that the school made, that they would graduate with six figure salaries and a lot of opportunities. And many of them, if not nearly all of them, found that that was not true.
It’s a great question. I mean, the reality is schools that are what we term as predatory are simply out for what they call a new start. And they’re trying to get as many students to start at their school as possible. They really don’t care about the graduation rates or how students are turning out. They don’t care about the outcomes. They really just care about getting as many taxpayer dollars in the door as possible. And that’s their focus. So a sign of, you know, a potential indicator of a bad school would be rushing a student to start. And, you know, typically good schools are focused on counseling them with what their academic future might hold, trying to help them make an educated and informed decision. But if a school is simply interested in getting you into the door, then that’s always a red flag.
A lot of these students are focused on just trying to build a better opportunity for themselves. And so they’ll be a little bit more weary for sure. And they’re going to be a bit more concerned and concerning about what schools they select to go to. The reality is this this opportunity that the Biden administration is presenting simply cancels their debt so it doesn’t make them whole in the sense that that time that they spent at the school is never going to be recovered. So they’re really trying to trying to build up based on that.
I think in this particular instance, you know, there is a major differentiator, which is ITT Tech was a fraudulent operation. So what we’re really talking about is if a consumer, for example, goes to the store and buys a toaster and then finds out that toaster simply doesn’t function, the expectation for that consumer would be to get their money back. And in this case, what that takes the form of is canceling this debt. So in this particular scenario, we’re not talking about widespread debt cancelation or student loan forgiveness or anything like that. We’re really focusing on the fact that these students were defrauded. And as a basis of that fraud, they should they should be restored.
It’s up to Congress to give the authority for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to make sure that a veteran, if they use their GI Bill, could get their GI Bill back, because at present, that’s not something that’s an opportunity.
There is a chain of schools called House of Prayer that operated across the country, and they were raided by the FBI. Two years ago, we reported this school based on student complaints and whistleblower complaints. We reported them to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the FBI. And finally, they they were raided. But it was a criminal enterprise that was solely focused on getting veterans, service members and their families to spend their hard earned benefits at the school. So this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.
