ITT Technical Institute was one of the many colleges that scammed students by making promises it couldn’t, or wouldn’t fulfill. In a fight to cancel student debt, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Secretary DeVos asking that she finally cancel the debt of defrauded ITT Tech students. She finally did, adding that she will do it with “extreme displeasure.”
It was back in 2016 when the school officially closed all 136 of their doors for good. There are several other schools forced to do the same. They faced multiple lawsuits and claims of deception, using marketing tactics to bring students in, only to leave them hanging in the end. Still, years later, students of the defunct school are still paying on their loans.
This is why several Democrats, including Warren, decided to send DeVos a letter to ask about when the students would finally have their loans taken care of. The federal government has obviously been dragging its feet on this issue, declaring that the loans would be forgiven around the time the schools closed.
Warren tweeted about the response she got from DeVos: “We got this note back from @BetsyDeVosED. I’m not sure which is better news: that she’s cancelling thousands of ITT Tech students’ loans, or that it gave her “extreme displeasure” to do so.”
Student Debt Causes Havoc
It’s difficult to understand why so many students were continuing to pay on their debt even after the schools closed down. Of course, the government loaned out this money and wanted it back, regardless of what happened to the school. Under the Trump Administration, they’ve taken a different tone on this issue than the left.
They believe it’s the personal responsibility of someone to pay back the loans they take out. If they were defrauded by the school, that isn’t the government’s fault. Yet, taxpayers are on the hook for canceling the student debt. It’s not a debate that’s going away anytime soon. The majority of Democratic candidates running for president have run on a platform of forgiving all (or most) student debt and making college free.
There are many pros and cons to that and it certainly wouldn’t be an easy bill to get passed. The government shouldn’t be in a position to have to cut out the $1.6 trillion students have borrowed over the past few decades. Yet, as the problem continues to get worse, it devastates the lives of those students and harms the economy.
