Four veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars recently were awarded $5,000 grants to help pay down student loan debt they racked up while attending for-profit colleges.
The grants came from the Veterans' Student Loan Relief Fund, a four-year-old organization that has helped more than 40 veterans it says have been misled into draining their GI Bill benefits and taking out onerous student loans.
It was created by Jerome Kohlberg, a World War II veteran and early champion of the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The relief fund accepts applications for grants of up to $5,000 for qualified active-duty military, veterans and family members who believe for-profit education companies have deceived them. For more information, go to iava.org/loan-relief.
The for-profit college industry has come under considerable fire in the last few years, particularly for how it has marketed itself as an attractive outlet for GI Bill benefits.
A 2014 report from the U.S. Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, "Is the New G.I. Bill Working?" says bluntly: "The fact that so many veterans are continuing to enroll in high-cost, for-profit colleges with questionable outcomes raises questions regarding whether aggressive deceptive and misleading marketing efforts are continuing."
Although overall student enrollment fell at each of the eight top for-profit GI Bill schools, enrollment of veterans dramatically increased during the same period.
To date, 37 state attorneys general have launched investigations. Scores of for-profit colleges are facing lawsuits for unscrupulous business practices, including allegedly inadequate disclosures about accreditation.
Testimony has wrapped up in a Hennepin County District Court civil trial in which Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson is suing Globe University and the Minnesota School of Business, saying the two schools systematically misled students to believe that their degree programs would qualify them for careers in law enforcement.
