Obama-era regulations designed to protect student loan borrowers and reign in for-profit colleges remain in place after a U.S. District Court ruled Wednesday that Trump Administration rollbacks on those measures were unconstitutional.
U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss ruled that the process by which those deregulations were going to be implemented violated administrative procedure.
“Delaying implementation of the Borrower Defense Rule imposes real harms on both borrowers and the public itself,” Moss wrote in his 57-page ruling. “The public interest may, of course, have many faces.”
The Borrower Defense Rule was designed to protect and reimburse students who were misled by schools they had borrowed money to attend.
It also primarily impacts students who study or have studied at for-profit universities. As of 2018, there are 13 for-profit universities operating in Wisconsin, compared to the 14 extension campuses operated by the UW System.
Some of those rules had been in place since the 1990s. Between 2015 and 2016, the Obama Administration added several sets of new regulations, but not all of them had taken effect by the time President Obama left office.
Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education under Donald Trump, postponed enacting those new regulations until 2019, during which time she said “it was time for a regulatory reset.”
The court ruled that the delay was both “arbitrary” and “unlawful.”
