EXCLUSIVE — America First Legal is launching a toolkit to help student loan borrowers get their debt waived if their university made “substantial misrepresentations” about intellectual diversity and their educational programs.
The conservative legal group is looking to use borrower defense claims against schools that “push anti-American and anti-Semitic woke ‘intersectional’ indoctrination and host foreign propaganda” in order to force the schools to pay for their allegiance to ideology over inquiry.
“This toolkit empowers students and parents who have been defrauded by the woke leftists who run our colleges to push back,” AFL vice president Reed Rubenstein told the Washington Examiner. “The higher education industry owes taxpayers and consumers the truth — and the Department of Education must support them by holding the industry accountable. The industry’s fraud on the market perpetrated against conservatives, pro-American, and Jewish students must be stopped.”
The “Borrower Defense Toolkit” comes as universities across the country are grappling with antisemitism investigations from both the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the House Education and Workforce Committee. Conservatives have been sounding the alarm about the spread of left-wing ideology on campus for years, criticizing schools for offering worthless degrees and a poor learning environment.
Borrower defense is part of federal law that allows students who are victims of “substantial misrepresentations” from a school to have their student loans canceled by the Department of Education, making the institution itself responsible for paying the federal government back.
“Many schools only enforce their conduct policies against conservative pro-American, pro-life, and pro-Israel students or faculty while leftist woke anti-Semites are protected — the rules simply do not apply to them,” AFL said in a press release. “If your college or university gives leftist students, pro-Hamas faculty, or anti-American foreign nationals favors or fails to discipline them in compliance with published standards of conduct, then it has likely made ‘substantial misrepresentations’ that may entitle you to claim a Borrower Defense to student loan repayment.”
AFL says “substantial misrepresentations” can come from how schools market their academic programs in communications and on their websites, where “nearly all higher education ‘institutions’ claim to be inclusive, to follow the law, and to enforce generally applicable rules of conduct,” but are in reality not places where conservative students can participate in the discourse.
Federal law also stops universities from omitting information “in such a way as to make an erroneous, misleading, or false statement.”
Roughly 43.4 million borrowers held $1.64 trillion in taxpayer-guaranteed student debt as of June 2023 — a “subsidy” AFL says without which the “higher education industry would collapse.”
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Borrower defense claims have typically been used against for-profit colleges, where the worth of a degree can be attached to the post-graduation salaries of students, requiring the school to ensure their degree is successful in the job market.
Public institutions, however, had rarely seen such claims until last year, when public research universities, community colleges, and other not-for-profit institutions saw an uptick in borrower defense claims. According to Inside Higher Ed, many of the schools are worried and do not know how to respond to them.