A coalition of Democratic attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit yesterday against the U.S. Education Department and Secretary Betsy DeVos for not enforcing an Obama-era rule intended to protect students and taxpayers from predatory for-profit schools, the Wall Street Journal reported today. In June, DeVos suspended the so-called “gainful employment” rules before they took effect. If enacted they would have cut off federal funding for schools where students leave with high debt and end up in jobs with low salaries. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., calls DeVos’s suspension of those rules “unlawful” and accuses her of trying to “run out the clock” through a series of delays until she can implement new regulation. In July, the same group of attorneys general sued DeVos over the rollback of another Obama regulation that empowered students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges to apply for loan forgiveness.
