When Rob Armour applied to have his student loans forgiven, in 2019, he thought he’d done everything right.
Armour was, in many ways, the model 21st-century college student — an adult learner who found higher education intellectually and financially rewarding. Having started college in his 30s, and juggling family duties, full-time work, and his courses, he found success in the classroom. He became the first in his family to finish a degree, then earned two more. His education helped him win a promotion and gave him a bigger view of the world. Until he started a doctoral program, he managed to pay tuition without taking on any student-loan debt.
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When Rob Armour applied to have his student loans forgiven, in 2019, he thought he’d done everything right.
Armour was, in many ways, the model 21st-century college student — an adult learner who found higher education intellectually and financially rewarding. Having started college in his 30s, and juggling family duties, full-time work, and his courses, he found success in the classroom. He became the first in his family to finish a degree, then earned two more. His education helped him win a promotion and gave him a bigger view of the world. Until he started a doctoral program, he managed to pay tuition without taking on any student-loan debt.
But when Argosy University’s campus in Schaumburg, Ill., closed suddenly, in December 2018, Armour was left holding more than $100,000 in loans with no degree. Argosy, it turned out, was not a model university.
A lawsuit against the Education Department raises questions about what ‘fairness’ means in regulating colleges.
For help, Armour, 54, turned to the administration of Donald J. Trump, who had earned his vote in 2016. Specifically, he applied for loan forgiveness from the U.S. Department of Education, led by Betsy DeVos. To his dismay, the department denied his application. That decision has set off a legal fight that raises a fundamental question about DeVos’s higher-education policy: What does it mean to practice “fairness” in government oversight of colleges?
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Fairness, to DeVos, means shielding colleges and taxpayers from what she has described as burdensome regulations and unscrupulous students. At the same time, the Education Department has resisted forgiving the loans of students, like Armour, who were left without degrees after their college closed suddenly. It’s not fair, DeVos has argued, for students to get “free money.”
In a written statement, a department spokeswoman said the Trump administration’s approach to loan forgiveness “corrects the overreach of the prior administration” and “restores fairness and due process.” In addition, she said, measures limiting loan forgiveness will save taxpayers an estimated $16 billion over 10 years.
But Armour and others argue that DeVos’s notion of fairness places the interests of struggling students squarely beneath those of faceless institutions, big business, and government. While the company that owned Argosy improperly obtained more than $20 million in federal student aid, the department is battling Armour for a tiny fraction of that amount.
“I do believe that if you’re playing by the rules and behaving, 99 percent of the time, life’s going to work out for you,” Armour said. “I was really kind of shocked that the government that’s supposed to be looking out for the little guy is the one that decided, you know, I’m not going to help you.”
‘College Is a Great Thing’
As a teenager, Armour didn’t imagine he would even go to college. Instead, growing up “dirt poor” in southern Illinois, he focused on making money. At 16, he worked as a night manager at a gas station near his high school. He bought a 1977 Monte Carlo with a red interior and bucket seats that swivel sideways.
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Then, in his senior year, with his girlfriend pregnant, Armour dropped out, married her, and moved. The marriage was short-lived, and within a couple of years, Armour was back in Illinois.
He worked a variety of jobs, but kept his eye on the region’s best-paying positions, at the nearby state prison. To land a job there he needed a GED. He went to Sauk Valley Community College and passed the test on his first try, he said. In 1990 he began work as a correctional officer at the Dixon Correctional Center.
To gain a promotion, Armour would have to do better than a GED. That’s when his career in higher education began. In 1997 he returned to the community college to pursue an associate degree in criminal justice, hoping it would help him earn the rank of sergeant. The degree took him seven years to finish; basic math proved a challenge. “I had to start way in the back,” Armour said. “You know, way back, like basic-algebra back.”
It wasn’t just the math that held him up. Armour enjoyed being in college but felt like an outsider. He sat quietly in class and tried not to draw attention to himself. He didn’t want to “make a big deal of it,” he said.
“I never felt like I belonged in college, you know, because I dropped out of high school,” he said. “The whole time in there, I feel like I’m sneaking in the back doors or something.”
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By the time he finished his degree, no promotions were available, he said. But he found a different kind of reward. He had become the first in his family to earn any college credential, and members of the family celebrated that success. They also took note of the standard he’d set: His younger brother later earned a bachelor’s degree, and both of Armour’s children have associate degrees.
In 2004 he enrolled at National Louis University, a private college in Chicago, and completed a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science just two years later. That degree got him his promotion — not just to sergeant but a step above that, to lieutenant. Why stop there? he thought. In 2008 he completed an online master’s degree in general psychology from Northcentral University, part of the California-based National University System.
For Armour, the succession of degrees paid off not just professionally but personally. They imparted a slate of soft skills so often touted by advocates of higher education. He learned how to better navigate conflict in the prison and avoid violence, a skill that can benefit both inmates and guards. “College,” he decided, “is a great thing.”
After 20 years of work at Dixon Correctional, Armour saw yet another opportunity to expand his education toward a positive goal. He wanted to counsel youth offenders and try to keep them from making the same mistakes he had seen countless adult inmates make as they cycled in and out of prison.
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So, in 2010, he enrolled in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at Argosy University’s campus in Schaumburg, more than 80 miles from his home — the only program within driving distance that offered the right kind of credential. He often worked night shifts at the prison before driving nearly two hours to the university for morning classes. He worked weekends so that two of his weekdays would be reserved for classes.
And for the first time in his academic career, Armour borrowed to pay his tuition — $100,000 in federal student loans. The high price of graduate credits and the time required to complete a doctoral degree made it financially impossible without doing so, he said. But he had a plan to repay the loans. When he enrolled, he was just a few years from retirement. He and his wife, a sheriff’s deputy, planned to live on their pensions and use the money from his work as a psychologist to pay off his debt.
Armour’s plan was working until February 2017, when a routine colonoscopy showed he had Stage 3 colon cancer.
The Dream Center Turns Into a Nightmare
The very same month Armour got that diagnosis, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as the U.S. secretary of education. Her confirmation was narrowly won, in part because she had almost no experience in education policy apart from her advocacy for school choice in elementary and secondary education.
That work made DeVos, a billionaire with a bachelor’s degree from Calvin University, an early and frequent target of teachers unions and some Democratic politicians, who fear school-choice policies undermine support for public schools. She was widely ridiculed after her Senate confirmation hearings for her lack of policy knowledge as well as several gaffes. Three years into her tenure, DeVos is frequently cited as a symbol of the Trump administration’s alleged ineptitude and corruption.
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But for as many punches as she’s taken, DeVos has also thrown her share, including her view that traditional colleges are elitist and overpriced. At a conservative political conference in 2017, she accused faculty members of indoctrinating students: “The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.”
Beyond the bluster, DeVos’s most significant higher-education policies have benefited a particular sector: for-profit colleges. The secretary and her deputies argue that proprietary colleges have been unfairly burdened by federal regulation.
Not coincidentally, several of DeVos’s key appointees are longtime veterans of that sector.
Robert S. Eitel, now a special counselor to the secretary, was an executive at the company formerly called Bridgepoint Education, which owns Ashford University, and the Career Education Corporation, now called the Perdoceo Education Corporation. Diane Auer Jones, the principal deputy under secretary, has worked in a variety of roles in higher education, including as a lobbyist for the Career Education Corporation.
DeVos’s Education Department has taken steps large and small that have helped several for-profit colleges continue to operate under questionable circumstances, sometimes with disastrous consequences for students.
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Late in 2017 the department approved the sale of Argosy University and two other chains of for-profit colleges owned by the Education Management Corporation, which had run into deep legal and financial problems. Two years earlier, the company had reached a $202-million agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice and 38 states to settle accusations of falsifying job-placement figures and paying improper incentives to student recruiters.
The buyer was a company owned by a Christian nonprofit organization, called the Dream Center, with no experience in higher education. It had tried to buy the troubled ITT Tech chain of colleges in 2016, but the Obama administration had blocked that deal. ITT eventually shut down.
Little more than a year after the sale’s approval, the Dream Center became a financial nightmare. Its colleges, already on shaky financial ground when they were purchased, continued to bleed red ink. The company estimated it would earn a $30-million profit in the first year, The New York Times reported, but ended up with a $38-million loss.
A congressional investigation later accused the Education Department of allowing some Dream Center-owned colleges to receive $11 million in student aid even though the institutions were not accredited. Dream Center officials also were found to have used some $13 million in such aid to pay company costs instead of sending that money to the students for whom it was intended.
In July 2018, more than half a year before the department finally revoked Argosy’s eligibility for federal student aid, Dream Center officials decided, behind closed doors, that they would shutter some 30 of the company’s campuses, including the Argosy branch in Schaumburg, Ill.
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‘Now I’ve Got Nothing’
That same summer, Armour was itching to get back into the classroom to finish his Ph.D. But his cancer diagnosis had made that impossible. He’d had surgery to remove a section of his colon and had undergone chemotherapy, but in the spring of 2018 his cancer returned. With just one project and a yearlong internship left to complete his degree, he took a leave of absence to have part of his liver removed.
But he made clear he’d be back. “I am totally planning to finish my degree and attend Argosy again,” Armour wrote to campus officials in August 2018. “This has been a difficult time for me, and I appreciate the university’s willingness to extend a hand.”
Four months later, Armour emailed an adviser at Argosy to extend his absence from the program while he recovered.
“Do I need to fill out additional medical-leave paperwork at this time?” he asked on December 14.
“I think we are fine,” the adviser responded.
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The campus closed that same day — a decision that the company’s leaders had communicated to campus officials five months earlier. Armour learned the news from friends on Facebook. He hadn’t even been told by Argosy staff members that the university was closing. “The college was telling me, ‘Everything’s OK, you’re fine, get better, come back,’” Armour said, “and now I’ve got nothing.”
Except for his student debt. After the university closed, Armour continued to pay $1,000 a month on his student loans. But then he learned about one possible avenue for relief: a federal process through which his loans could be forgiven.
In March 2019, Armour applied for forgiveness, explaining that even though he had not been attending classes at the time the university closed, he was on an approved leave of absence from the program. In April his loan servicer and the department responded by mail that his application was “materially complete” and that he appeared “to meet the criteria for discharge” of his loans. The letter also stated that it was “not a final determination” of eligibility for loan discharge.
In May, Armour got a second letter from the department. It told him that he did not qualify. It offered no explanation.
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Less Defense for Borrowers
A central goal of DeVos’s higher-education policies has been to ease oversight of proprietary colleges. But that philosophy has been guided by something broader: an effort to undo nearly all regulations and guidance issued under President Barack Obama. That is consistent with the overall approach of the Trump administration, which regularly responds to criticism of its actions by blaming the former president.
“At the risk of being trite, the easiest way to describe it is: If the Obama administration thought it was a good idea, the Trump administration thinks it’s a bad idea,” said Tim Bishop, a former Democratic congressman from New York and a former college administrator.
Under Obama, the Education Department shifted the burden of accountability onto colleges, particularly for-profit colleges. The effort included the “gainful-employment rule,” which penalized career colleges whose students did not end up earning enough to repay their loans, as well as measures to force states and accreditors to increase oversight of the institutions.
The Obama administration also created a “borrower defense” regulation, to protect students who take out loans and are defrauded by their colleges. Another regulation, expanded by the Obama administration, made it easier for loans to be discharged if an institution closed before students finished their degrees — the very provision that Armour applied for.
But the accountability enforced by the Obama administration has now been largely abandoned. Under DeVos, the department eliminated penalties for the gainful-employment rule and eased the pressure on accreditors to focus on poorly performing colleges.
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Notably, DeVos has repeatedly resisted measures to provide any kind of loan forgiveness to borrowers. Soon after she took office, she sought to freeze the borrower-defense rule and announced plans to rewrite it. But a court ruling in a lawsuit by 18 state attorneys general has forced her to follow the regulation until a new one takes effect, in July. (Even after the court compelled her to carry out the existing rule, the department has shown its reluctance to comply. In approving some 16,000 claims granted by the Obama administration, DeVos noted that she had done so “with extreme displeasure.”)
The new borrower-defense regulation will require students to apply individually for relief, and they will have a harder time proving that the closed college was seeking to defraud them without access to its internal documents and the help of a lawyer.
“It’s surprising to hear the new borrower-defense rule described as friendly to for-profit schools,” the department’s spokeswoman, Angela Morabito, wrote in an email response, “when it has clear and verifiable financial triggers designed to hold institutions accountable, and it in fact applies to nonprofit and for-profit schools alike.”
Many nonprofit colleges and higher-education associations have also supported the new borrower-defense rule. Financial-aid administrators, for example, say the Obama-era regulation didn’t distinguish between intentionally misleading statements and simple misstatements, leaving those campus officials on the hook for unintentional errors.
Judging by her rhetoric, DeVos has weighed two risks — the danger that moneyed institutions will scam thousands of students versus the danger that students will line up for undeserved handouts of government money — and decided they are equal.
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“We cannot tolerate fraud in higher education,” DeVos said in announcing the new rules, “nor can we tolerate furiously giving away taxpayer money to those who have submitted a false claim or aren’t eligible for relief.” Fairness, to DeVos, means students must accept more responsibility for having chosen the wrong college.
It’s a twist on the idea of fairness that carried the day in the Obama years, but not even all Republicans in Congress agree with DeVos on borrower defense. Majorities in both chambers have now voted to revoke the new regulations. President Trump is expected to veto that legislation.
Students whose colleges close before they complete their degrees may also be denied relief more often under new rules for closed-school discharges of loans. Under the previous rules, students would automatically have their loans forgiven if they did not enroll in a comparable program within three years after their college closed.
That automatic discharge has been eliminated from the new regulations, though students will have an extra two months to apply for a discharge from the date their campus shuts down — 180 days instead of 120 days. Eliminating the automatic discharge “encourages closing institutions to allow students to complete their programs,” the department said in its statement to The Chronicle.
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The department also reasons that students would have taken advantage of the previous rules. “Students could intentionally delay re-enrollment at a new institution for three years in order to retain the credits already completed but eliminate the debt associated with earning those credits,” the department explained in documents accompanying the new rules.
But removing the automatic discharge means all students will now have to apply for a closed-school discharge, just like Armour, said his lawyer, Alexander S. Elson. And students aren’t typically well informed about their options. “Many eligible students do not apply for closed-school discharges because they don’t know about it,” Elson said. “In the case of the Dream Center, the school actively concealed it from students.”
At the same time, the department has removed a requirement that colleges that close provide information to students about applying for a closed-school discharge. Instead, students should get the information “from the department’s website, or the websites of accreditors and state authorizing bodies.”
The department’s website, however, contains no link to the discharge application and tells borrowers to contact their loan servicer.
‘She Is Failing’
For more than a dozen years, Armour’s determination kept him going to college and working full time in a stressful job. Now he is using all his energy to stay alive and try to get his loans forgiven.
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Armour sued the department in August, with help from lawyers at the National Student Legal Defense Network. He argues he is due not only the amount that is left to pay on his loans, $124,000, but also the $34,000 he has already paid, said Elson.
The lawsuit details the department’s failings as well as the difficulties Armour faced in dealing with Argosy. For example, emails provided to the department show that he was on an approved leave of absence when Argosy closed, according to court filings. But company officials were not able to give him any official documentation to support his claim to the department, despite months of requests, the court filings said.
The department’s own calculations show that Armour’s temporary leave was granted within 120 days of when the university closed, which meets the regulation’s deadline, Armour argues in his complaint. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Armour says, he found nothing to indicate why the department had rejected his claim after initially declaring that he appeared to qualify.
The department doesn’t totally reject the particulars of Armour’s case in its response to his complaint. Instead, the government’s lawyers write that the case should be adjudicated under a completely different part of the Higher Education Act: not the rules for closed-school discharges, but the regulations that govern when colleges must return federal aid to the government if a student drops out. Under that section of the law, the department argues, Armour was absent for more than 180 days, which amounts to a withdrawal from the program, not a temporary leave of absence.
Armour is likely to spend the rest of his life balancing payments for his cancer treatments with payments on student loans.
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“Those provisions do not apply to this case,” Armour’s lawyers respond in court filings. The department’s decision to deny loan forgiveness is “incomprehensible on legal and equitable grounds,” they write. “If left to stand, it will almost certainly require Mr. Armour to spend the rest of his life balancing payments for his cancer treatments with payments on student loans for a degree he was unable to obtain through no fault of his own.”
A meeting last month to try to settle the case ended with no agreement. Now a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is considering the department’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
In one attempt to resolve the case, the department has offered Armour an “expedited review” for a loan discharge under the “total and permanent disability” process.
“The last thing he should be worried about right now is student-loan debt, so we are doing everything we can to get him the maximum amount of relief possible under the law,” Morabito wrote to The Chronicle.
Elson said the offer of a quick review was “insulting.” Disability discharge would apply only to the outstanding loan balance, he said, meaning Armour would forfeit the $34,000 he has already paid. “They are asking him to admit defeat in the middle of his cancer treatment,” Elson said in an email, “and what they offer in return is a chance for inferior relief under an unrelated program.”
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Armour’s cancer is now in Stage 4, and he continues chemotherapy treatments every two weeks. Under that regimen, he endures 48 hours of toxic chemicals pumping into his body, then five days in which his body tries to expel the poison in every way possible.
The schedule leaves one week between each round of treatment. He focuses on healthy eating — he has become a vegetarian since his cancer diagnosis — and trying to stay optimistic. He teaches classes on firearms safety, reads Scripture with his wife in the mornings, and sees his grown son and daughter as often as he can.
He has been able to suspend his loan payments under a 2018 law that allows cancer patients to defer their loans. But the process to invoke the law was confusing, and the deferment lasts only until six months after he stops treatments. “So they’re basically telling you you have to take chemo in order to qualify,” Armour said.
It’s worth the trade-off, he said, but it’s not easy. “You know what? I’d wake up every day to puke and shit to kiss my wife, I guarantee you,” Armour said. “But it’s a hard life to live like that.”
His doctor has told him that he has up to two years before either the cancer or the damage from chemotherapy kills him. He worries that if his suit fails, the department will continue to hound his wife for the debt. The Higher Education Act is supposed to prevent that, he said, but amid the drawn-out battle over a closed-school discharge, he doesn’t trust the department to follow that section of the law, either.
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His anger at DeVos and the department is not political, said Armour, a self-identified conservative who plans to vote for Donald Trump again in 2020 because he thinks the president is good for the economy and working-class people.
“I’m not mad at Betsy DeVos from a political point of view or an ideological point of view,” he said. “I’m mad at her because she is failing, legitimately failing, at the work that she’s doing.”
Eric Kelderman covers issues of power, politics, and purse strings in higher education. You can email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com, or find him on Twitter @etkeld.