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| Home / College Guide / “Tired of Turmoil on Campus? Learn How to Get a Refund” |
| Posted on Thursday, April 25 @ 00:00:06 PDT |
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If your education has been derailed by the protest chaos on US campuses, you could get your money back.
Under federal repayment rules, those who were defrauded or misled by a college can
file a claim seeking relief.
Under these rules, known as ‘borrower defense,’ some people even get loans wiped clean.
Students who were deceived by for-profit colleges, which closed suddenly or provided misleading information about programs and post-graduation possibilities, traditionally turned to this process.
Now, a conservative legal group says the same rules apply to colleges that fail to keep order on campus.
Students line up to show identification as they enter the Columbia University campus in New York City, where campus life has been roiled by protests
Pro-Palestinian advocates from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrate at an encampment for Palestine at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
According to America First Legal (AFL), an organization established by former Trump administration members, many institutions are neglecting to uphold their conduct regulations in the midst of the surge in demonstrations.
AFL lawyer Reed Rubinstein says students can get their money back
Students face no repercussions for blatant harassment on campus, says the group.
Students who assault or intimidate Jewish or Christian classmates too often get away with it, says AFL.
So do those who tear down posters of Hamas hostages, or who disrupt classes or speeches by prominent conservatives.
This, they say, could amount to a ‘misrepresentation’ by colleges, which present their campuses as orderly and safe in prospectuses.
Reed Rubinstein, AFL lawyer who served in the Trump administration education department, says this can be the basis for a claim under borrower defense.
‘We’re seeing Colombia and MIT throw away long-standing codes of conduct to protect people who are engaged in the most raw kind of anti-Semitism we’ve seen the US since the 1930s,’ Rubinstein told DailyMail.com.
‘The idea that the university administrators would just cut and run on that is not something people contemplate.’
This makes a ‘case for fraud,’ he added.
Locked gates and extra security are not what many Columbia University students expected when they took out their loans
A protester being detained by Texas troopers at the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday
AFL has
produced a ‘toolkit’ of how to request paybacks through the Federal Student Aid website.
It suggests language to use in a claim, with examples for some of the schools that have seen Jewish and other students harassed in recent months.
They include the Cooper Union, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Harvard University and SUNY Binghamton.
The federal Department of Education did not answer DailyMail.com’s request for comment.
The department doesn’t publicly release information about the claims.
Colleges are not keen to talk about them, either.
The ‘borrower defense’ system was seldom used until the mid-2010s.
It’s mostly discharged the loans of students who went to for-profit colleges.
Claims are more common now, and are made against a wider range of public, research and religious schools.
The Federal Student Aid website says students can be forgiven debt if their ‘school engaged in certain misconduct related to the making of a federal loan or the educational services it provided which caused you harm.’
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in New York Police to clear the encampment of protesters
Police arrested demonstrators at UT Austin after warning them they could face criminal charges if they did not disperse
Misconduct can include false promises about central degrees or certificates, career services, earnings prospects, or the transferability of credits to other institutions, it says.
Student protests over the war in Gaza have intensified and expanded over the past week.
Encampments are now in place at colleges including Columbia, Yale, and NYU.
Hundreds of Texas troopers went into the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday, in the latest standoff between authorities and pro-Palestine college students.
Students have issued calls for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to US military assistance for Israel, and university divestment from arms suppliers and other companies profiting from the war.
School administrators and local law enforcement have in recent days started cracking down on the wave of protests.
Columbia and the affiliated Barnard College have suspended dozens of students involved in the protests.
More than 100 protesters were arrested at Columbia, where university President Minouche Shafik called in New York Police to clear the encampment, saying it violated campus protest rules. Scores more were arrested at NYU.
Columbia courses are now held online or in person; California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, cancelled classes this week.
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