Dive Brief:
- Two senior Democrats in Congress are accusing the U.S. Department of Education of letting poor-performing higher education institutions off the hook by allowing them access to federal funding in spite of student loan default rates of 30% or more.
- The lawmakers, Sen. Tom Harkin (IA) and Rep. George Miller (CA) sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday. Harkin and Miller are the senior Democrats on the education committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, respectively.
- The letter gives the department 30 days to provide answers to nine questions about why the department decided to recalculate student loan default rates for schools.
Dive Insight:
Harkin and Miller are basically calling the department’s bluff on one of its reasons for adjusting the default rates in favor of the questionable institutions—that some borrowers had more than one servicer, which caused them to default. The letter also asks about what the department is doing to fix the servicer problem, and asks the department about what other quality measures it considered for institutions that were in danger of going over the default threshold but were pulled back into compliance with the recalculations.