Should Secretary Duncan Apologize To For-Profits For Parent PLUS Loan Debacle?

Career College Central summary:

Since making relatively minor changes to the credit check requirements for Parent PLUS loans last year, the Department of Education has been under a firestorm of criticism from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their lobbying organization, the National Association for Equal Opportunity (NAFEO). According to HBCUs, the impact of the policy change caused a significant decline in enrollments and a huge loss in revenue for their institutions. In an effort to ease tensions, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently apologized to HBCU leaders at their annual meeting saying, “I am not satisfied with the way we handled the updating and changes to the PLUS loan program. Communication internally and externally was poor. I apologize for that, and the real impact it had.”
But if Secretary Duncan really wanted to apologize to the colleges most affected by the change to Parent PLUS loans, he should have been talking to for-profit colleges, not HBCUs. After all, since the policy change was implemented two years ago, for-profits have lost approximately $790 million dollars more than HBCUs in PLUS disbursements. Why is that? The for-profit sector has a much higher percentage of Parent PLUS borrowers than at HBCUs.
Using recently released data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA), I analyzed Parent PLUS loan data from pre-recession 2006 to 2013. From 2009 to 2011, both for-profits and HBCUs saw huge increases in recipients (approximately 50,000 and 15,000 more recipients respectively) and disbursements (approximately $450 million and $156 million respectively). This was the peak of the recession, at a time when family net worth diminished while college prices soared. Parents turned to PLUS loans to help send their children to higher-priced colleges that could not or would not help them fill the gap with institutional aid.

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