It’s a good thing Trump is such a populist, isn’t it. Good thing he’s the savior of the forgotten working class and a drainer of the swamp.

The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, according to department officials, abandoning the Obama administration’s policy of erasing that debt.

Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by now-defunct for-profit schools had over $550 million in such loans canceled.

But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is working on a plan that could grant such students just partial relief, according to department officials. The department may look at the average earnings of students in similar programs and schools to determine how much debt to wipe away.

It’s awesome any way you look at it. The government encourages people to go into debt to fund tertiary education, and doesn’t do any filtering or regulating of what gets to call itself tertiary education, so people go into debt to go to for-profit “colleges” that teach them nothing and make them no more hirable than they were before, but now they have that huge debt to pay off.

If DeVos goes ahead, the change could leave many students scrambling after expecting full loan forgiveness, based on the previous administration’s track record. It was not immediately clear how many students might be affected.

…

In August, the department extended its contract with a staffing agency to speed up the processing of a backlog of loan forgiveness claims. In the procurement notice, the department said that “policy changes may necessitate certain claims already processed be revisited to assess other attributes.” The department would not further clarify the meaning of that notice.

DeVos’ review prompted an outcry from student loan advocates, who said the idea of giving defrauded students only partial loan relief was unjustified and unfair because many of their classmates had already gotten full loan cancellation. Critics say the Trump administration, which has ties to the for-profit sector, is looking out for industry interests.

Ties! Yeah it has ties – it used to be in the damn sector, scamming people into spending a lot of money to go to Trump “University” which was actually just a two hour marketing seminar. Thieving swine Trump got out only because he had to. He paid 25 million bucks to settle lawsuits after he won the election.

“Anything other than full cancellation is not a valid outcome,” said Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented hundreds of defrauded students of the now-shuttered Corinthian Colleges. “The nature of the wrong that was done to them, the harm is even bigger than the loans that they have.”

Make America Great Again.