The Biden administration is coordinating with Democrat operatives with a history of pushing harmful education regulations and strengthening leftist universities.
Operatives David Halperin and Robert Shireman have been working together since the 1990s on a quest that appears to benefit the leftist university elite while attempting to break down alternative forms of education.
Their goals seem to be bearing fruit in the Biden administration, where successive pauses in student loan debt and new regulations imposed on proprietary colleges — which offer job training for veterans, minorities, and working-class families — have passed through the Department of Education. Meanwhile, such regulations — like “gainful employment” tests for schools — are not imposed on universities that offer unmarketable degrees.
Attacking Career Colleges
The “gainful employment” test — a vestige of the Obama administration targeting career colleges — sought to track how much debt a career college would leave a student as compared to the amount of money they made post-graduation. Given the results, financial aid was to end for colleges that left their students in a high amount of debt with a low amount of post-graduation return.
Halperin, who describes himself as a “leading critic of for-profit higher education in the United States” on his blog website Republic Report, and Shireman were both responsible for pushing the “gainful employment” regulations during the Obama administration. Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration found issues with career colleges and tried restricting financial aid to students from 2011 to 2014.
The policy was reversed in 2019 under the Trump administration, but Halperin and Shireman are pushing to bring back the policy in the Biden administration.
A study of such regulations shows that many of Halperin’s and Shireman’s ilk in academia would not pass the test — and yet their advocacy for it remains.
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal found students seeking master’s degrees at the country’s most elite universities were graduating with loan debt wildly beyond their post-graduation income. For example, while the median amount borrowed for a master’s degree in publishing at New York University was $116,000, the median annual income two years after completing the program was $42,000.
Likewise, a person receiving a master’s in film from Columbia University held a median debt of $181,000, while half the students made less than $30,000 annually, two years post-graduation.
Another study done by the non-profit, non-partisan think tank Texas Public Police Foundation found that when subjected to the “gainful employment” test, 51 percent of the failing programs are at private, non-profit institutions, while 39 percent are at pubic institutions.
Only 11 percent of the programs at for-profit institutions fail the test.
“The Obama administration did not apply this to all of higher education,” Andrew Gillen, Ph.D., the study’s author and senior policy analyst for TPPF said. “They really singled out the for-profit sector.”
While the report suggests that a return of the policy be applied universally — looking at specific programs at all types of institutions of higher education — many believe the singling out of career colleges was both political and purposeful in an effort to help the left’s politically useful friends at universities and harm its politically inexpedient enemies at career colleges.
Coordination with Wall Street Short-Sellers
Shireman, while serving as a deputy undersecretary in Obama’s Department of Education, appears to have been in bed with famed U.S. housing bubble short-seller Steve Eisman and others on Wall Street in a coordinated attack on for-profit colleges, tanking their stocks and allowing Wall Street to short-sell career colleges.
In 2010, Eisman was in contact with Shireman and other Department of Education officials concerning a presentation he was set to give called “Subprime Goes to College” in which Eisman compared for-profit colleges to subprime mortgages and warned of $275 billion in student loan defaults at career colleges while advocating for new regulation of the institutions.
As Fortune reported at the time, for-profit education companies ITT Educational Services and Corinthian Colleges both saw their stocks drop by three percent. Eisman also testified before the Senate education committee, resulting in another drop in for-profit stock prices.
Before Eisman’s presentations, however, he spoke to Shireman and David Bergeron, then-acting deputy assistant secretary for policy and budget at the Department of Education. After the conversation, Shireman too gave a presentation likening for-profit colleges to subprime mortgages — and Career Education Corp stock fell 12 percent while Apollo group dropped six percent.
All of this took place before new career college regulations — namely “gainful employment” — were finalized in the summer of that year.
“When an investor meets with a senior official of a federal department — in this case the No. 2 person — shortly before the issuance of a regulation that clearly could affect the public markets, that has a bad appearance,” Lanny Davis, a spokesman for the Coalition for Educational Success, said at the time. “The only way to clear up the bad appearance is full transparency — meaning disclosing the fact you’re meeting with the investor ahead of time and requiring the investor to fully explain the positions he holds.”
The Obama-era Short Selling scandal is also what ties Shireman and Halperin to the Biden administration through current U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal.
Both Kvaal and Shireman were part of the Department of Justice investigation into the Department of Education for its alleged short-selling impropriety.
“While at Education, Mr. Shireman led the agency’s regulatory effort of the for-profit education industry, and questions were raised about his potential conflicts of interest because of his former involvement with a nonprofit education entity,” left-leaning government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote in a 2011 complaint. “Mr. Kvall has taken over Mr. Shireman’s role, and publicly available documents suggest he too may have been influenced by outside groups.”
When Shireman left the Obama administration, Kvaal took his place. Similarly, Shireman founded and served as president of the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) — an education policy lobbying organization. Kvaal, too, served as president of the lobbying group.
According to public records released by CREW, Kvaal appears to have been tasked with leaking “gainful employment” rules to Halperin ahead of the announcement, thereby allowing for the shorting of career colleges.
Halperin was also accused of doing the Obama administration’s “dirty work” on behalf of the career college regulatory schemes. Both the Daily Caller and Politico said Halperin was running “a $1 million campaign,” including ads, for the administration.
Indeed, he ran Campus Progress — a publication of the far-left think tank Center for American Progress — while the think tank was running anti-career college ads that only served to benefit short-sellers. Even left-wing organizations like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CARE) and ProPublica were publishing articles about how Wall Street short-sellers were behind the push for controversial career college regulation.
After Shireman left the Department of Education under an ethics cloud, both he and Halperin continued to advise and lobby the department without registering as lobbyists.
Indeed, after leaving, Shireman emailed his former colleagues at the department in order to push them for “federal incentives” on behalf of Inside Track, a company Shireman advises.
Further, according to emails, Shireman also directly advised then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, telling him to make a “casual but firm public statement” about a college price comparison tool in 2013, among other things.
Halperin even admitted to lobbying the Department of Education over 70 times without registering as a lobbyist in the court case Public Citizen v. DeVos, No. 1:19-cv-986-RDM.
Circular Testimony
Both Halperin and Shireman get called upon to testify before Congress as humble “education experts” but, in reality, push their leftist agenda disguised as credible data.
Many of the articles Halperin cites in testimony are his own Republic Report blog posts. In a May 22, 2019, testimony before the House, Halperin cited his blog 31 times. Shireman writes reports and testifies citing Halperin as well.
His blog — which is effectively a single-issue publication to air grievances about career colleges — is part of the Ralph Nader-affiliated Essential Information which says it investigates “how money corrupts democracy.” Ironically, Shireman’s and Kvaal’s TICAS has contributed about $200,000 to Halperin’s blog in recent years.
The chief concerns of his blog are how to disallow federal funding of the schools, including denying them participation in the G.I. Bill.
Halperin will testify, for example, that career colleges have poor graduation rates but will leave out the fact that only eight of the top 30 colleges with poor retention rates are career colleges, according to Newsweek. He also leaves out information like career colleges will accept many students others will not — especially single parents, veterans, and those who have been out of the classroom sometimes for decades.
Halperin appears to put on the façade of being a journalist while simply advocating — and lobbying for (without registering) — his preferred policy positions. Similarly, Halperin’s Campus Progress newsletter was described by CARE executive director Melanie Sloan “to have blurred the lines between political advocacy and journalism by allowing staff members to present themselves as journalists writing objective articles, but then churning out vitriolic ‘stories.'”
Halperin also uses his platform to defend his friends, including Shireman and Kvaal.
Indeed, in an article titled “NPR Report Highlights Wall Street Journal Role in Smear on Obama Official,” he claimed the Wall Street Journal published “false attacks and innuendoes, invented by the for-profit college industry” to attack Shireman.
The missive goes on defense against his, Shireman’s, and Kvaal’s connections to Wall Street short-sellers in their Obama-era scandal, saying that a “smear campaign … falsely implied that industry critics were corruptly acting at the behest of, and with funding from, greedy short sellers.”
Though, Halperin does admit, “Disclosure: Bob Shireman is a close friend and colleague of mine.”
Expertise v. Activism
It is often that Halperin and Shireman are trotted out for their “expertise” in education, and they appear to have the credentials to back that up. But, as with nearly any political appointee or public policy advocate, they came about those credentials through having the correct partisan politics for the time.
With the Biden administration and Democrats more broadly scrambling on the education issue ahead of the midterms, they are once again being used to push for and justify new education regulations.
Couched in the proper rhetoric, bringing back regulations as a political tool may be a useful strategy, especially with student loan forgiveness for traditional colleges and universities.
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.
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