VVA: Carper Introduces Bill to Eliminate Education Loophole that Robs Our Military, Veterans, and American Taxpayers

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "Today, the senior Senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, unveiled the Military and Veterans Education Protection Act of 2017.  When this eminently sensible bill is enacted into black-letter law, it will bring a modicum of fairness and sanity to a shameful though currently legal abuse of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill," said John Rowan, National President of Vietnam Veterans of America.

"Ever since the revelations by former Senator Tom Harkin's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee several years ago, VVA has sought to close what is known as the 90/10 loophole," Rowan said. "This enabled certain proprietary institutions of higher learning to count revenues from military and veteran education programs toward the limit on federal revenues they are allowed to receive under the Higher Education Act of 1965.

"This has resulted in a rip-off of stunning proportions," Rowan said.  "It victimizes military and veteran students seeking education to achieve their version of the American Dream but who, instead, receive worthless educations, coupled with unforeseen and nearly insurmountable debt. This perpetuates a fraud on American taxpayers, who pick up the tab for a program perverted to enrich investors in this shoddy endeavor in higher education. "As Holly Petreaus explained when she was with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 'For every service member or veteran--or spouse or child, in the case of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill--enrolled at a for-profit college and paying with military education funds, that college can enroll nine others who are using nothing but Title IV money. This gives for-profit colleges an incentive to see service members as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform, and to use aggressive marketing to draw them in.'

"Ms. Petreaus was right on the money," Rowan said.  "It's high time now for Congress to do the right thing and eliminate this legal grift," Rowan said.

SOURCE Vietnam Veterans of America