Virginia Foxx rakes in the dough from student loans she despises
Virginia Foxx rakes in the dough from student loans she despises
byMeteor Blades
In case you missed it Monday, a key member of what my colleague Hunter calls the congressional dimwit caucus, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), takes a jaded view of Americans who take out student loans. Uh...make that a jaundiced view. Er...make that a jackass view. You see, she and her husband worked their way through school all on their own in the early '60s, and they borrowed very little. She says she has "very little tolerance" for those who graduate with a lot of debt. The younger generation, she insinuates, is a bunch of slackers. Be summer janitors. A burger flippers. That should cover tuition, books and living expenses with no problem, just as it did in the years when Jack Kennedy was president and the Foxxes were getting their degrees.
Without that student-loan debt, however, as Andrew Leonard shows in a fine little smackdown of the congresswoman, Foxx would be short many thousands of bucks in her campaign coffers. Among her top contributors are the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities and Corinthian Colleges. Fly-by-night for-profit education operations are something Foxx has eagerly gone to bat for despite continuing reports from the Government Accountability Office showing these operations, especially the online-only versions, to be massive rip-offs, offering inferior education and exceedingly low graduation rates. One of the biggest rip-offs is the fact that they thrive on student grant and loan money.
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/a_huge_student_loan_scam/singleton/
To help them out, Foxx introduced HR2117, the Orwellianly named Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education Act to "prohibit the Department of Education from overreaching into academic affairs and program eligibility under title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965." In other words, as Danny Weil says, Foxx's act amounts to "no regulations allowed." Or, as Leonard suggests for a retitling: “The Protecting the Freedom of For-Profit Schools to Suck off the Government Teat Without Any Accountability Whatsoever Act.”
Her bill is (which passed the House by a wide margin, including many Democratic votes) is designed to repeal two new requirements established by the Obama administration:
MORE:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/17/1084185/-Virginia-Foxx-rake-in-the-dough-from-student-loans-she-despises
= new reply since forum marked as read
My mother has a college friend from a private college in Massachusetts. They both went to school in the late '50s. The friend is a right winger who has similar views. She worked summers to pay tuition. By the time my husband and I went to college summer jobs paid for books and spending money. These people live in a bubble. 
Kids today cannot possibly earn all their tuition. And of course she is a hypocrite...all Repubs seem to be...
