A military spouse from Sanford was walking the halls of power last week to fight for better rules to keep low-performing — and in some cases predatory — colleges and universities from receiving federal funding.
The Education Department is retooling its accreditation standards, which among other things help determine which schools can receive federal GI Bill benefits to educate veterans and their families.
Cynthia Lawrence, the wife of an Air Force veteran, traveled to Washington at the invitation of an advocacy group to tell her story to department officials and members of Congress.
She says she used part of her husband's GI Bill benefits to enroll in a doctoral program at a large for-profit university. But she says delaying tactics by the school added years to her studies and nearly $40,000 in extra costs that she had to pay out of pocket.
"I'm holding the bill for a university that took advantage of me, and I don't want another veteran or another veteran's spouse to have to go through that — ever," she said.
She enrolled in 2014 and says that at first, with basic classes, everything went smoothly.
"But as soon as I started getting into the doctoral-specific dissertation classes, that's when they started doing bait and switch — changing program requirements, not honoring my contract as far as my catalog year, meaning the classes I was supposed to have," she said.
"Things started to get really, really wonky. They kept changing everything: chairs, methodologies, not allowing meaningful feedback, giving only scanty feedback. Anything they could do as a stall tactic, they did."
After seven years, she exhausted all of her student loan benefits. She wasn't able to graduate until 2022 after transferring to another university.
"I want to prevent someone from signing up at a university that's going to take advantage of them," Lawrence said.
The toll of enrolling in a substandard college or university — whether because it's predatory or simply run poorly — can mean wasted years and significant money.
"My debt, compared to a lot of other folks, was very small, but I've heard of people taking on upwards of $425,000 in debt and having nothing to show for it," she said.
Last week, the Department of Education held the first meetings in the process of retooling its accreditation standards. It's expected to hold another set of meetings in about a month, which are likely to be the last before it votes on recommendations, said William Hubbard, a Marine Corps veteran and vice president for Veterans & Military Policy at the nonprofit advocacy group Veterans Education Success.
That group brought Lawrence to Washington last week, along with an Army veteran with a similar story. Hubbard said the visits were especially important because the committee working on the rules had decided to deviate from normal procedure and not allow the public to speak at the end of meetings.
"It's often helpful to hear directly from constituents and people who've been personally affected by these issues, and so they came from Texas and North Carolina to D.C. to share their stories and highlight some of the gaps in the system as it stands," he said.
While accreditation rules don't directly affect GI Bill benefits, they offer crucial gatekeeping standards to keep subpar programs out of the system.
"Unfortunately, the system as it stands is really not working well, and that's part of what they're looking at at the Department of Education," he said.
The committee does include a representative from a veterans group, but Hubbard said the process has been mainly focused on culture war issues.
"Accreditation, in theory, is supposed to determine the quality of an institution, and frankly, I'm not sure diversity issues are the make-or-break factor on that front,” he said. "We'd really like to see them focus more on academic instruction and, ultimately, the outcomes of higher education — which are to get a career, get a good-paying job, and have strong workforce impact. That really hasn't been the majority of the discussion and I think that's a missed opportunity."
