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It is certainly no secret that the primary focus of for-profit college lobbyists and leaders over the past year has been to persuade Congressional Democrats to break with the Obama administration over its efforts to rein in the sector. But a new report in the Huffington Post provides the most detailed information to date of just how aggressively the industry has pursued this strategy.

In an analysis of campaign finance records, the online publication found that career college officials provided, both individually and through political action committees, more than $2 million in campaign contributions in the 2010 election cycle -- almost double what they had given in the previous cycle. Here’s how the schools divvied it up:

[Editor's Note: A version of this post ran first on our sister blog, Ed Money Watch]

After months of drama, the White House and Congressional leaders found the money to keep the current maximum Pell Grant in place for the upcoming school year. But this victory did not come without a price -- Congress is on the verge of eliminating a popular policy that allows low-income students to collect two grants in a single award year with the second grant generally used to pay for summer school.

For Obama administration officials, this trade-off was a no brainer. With the Pell Grant program running huge deficits, and House Republicans threatening to significantly cut the maximum award and thereby reduce the grants’ purchasing power, providing two Pell Grants to students in a single year seemed to the administration to be a luxury the government could no longer afford.

But to some college officials -- particularly, but not exclusively, at community colleges and for profit schools -- this change, which was made without any meaningful public debate or discussion, is shortsighted. They say that ending the policy will be especially harmful to adult students who, because of their work and family commitments, don’t have the time to attend college on a traditional academic schedule.

For-profit college lobbyists are making a last ditch effort to get Congress to include a controversial provision blocking the Department of Education from issuing a final regulation on "Gainful Employment" in the spending bill it will be voting on this week to finance the government for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year.

As Higher Ed Watch reported yesterday, the tentative budget deal that the White House and Congressional leaders reached late Friday night did not include this provision, which would have prohibited the Education Department from finalizing a rule that aims to prevent unscrupulous for-profit colleges from overloading financially needy students with unmanageable levels of debt. This was one of several hot-button policy riders House Republicans were pushing that the White House rejected.

But career college lobbyists have not given up the fight. On Saturday afternoon, the group formerly known as the Career College Association sent out an alert to its members, entitled "URGENT REQUEST: WE NEED YOU TO MAKE CALLS THIS WEEKEND!" Claiming that the issue is "NOT yet resolved," Harris Miller, the organization's president wrote:

Therefore, we encourage you TODAY and throughout this weekend to contact the offices of your Congressman/Senators urging them to support inclusion of the Kline/Hastings amendment [forbidding Ed Dept from finalizing Gainful Employment rule] in the final package. In particular, if you have a relationship with the following key Congressional leaders -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Republican Thad Cochran (R-MS), House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY), House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), or House Appropriations Committee Ranking Democrat Norm Dicks (D-WA) -- please make a special effort to reach those Members.

Given the fact that the for-profit higher education industry has spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to stop the Department from moving forward with this regulation, it's hardly surprising that career college lobbyists are not conceding defeat yet.

At Higher Ed Watch, we will continue to monitor this story as it develops.

President Obama in his fiscal year 2012 budget request put two federal student aid programs for college students on the chopping block: the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership (LEAP) program, which provides states with money for need-based aid for undergraduates, and the Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarship program, which provides funds to states for merit scholarships. In their efforts to reduce federal spending in the current fiscal year, federal lawmakers have already killed the LEAP program but have so far left the Byrd scholarship program in place.

This may prove to just be a temporary reprieve, however, as the White House and Congress continue to negotiate a final budget bill for the remainder of the year that would make deeper spending cuts than those that have already been approved. Nonetheless, the fact that the Byrd Honors Scholarship program, which dates back to the 1980s, has made it through the first several rounds of cuts unscathed is fairly remarkable considering that it doesn’t have much of a constituency outside of Congress fighting for it. In fact, it is one of the few federal student aid programs that the Student Aid Alliance, a coalition of higher education associations and student advocacy groups, does not champion.

Truthfully, given its namesake, the program has never really needed the groups’ support. The program was the brainchild of the late Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who not only was the longest serving Member of Congress ever but also was the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee for nearly two decades. In that position, he held a powerful grip over the country’s purse strings.

According to a 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Byrd had a very personal reason for pushing for a program that would reward top performing high-school students with college scholarships. As “the valedictorian of his Depression-era high school” in the mid-1930s, Byrd had been heartbroken to find “that he could not afford to attend college at the time.” He didn’t want other exceptional students to suffer the same fate.

Under the program, which Congress created in 1986 as part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act, the U.S. Department of Education provides funds to state educational agencies, which then use the money to allot scholarships of $1,500 each to top high school seniors who plan on attending colleges that participate in the federal student aid programs. At first, the scholarships were non-renewable. But in 1992, Congress expanded the program to allow students to continue receiving these awards for up to four years of college.

The overall amounts of funds states receive each year are based, according to the Education Department, “on the ratio of the state’s school-aged population (5-17 year olds) to the total school-aged population in all participating states.” The U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, America Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands are each guaranteed 10 new scholarships per year. No state or territory can receive less than $15,000 in new scholarship funds in a given year.

Under the temporary spending bills that Congress has passed so far for the 2011 fiscal year, the Byrd program is scheduled to receive $42 million, the same amount as it got in 2010. Under this appropriation, the program would be able to continue to fund 28,000 scholarships a year, including 7,350 new ones.

But is the program needed at a time when colleges and states are already shelling out billions of dollars in merit based aid each year?

The Obama administration certainly doesn’t think so. The Byrd program was one of a little more than a dozen education programs that the president proposed eliminating as part of his fiscal 2012 budget request.

“By targeting students who are already likely to attend and succeed in college, and by awarding relatively small amounts, the Byrd Honors Scholarship program does not effectively improve college access or completions,” the Education Department stated in its budget summary. “The Administration believes that the reallocation of funding from the Byrd Honors Scholarship program to larger programs with more flexible authorities will result in administrative savings and improved college access.”

The administration has proposed replacing both the LEAP and Byrd program with a new College Completion Incentive Grant program, which would provide $1.25 billion to states over the next five years to make "systemic reforms” in their higher education systems with the goal of graduating more students. With Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives, and the appetite on Capitol Hill for budget cuts, the chances that this proposal will be enacted are, to be generous, slim to none.

Still, most student aid experts agree with the administration’s assessment that there is absolutely no need for the government to continue supporting an exclusively merit-based aid program. [The administration and Congress have already allowed two short-lived student aid programs that rewarded both merit- and need -- Academic Competitiveness and SMART grants -- to quietly expire.]

Without the support of the administration or of any constituency to speak of, it seems unlikely that the Byrd Honors Scholarship program will continue to escape the budget axe for long. After all, it is a small, redundant program that has long outlived its purpose, considering the vast sums that states and colleges pour into merit aid each year. Still, the program may very well live to see another day, if lawmakers feel it is just too soon to kill a program that bears the name of their former formidable colleague.

Yesterday, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story about the sorry state of the student loan industry. Throughout the article, we are told that the demise of the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program last year has led student loan companies and guaranty agencies to lay off thousands of workers and eliminate college access programs they managed. While some lenders and guarantors are coming up with “innovative ideas for helping people pay for college” in order to survive, “many of the ideas may not work out, which could lead to a further shrinking of the industry,” the article states.

After reading the story, even we at Higher Ed Watch felt a lump in our throats. That is until we remembered an essential point that the article neglected to mention: the one and only purpose of the federal student loan program is, and has always been, to ensure that all college students have access to affordable loans for any school they wish to attend without delay or disruption. By all accounts, the U.S. Department of Education’s Direct Student Loan program is carrying out this job quite well -- and at a much lower cost to taxpayers.

Harris Miller, the president of the group formerly known as the Career College Association, likes to say “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.”  But apparently that rule applies to everyone but his own organization.

As we've reported, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, as the group is now called, has not been shy about twisting the facts in its battle to stop the Obama administration from putting into effect regulations that would increase federal oversight over the for-profit college sector. So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the lawsuit that the association filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia earlier this year to block the Department from carrying out several of these rules was rife with misleading statements and outright errors.

At Higher Ed Watch, we ran a post in January responding to some of the most outlandish misstatements in the lawsuit. We focused particularly on arguments the group made to try and convince the court to strike down a regulation that would, once and for all, eliminate the safe harbors that the Bush administration put in place in 2002 to help for-profit colleges skirt a long-standing federal law that prohibits schools from compensating recruiters based on their success in enrolling students. Now, in its response to the lawsuit, the Obama administration delivers some powerful blows of its own to the career college lobbyists’ arguments.

Today we are running excerpts from the Justice Department’s brief that answer the association’s claims about the incentive compensation rule and show why the court should throw out this misguided lawsuit. Here are the claims and the administration's responses to them:

[Correction: We have updated this post to reflect the fact that the data in the Institute on Higher Education Policy report on the delinquency and default rates by institutional type only takes into account the experiences of those who borrowed to attend college, not all students. We apologize for any confusion we may have caused.]

Pity students who attend two-year for-profit colleges. According to a new report released this week by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), the majority of students who enroll in these expensive schools and take out federal loans are likely to become delinquent and/or default on their debt, whether they graduate or not.

This is just one of dozens of findings in the report, Delinquency: The Untold Story of Student Loan Borrowing, which will be the subject of an event here on Thursday at the New America Foundation. In the study, IHEP used data provided by five of the nation’s largest guaranty agencies to see how 1.8 million borrowers, who entered repaying on their federal loans in the 2005 fiscal year, managed their debt.

It’s that time again when the group formerly known as the Career College Association brings for-profit college representatives and students to Washington, DC to lobby for the sector. But this year, the group is not taking any chances. Not only are they providing students with talking points arguing against the Obama administration’s proposed Gainful Employment rule, but they are also warning them not to talk to reporters about their student debt loads.

In a document entitled “Tips for Talking to the Media,” they tell students and graduates of their programs exactly how to respond to such a question:

Should a reporter ask if or how much debt you incurred at a career institution, you can firmly but politely reply: “I made an adult decision to invest in my education, and I am confident in my ability to meet my financial responsibilities.”

But what if reporters -- those nasty nabobs of negativity  -- aren’t satisfied with that answer and try to dig deeper? Don’t worry, the career-college lobbyists have that covered too:

Should the reporter continue to push on the debt point, you can politely but firmly reply, “I have answered that question, and am happy to talk more about how my degree/diploma/certificate has enhanced my career prospects.

And if reporters dare to bring up questions about “high-pressure recruitment,” the document advises students to say:

My decision to choose a private sector college was made after I had considered other options. It was my choice, and I made it based on several factors, not solely on any contact with recruiters.

In summing up, the lobbyists encourage students to be “honest” and “straightforward” with journalists -- "unless of course those jerks start asking questions about your debt again!" [Full disclosure, we added that part in.]

How much does it really cost a student loan company to collect on a defaulted private student loan? That question is at the center of a class action lawsuit that a federal judge in California has allowed to proceed against Sallie Mae, the country’s largest private student loan provider.

The case was filed by four borrowers who have defaulted on private loans they took out from the student loan giant between 2002 and 2004 to attend Career Education Corporation’s California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. Before sending these borrowers’ loans to a collection agency, Sallie Mae added a collection fee of 25 percent to their loan balances in a process known as capitalization. As a result, the total amount each of the plaintiffs owed ballooned -- growing, in one case, from approximately $48,000 to $60,000 and, in another, from about $73,000 to $103,000.

While Sallie Mae’s actions in this case were not necessarily unusual, the lawsuit argues that the company violated the terms and conditions of the loans. At issue is the following clause that Sallie Mae includes in its private student loan promissory notes regarding potential collection charges:

 “[Borrower] agree[s] to pay [holder] reasonable amounts permitted by law, including attorneys’ fees and court costs which [holder] incurs in enforcing the terms of this Note, if [borrower is] in default.” [Emphasis added]

The lawsuit contends that the 25 percent fee is "not reasonable" and has no relation to the true costs that Sallie Mae incurs when a borrower goes into default. Instead, the borrowers' lawyers argue that this is an arbitrary fee that is "designed to substantially exceed the collection costs actually incurred."

While “it would not be impracticable or extremely difficult to fix the actual costs of collection," the lawsuit says, Sallie Mae has not made “a good faith attempt” to do so. “The amount of the Collection penalties does not represent the result of a reasonable endeavor by Defendant to estimate a fair compensation for any loss that may be sustained."

The reactions that President Obama’s budget request for the 2012 fiscal year elicited this week from the college lobbyists at One Dupont Circle were entirely predictable. They applauded the president’s desire to keep the maximum Pell Grant at $5,500, but made clear -- in the most polite way possible -- that they would not support the means by which the administration would achieve that goal.

“It is clear that the administration has put a lot of effort and care into producing a budget that strives to protect and preserve student financial aid,” Molly Corbett Broad, the president of the American Council, said in a written statement. “While the higher education community does not agree with all of the choices made, we support the overall objective of ensuring a viable array of student aid programs anchored by the indispensable Pell Grant program.”

At issue are proposals in the president’s budget plan that aim to shore up funding for the program, which is facing a serious budget crisis even as demand for the grants continues to escalate. This is primarily because short term funding sources (such as through the stimulus legislation and last year’s student loan reform bill) that helped finance a maximum Pell Grant award of $5,550 in fiscal year 2010 will be all used up. Congress has not yet found the money it needs to keep the maximum award in place the current 2011 fiscal year, which started in October, let alone in 2012, when the cost of doing so is expected to skyrocket to nearly $40 billion.

An audit report that the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education released last week of the for-profit college chain Ashford University puts the lie to a key argument that the main lobbying group for career colleges made in a lawsuit it filed late last month in federal court against the Education Department.  

The lawsuit seeks to block the Department from putting into effect several consumer protection regulations that the agency finalized in November. Among the rules is one that would eliminate the “safe harbors” that Bush administration officials with close ties to the for-profit higher education industry put in place in 2002 to help for-profit colleges skirt a long-standing federal law prohibiting colleges from compensating recruiters based on their success in enrolling students.

In arguing to stop the Department from being able to enforce the rule, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (which was formerly -- and much more appropriately -- named the Career College Association) claims that the safe harbors have made it easier for federal officials to enforce the incentive-compensation ban. “In short, the bright-line rules embodied in the [2002] Clarifying regulations were easy for regulated parties to understand and enabled the Department and courts to quickly and easily distinguish between schools that improperly used commissioned salespeople to drive up enrollment and schools that properly paid their recruiting, admissions, and financial aid employees competitive salaries, appropriately adjusted to reflect their on-the-job performance,” the lawsuit states. [Emphasis added]

But as we said last week, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the safe harbors are not “bright line” standards but giant loopholes that have made it extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible, for the Education Department to enforce the law -- just as we at Higher Ed Watch believe their creators intended them to do. Most problematic is the first safe harbor, which allows colleges to adjust the annual or hourly wages of recruiters up to twice a year, as long as the adjustment is “not based solely on the number of students recruited, admitted, enrolled, or awarded financial aid.” In other words, this loophole allows colleges to circumvent the law, which bars schools from providing any commission-based compensation to their recruiters. [Emphasis added here and in the previous sentence.]

"They definitely seem to be the most aggressive attack dogs," Stephen Burd, editor of the New America Foundation's "Higher Ed Watch" blog, said of EDMC. ...