Jump to main content

This is historical material “frozen in time”. The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.

Search form

Working Together to Protect Student Veterans

August 26, 2014 at 3:58 PM ET by Holly Petraeus
Summary: 
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announces a new agreement to prevent abusive and deceptive recruiting practices by schools serving service members, veterans, spouses and other family members.

Ed. Note: This is cross-posted from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau blog. 

We’re joining the Departments of Veterans Affairs (VA), Defense (DoD), and Education (ED) to better protect servicemembers, veterans, and their family members who are attending college. We’ve signed an agreement to carry out a comprehensive strategy to strengthen our enforcement and compliance work.

This new agreement is part of a larger effort to prevent abusive and deceptive recruiting practices by schools serving servicemembers, veterans, spouses and other family members. This includes working to ensure that these servicemembers and others have the right information to make informed choices with their education benefits and that colleges are providing these students high-quality academic and student support.

Our agreement requires the agencies to:

  • Have a point of contact for sharing information
  • Share complaints about schools
  • Alert each other of suspected fraud, deception, or misleading practices; and/or
  • Notify each other of any agency action that could lead to a college’s loss of eligibility, a suspension of enrollment, or a termination of license

Before this agreement, an agency could have been looking into a particular school or even taking away the school’s eligibility for federal funds without the other agencies knowing about it. Now, we have a system for sharing important information and coordinating efforts.

Recently, we also worked with VA, DoD, and ED to launch an online student complaint system. Here, students can report negative experiences at schools and training programs. The complaints are forwarded to schools and also shared with other law enforcement agencies. The student complaint system has already received over two thousand complaints.

We look forward to even more successful work together in the future.