The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has joined forces with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense to better protect service members, veterans, and their family members who are attending college.
A new comprehensive strategy will be used to strengthen enforcement and compliance work that will ensure preventive measures against abusive and deceptive recruiting practices by schools that specialize in admitting servicemen and -women, veterans, their spouses, and other family members.
The CFPB will now redouble its efforts to ensure that veterans have the right information to make informed choices regarding their education benefits in both the short and long term, and that their selected institutions of higher education are indeed providing the highest quality of academic standards and student support.
These new measures will be based on a set of criteria coordinated by CFPB staff: All veterans must have a point of contact for sharing complaints about schools; they must be able to alert each other about suspected fraud, deception and misleading practices; and they must be able to notify one another of any institute’s actions that could lead to that school’s loss of eligibility, suspension of enrollment, or termination of licensure.
To speed the process along, a new online student complaint system will be put in place. Students will be able to report negative experiences at schools or during training programs. The complaints will then be forwarded to other schools and also shared with law enforcement officials. With more than 2,000 complaints recently registered, the CFPB is providing a system that will help protect veterans and their families.