If your education has been derailed by the chaos of protests on American campuses, you could get your money back.
Under federal payment rules, those who were defrauded or deceived by a university can file a claim looking for relief
Under these rules, known as “borrower defense,” some people even get their loans discharged.
The process was traditionally used by students who were defrauded by for-profit universities, which closed at short notice or misrepresented courses and job opportunities for graduates.
Now, a conservative legal group says the same rules apply to colleges that don’t maintain order on campus.
Students line up to show identification as they enter the Columbia University campus in New York City, where campus life has been disrupted by protests.
Pro-Palestinian supporters from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrate at MIT at a Palestine camp at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
America First Legal (AFL), a group founded by former Trump administration officials, says too many schools are not enforcing their codes of conduct amid the wave of protests.
AFL lawyer Reed Rubinstein says students can get their money back
Students face no repercussions for blatant harassment on campus, the group says.
Students who assault or bully fellow Jews or Christians too often get away with it, AFL says.
The same thing is done by those who tear down posters of Hamas hostages or who interrupt classes or speeches by prominent conservatives.
This, they say, could amount to “misrepresentation” by universities, which present their campuses as orderly and safe in prospectuses.
Reed Rubinstein, an AFL lawyer who worked in the Trump administration’s education department, says this may be the basis for a claim under borrower defense.
“We are seeing Colombia and MIT get rid of long-standing codes of conduct to protect people who are involved in the crudest kind of anti-Semitism we have seen in the United States since the 1930s,” Rubinstein told DailyMail.com .
“The idea that university administrators would just stop doing it is not something people entertain.”
This constitutes an “argument of fraud,” he added.
Locked doors and extra security aren’t what many Columbia University students expected when they applied for their loans
A protester detained by Texas police at the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday.
AFL has produced a ‘toolkit’ how to request refunds through the Federal Student Aid website.
Suggests language to use in a complaint, with examples from some of the schools that have seen Jewish and other students harassed in recent months.
They include Cooper Union, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Harvard University and SUNY Binghamton.
The federal Department of Education did not respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.
The department does not release information about the claims.
Universities are not willing to talk about them either.
The “borrower defense” system was rarely used until the mid-2010s.
Most students who attended for-profit colleges have their loans canceled.
The claims are more common now and are made against a broader range of public, research and religious schools.
The Federal Student Aid website says that students can have their debt forgiven if their “school engaged in certain misconduct related to the provision of a federal loan or the educational services it provided that caused you harm.”
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called on the New York police to clear the encampment of protesters.
Police arrested protesters at UT Austin after warning them they could face criminal charges if they did not disperse.
Misconduct can include false promises about degrees or central certificates, professional services, income prospects or the transferability of credits to other institutions, it says.
Student protests over the war in Gaza have intensified and expanded over the past week.
Camps have currently been established at universities such as Columbia, Yale and NYU.
Hundreds of Texas police officers entered the University of Texas at Austin on Wednesday, in the latest confrontation between authorities and pro-Palestinian university students.
Students have called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to US military assistance to Israel and university divestment from arms suppliers and other companies that profit from the war.
School administrators and local authorities have begun cracking down on the wave of protests in recent days.
Columbia and affiliated Barnard College have suspended dozens of students involved in the protests.
More than 100 protesters were arrested at Columbia, where university president Minouche Shafik called the New York police to clear the encampment, saying it violated campus protest rules. Dozens more were arrested at New York University.
Columbia courses are now taught online or in person; California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt, canceled classes this week.