Why Betsy DeVos Is An Imminent Threat To Education

Just under 100 days ago, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, was successfully voted to the White House. She faced a fifty-fifty split by the Senate, but for the first time in history, the Vice President, Mike Pence, voted in order to break the tie. Her nomination was controversial, as the Michigan-born republican has no experience in public education or with federal student loans, both of which are crucial components of the responsibilities of the Secretary of Education.

Let’s backtrack on Ms. DeVos. She was born into money and paid her way through a private education at Calvin College. During her freshman year, DeVos served in the college’s student senate and ironically was elected without a single vote casted, as too few students applied for an election to take place. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business economics, which, however, has yet to prove useful to her political career; before her confirmation as education secretary, DeVos had served only at the state level as the chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Her and her husband’s assets total somewhere between $580 million to $1.2 billion. On the surface, these numbers shouldn’t matter — that is, until we acknowledge the fact that the DeVos family made $1.2 million in donations to the GOP during the 2016 election cycle. DeVos as Trump’s pick for education secretary makes a little more sense when the quantitative data is factored in.

DeVos has spent her pre-White House career pouring her support — monetary and influence-based alike — into private and charter schools, making her, frankly, unqualified to be cradling the futures of over 50 million public school students in her hands. During her exchange with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren at her confirmation hearing, DeVos validated that she never had to take out a student loan to pay for higher education. Nor had her children, as they too attended solely private primary and secondary schools. As noted by Warren, the Secretary of Education is essentially responsible for managing a trillion dollar student loan bank, with $30 billion of that going towards Pell Grants yearly. Not only is DeVos void of experience working with public schooling, but she has admittedly never handled a sum of money that large or of that great significance.
But why is this problematic? Why, exactly, is Betsy DeVos’s place in the White House a threat to education? I extend this threat past public K12 students and towards all K12 students in the country. Private high school students are not safe from the detrimental decisions that DeVos will assuredly make in the future (thankfully enough, she hasn’t done much except get booed at a graduation ceremony since her confirmation three months ago). College is expensive, regardless of if the institution is a private or public one. 66% of American students will take out a student loan to pay for some portion of college, and an even greater percentage will be faced with debt upon graduation. With this being said, all high school students should acknowledge the fact at some point during their college search, they will entertain the idea of taking out a student loan. There is no nightmare worse than getting accepted into a dream school but being unable to attend because of financial parameters. The vast majority of student loans are fostered by the federal government, and they rest at the mercy of one inexperienced and unqualified Betsy DeVos.