Political Scientist and public servant Jon Oberg spoke to Nikki about his decades of work investigating fraud in the student loan industry. He has filed suit against nine student loans lenders and studied student financial aid distributions over time. Jon is a panelist in the January 13th Scared to Debt documentary series discussion on How Government Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt.

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Transcript – 

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast. It is so good to have you here.

Jon Oberg: Thank you. Thank you.

Nikki Nolan: For people who don’t know you, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what initially made you interested in the student loan industry?

Jon Oberg: Well, yes, I’d be happy to. I suppose there are quite a few who don’t know me. There are quite a few who do in the student loan industry and in the world of higher education. I am a political scientist by profession and that has guided my interest and my experience, over probably five decades now of work in the area.

As a political scientist, I’ve been in the classrooms, I’ve been in research, I’ve been in public service. I have worked at both the federal level and the state level. I’ve been in the different branches: executive, legislative, judicial. My specialty I suppose, within political science, has been higher education finance. And I have kept up my interest in the political science field by teaching quite a bit over the years and also doing research and occasionally publishing that research. That’s who I am. I am so glad to join your illustrious group of those who have already given their takes on these subjects on your podcast. It’s an impressive group.

Nikki Nolan: In a recent blog post, you wrote that the Department of Education was purposely lax, which had a lifelong effect on borrowers and higher education. What do you think should be the remediation?

Jon Oberg: The purposefully lax phrase comes from this wonderful new book by Professor Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. She gets an awful lot right in the book.

Nikki Nolan: She’s so great. She was our previous guest, right before this episode.

Jon Oberg: I can’t praise her book enough. She is a historian. And so she takes a very different approach with her academic methodology as compared to mine. But we come to many of the same conclusions and the only thing about her book is I wish there were a lot more. I wish she would have delved into what she meant when she said the Department of Education was “purposefully lax” in enforcing the laws. Well, this is very true. In the blog post, I have expanded on that and I have said that actually, the term ought to be “purposefully complicit.”

It was not just looking the other way. There were people in the department, and there is good evidence as to who they are. And we should take great interest in this, who were complicit with certain lenders to try to move literally billions of dollars out of taxpayer money out into the lenders? How can it be remediated now? This is a huge gap in our thinking right now.

And what are the adverse effects of this? This is something that really needs to be explored. For me, it’s not hard to see at all that there is a continuum between the effort to put a lot of this illegally claimed money out into the lenders, to turn that into ill-advised loans. I mean, lenders make money on loans. They have to have loans out there. And you can see in the case of PHEAA, that is Pennsylvania, you can see in Iowa. You can see in Kentucky, you can see in many different states how this works. There’s a lot of talk about student loan cancellation for reasons of economic recovery. There’s a lot of talks and you do a great job on your podcast to illuminate horror stories among borrowers who just cannot ever get any resolution of their problems. So I’ve sort of considered those to be two legs of a three-legged stool, but that’s unstable. There’s another factor in there, and that is the complicity of the Department of Education in creating this monster.

As a taxpayer, I just listen to the arguments. So, when I might say, by degree, oh, it’s a borrower problem. Why don’t those people repay their loans? If I knew that the government itself was responsible for defrauding and setting up a predatory system, I might be much more sympathetic to the question of cancellation.

Now, the question of how the cancellation might work is fraught with many questions. I am of the opinion that — I have many years of experience with this particular provision. It’s 20 US Code 1082, the so-called the compromise and settlement powers of the secretary. And I’ve been in the room when those are used. I’ve been in many rooms when those powers have been cited, including in courtrooms and lawyers’ offices on K street. And so we’ve talked about that. I believe in a rather expansive reading of that. And so I think the power is there. We know that there has been a legal opinion that has been provided to the Biden Administration on the extent of those powers. And I think it probably says that there are considerable powers there. So, I think, and there are many ways, in order to compromise and settle, or mitigate, that could be used. And I wouldn’t say that it ought to be limited to the idea of $10,000 or $50,000 or whether there ought to be some other way to look back.

I’m intrigued by somebody’s idea in a think tank that we should have a retroactive Pell and look at what Pell should have been, and then apply that to whatever balances are remaining, and how much that I don’t have the databases to know that. But that is not an original idea with me, but I think that might be an interesting way to approach it.

I have thrown out and some people have agreed and said, I’m not sure when the Secretary — I think the Secretary — would have the power to cancel everyone’s loan. If they have repaid principal and government cost of money and you asked the question, well, why haven’t they been cancelled? I mean, isn’t that the idea? You pay back your principal and interest, shouldn’t your loan be canceled?

Well, a lot of people have been paying and paying and paying and their principal doesn’t go down. All of which, all of which may have been not what the borrower requested, but what the servicer saw as it’s interest, benefiting the for-profit company that is doing this.

And so, that would be one, that’d be another way to remediate, to say we just can’t, we just cannot anymore. The Secretary of Education could say given the history, given the fraud, given the complicity of people in the department in this waste, fraud, and abuse, we cannot in good conscience not cancel those kinds of changes that have been levied on this population. So that’s another way, you know, to explore, as I say, I don’t have the databases.

We also have this transition problem right now. How are we going to move all of these loans? Because not only has FedLoan servicing said is it bowing out. And I will say parenthetically here, one of the reasons it is, it is bowing out is that it was caught in perjury. And one of the ways it thought it could get out of investigations for the CEO’s perjury would be just to depart the field. We have Navient too, in a similar situation, having been taken on by the CFPB and in that, in those lawsuits.

Anyway, there must be a huge number of transfers and people are being advised that, oh, something is going to go wrong. Your records are going to be destroyed. Nobody’s going to be able to reconstruct. So, you’d better go to your computer and take and make a copy of every transaction you’ve ever made. Well, this is no way to run a loan program, let alone a government. And I think it would be wise for the Secretary under the compromise and settlement power somehow to step in here and maybe get rid of a lot of volume as well as to do justice to the people who have been adversely affected.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, the Debt Collective, recently uncovered through a FOIA request. They were able to see that there actually has been a memo that has been written, it’s been heavily redacted to the point where you can’t read it, but they are hoping that through compromise and settlement, that is how we’re going to get to cancellation.

How about we move on to what has been your experience in higher education?

Jon Oberg: My experience in higher education goes back to the 1960s. I had actually already graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree before the Higher Education Act of 1965 was passed. And I was working then in state government as a higher education budget analyst in my home state of Nebraska when the big Education Amendments of 1972 were passed.

And this was the legislation that has shaped the higher education world ever since because this was the legislation that built on the 1965 act to create what became known as Pell Grants. It also expanded the guaranteed student loan program greatly by creating a government-sponsored enterprise, Sallie Mae.

Going forward quickly over the decades. I’m familiar with just about every reauthorization of the higher education act, from then till now.

I also was present in, as I worked in the Senate when the Reagan Administration began. And that’s an important milestone too, because this was the time when grants started to be deemphasized. Reagan wanted to cut back on grants and make student borrowing the way that people paid for higher education.

I was present in the room when David Stockman gave his pitch to the Senate budget committee on behalf of the Reagan Administration’s program, which of course was, based on some things that had to be backtracked. And Stockman later said, he was all wrong on a lot of those things, but it did a tremendous amount of damage to higher education, I believe, when we cut back on grants.

In the middle part of the 1980s, I went back to my home state of Nebraska and took the position of the director of the association of independent colleges and universities. And we went through the necessity of converting from low tuition and grant finance to having to rely a lot more on student loans.

Even though I was working in higher education, in the revolving door, so to speak, I established a seminar, at that time back in 1986, I believe it was. But with the theme of, are we relying too much on student loans? Are we going to burden a generation, let alone what turned out to be two or three generations, with huge amounts of debt?

At that time, I was also associated with the national organizations, what we might call One DuPont, the American Council on Education, and NAICU, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, and all their lobbying efforts. And I participated in those.

In the nineties, I came to join the US Department of Education, as a civil servant in the Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs and served then as the congressional liaison between the Congress and the Department for programs under the Higher Education Act, including all the grant and loan programs, specifically loan programs. And, then I was a person who was very deeply involved in the adoption of the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, for better or for worse. We didn’t know at that time.

I shifted over to the research office at the beginning of 2001 and witnessed a lot of bad things happening in the department over those two decades. But particularly then.

So that’s a long answer that takes me up through my work at the Department of Education. And I retired from the Department of Education in 2005.

Nikki Nolan: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. I’m really curious. You’ve been through so many things and seen so many different generations. What effect do you think this has on the younger generation?

Jon Oberg: Well, it’s all bad. I would say compared to when I started to work in higher education, when tuition was low and what loans were, something that was kind of a last resort or something temporary, something that people could handle. And increasingly of course, tuition has gone up a great deal.

Loans have gone up, we’ve created a student loan industry that is combined with colleges and universities. Desires for revenue have really become a monster. And you’ve had many people on your podcast who have described their experiences with this. I would say that one of my favorite books on this topic is The Debt Trap by Josh Mitchell. He starts off by, in his introduction, saying he talked to Alice Rivlin. It was a Rivlin report, back at the end of the Johnson Administration that led to the ’72 amendments and eventually got us into trouble. And he asked her, before she passed away, I believe in 2018, to take stock of it.

And she said, we created a “monster.” And that is what the younger generations now have to deal with. And that monster isn’t just the loan burden. But we see a lot of predatory colleges and universities, mostly for-profit, but also many programs in the not-for-profit area too, that are taking advantage of this generation. It is no wonder that we have the crisis, the “catastrophe” as Josh Mitchell calls it in his book that has come about now.

Nikki Nolan: How do you think that higher education could be reformed?

Jon Oberg: Well, as a political scientist, I’ve asked that question every decade, because every decade it seemed to need reform because it was going off the rails. I do want to go back to the time of the early 1970s and the Rivlin report and the Carnegie Commission reports about how they saw higher education’s future back then. This was 50 years ago.

I was very impressed at the time by the Carnegie Commission’s work, which was entitled “Higher Education: Who Benefits, Who Pays, Who Should Pay?” And back then there was an era in which there was a consensus on this. The tuition shouldn’t be more, and family burden shouldn’t be more than one third of the cost of education courses. Far more than that, right now. That state and federal governments said its taxpayers should pay another third.

And that has evaporated. They don’t do that anymore. And then the other third would be made up from various kinds of charitable contributions and enterprises that exist in higher education for revenues. We could go back to that. Some people have said, oh, why don’t we try to make that our target, because that worked for quite some time and that would bring down loan burdens and tax support backup and so on. That is a response that would be a very moderate response. It would be going back to a time when everybody was treated more fairly.

As a political scientist too, who studied in Germany. My doctorate is from the Freie Universität Berlin, and I have worked in Germany and I know their higher education system quite well.

And so from a comparative view, I think we could pick up some tips from other countries and I’ll just use Germany as an example. They have a program that was established in 1972, the same turning point year for American higher education. And, they created a grant and loan program called the Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz or BAföG for short.

And they avoided some of the problems that we didn’t. For example, they kept the grant to loan ratio set on each loan. So it was a half grant, half loan. The ratio could not get out of balance. They set the ratio of state to federal funding, as I recall, it was 60/40, so that couldn’t get out of balance. Now they’ve changed that since, in Germany, but that has generally worked very well. If we had done that in the United States, we would not have had these great imbalances.

We would love to have a situation now where the grants kept up at the same rate as the loans did. We would love to have a program now in which state governments were not allowed to pull their money out and rely on tuition income. So those are just two ways that we could look at how higher ed could be reformed. Now I won’t get into other more ambitious, free college ideas and so on.

I’m very sympathetic to a lot of those. You have to, however, answer the question: how do we get from here to there? And almost all of these free college ideas and so on rely on bringing the states back into a larger share of funding. And this would be through what is known as cooperative federalism.

Lately, cooperative federalism has been discussed under that name. I see some of the borrower advocate groups are holding webinars on the advantage of cooperative federalism, and sometimes, this is called “skin in the game” where the other partners, the colleges and so on, and the states, should be bearing much more of the responsibility for the debt.

You asked a really good question. How do we get from here to there? Do you see a path? I don’t see it. I don’t see a clear path. I really, I really don’t. And that’s really too bad, that we don’t get into the nitty-gritty of that. And how would we do it? There are some good ideas out there, but they seem to be pushed to the back burner, because the political rhetoric is so inflamed.

Nikki Nolan: That some of the things that I’m really curious about is I want to know, the how- I want to know what are the little pieces that get us from here to there. And then we can actually start making progress, but it feels like everything just gets so deadlocked and that’s a little bit hard.

Jon Oberg: One of the good, related questions to that is let’s suppose that we were able to cancel all student debt right away. I’m not sure that we could do that, but let’s just say we could. We would need to reform higher education finance into the future, or we would get right back in the soup again.

So there are moving parts here that have to be addressed simultaneously. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why people don’t talk about it too much because it quickly becomes very complicated and you have to have thought through a lot of factors before you make these big policy moves.

Nikki Nolan: So I’m just going to shift into how has your political science and public service background influenced your take on the student loan lenders?

Jon Oberg: Well, I guess it’s clear that you know, I view myself as a political scientist and a public servant. When you go into public service, you’re often required to take an oath of office. I certainly did when I was in state government. I was chief fiscal officer of the state of Nebraska 40 some years ago. And of course, I had to take an oath. I also had to be bonded of course, because I was responsible for all the public finance, accounting, and budgeting and the signing of warrants and all that. When you do that, you take those oaths seriously, so that you will enforce the laws of the state.

And at the federal level, when you take an oath of office, as I did when I became a civil servant at the US Department of Education, that you will abide by and that you will enforce the laws of the country. And so that influenced me a great deal that when I saw untoward if not illegal and fraudulent activities at the department. I didn’t feel as if I had much of a choice, having taken the oath to enforce the laws of the United States, but to raise some red flags and say, you can’t do this.

And this is illegal. It’s waste, it’s fraud, it’s abuse, it’s mismanagement. It’s all of the above. So, those were just things in my background. And then my political science background also made me very curious. I mean, this is my field, to understand the relationships among agencies and among interest groups and among lobbyists, and how government works — iron triangles and revolving doors and how they fit in.

So, I had a natural curiosity too, to pursue these things and say, okay, I’m going to say, no, you can’t do this and just see what happens.

Nikki Nolan: What is an iron triangle and a revolving door?

Jon Oberg: Iron triangles matter in political science and other disciplines that study them. If you are an interest group, with an agenda before the federal government or state anywhere, what you want to do is to get your people or like-minded people into three key positions. One of course you control, and that is your association’s offices.

You get some people then in the legislative offices that control the legislation that you want to influence. You get your own people in there, to write the legislation and then you get the people in the executive agency itself. Particularly if you can get them high up, then you control a whole triangle. And you can have your way, getting your policies adopted through the different branches and implemented. So that is what you want to achieve.

The revolving door then is an expression that is often used to show how people move from industry into congressional committees and into executive branches.

I have been in the revolving door and one of the things that separates me a little bit from a lot of your other guests is that I have seen all this from the inside. Having participated in it, having been in the room, knowing how it all works. So, that’s what iron triangles are, and revolving doors.

Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for explaining that. I would love to step back and ask, what challenges did you encounter as you started to uncover some of those suspicious transactions between student loan providers and the federal government?

Jon Oberg: I was met immediately with a challenge from my boss, who was the Assistant Secretary for research. I was working in the research office at the Institute for Education Sciences. I wrote him an email and described what I thought was going on. And I said, this is illegal and it’s got to stop. The response that came back to me was stop it, it’s not your job to look into these things. And I would say, however, that when I was still in the department I had great support within the department because many people would say, yes, you are on the right track. Don’t stop. Keep asking these questions. We are not able to do this ourselves, but we know what is going on, and keep it up. I would sometimes say, well, why don’t you join me? And those who know the government, and how it works, wouldn’t be surprised at the answer that I got back. Sometimes literally that, I would help, but I’ve got to put food on the table. I can’t risk my job. They said you do it, Jon Oberg, because you are within a couple years of retirement, you already are well-known. Your reputation is already safe. You’re known on the Hill; you’re known in the department and so on. It’s not a lot of risk for you to start raising these issues.

So, yes, I had immediate challenges, mostly from the political higher-ups who’ve said, oh no, don’t look at this. Don’t look at this. There’s nothing here for you to see.

After I retired in 2005, I did pursue these questions on my own. When I was in the department, I always, I was always careful to clear anything I did through the Office of Ethics, so that there was nothing that I was doing that I’m not allowed to look into these things as a civil servant in the department. Can I do it on my own?

And the answer was, yes, you can. Can I communicate with the Congress and the congressional staffs or with GAO or with any other such organization? The answer was, yes. So after I retired, I began to ask the Congress to get information out of the Department of Education. Congressional offices asked to give it to them and they would send it to my home and I would massage it on my computer to do analyses as to the dimensions of the false claims.

And, in 2007, I had sufficient evidence of the false claims in order to file a suit against nine student loan lenders. And I did have success with that. We had settlements in seven of the nine cases. And I suppose a rough count would be about 70 million dollars of the false claims were returned back to the Treasury. And this also had a big influence because when my suit — it was under seal at the Department of Justice for two years — but when it became unsealed in 2009, there was quite a stir about, oh, what is going on here? And within six months, Congress, in 2010, ended the bank-based loan program.

I will not say that it was due to the revelations in our lawsuit wholly, but it certainly contributed, to say these lenders were going after actually billions. The GAO estimated the total amount, had they succeeded, in the billions of dollars — with a B. There’s many other reasons why the program was killed, but that I think that was one of the successes of the litigation.

In the next 11 years, I went on and on and on and on with those lawsuits and we had quite a success. Eventually by 2017, all the way to the US Supreme Court, where we challenged one of the lenders on their claim of sovereign immunity.

One of the things that this lender, PHEAA/FedLoan, your listeners know about FedLoan very well. Many of them do. The outfit that ran the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program into the ground. And we succeeded in stripping them of their sovereign immunity. They had claimed that no borrower could sue because they had sovereign immunity. They were an arm of the state of Pennsylvania and therefore they were immune from suit.

No state attorney general, where some of our best consumer protection laws are, could sue because PHEAA claimed to be an arm of the state and they had won many of those cases.

I had a very good legal team behind me. And that was one of the hurdles we had to climb. But we did. We got the Fourth Circuit to agree with us that this huge loan lender, loan servicer was not beyond the reach of consumer protection law.

And, I would say, as you know, FedLoan (that is, PHEAA, also known as AES), has subsequently, under pressure because it’s done such a bad job, is leaving the field. It will no longer be a federal loan servicer. Now it’s very difficult to transition to other servicers. It is very difficult, that has not been done. And we shouldn’t underestimate, but at least we were certainly gratified that there’s pretty much a straight line from challenging PHEAA through lawsuits, all the way to their departure, which has been very gratifying.

Now there are also many shortcomings or even failures in our litigation. As I mentioned, we only got about $70 million back in settlements. My estimate of the amounts that were not repaid would probably be multiples of that. I think probably, up to a billion dollars was illegally claimed and that’s not even 10 cents on the dollar. Where we settled with a lot of the lenders, we would only sometimes get 15 or 20 cents back on the dollar.

Now why this is bad is, what kind of a lesson does it teach? It taught the lenders that actually, there’s no downside to making false claims and acting illegally. If you get caught and I didn’t catch them all, I caught many of them, but if you get caught, you may have to pay some of it back, but that’s a cost of doing business. Right?

And so the wrong lessons were learned. I think one of the worst decisions ever was Secretary Margaret Spellings’, when she made the determination that indeed the claims were illegal, but no one had to pay anything back. That was in 2007. What we see then is the lenders, particularly Fed Loan, servicing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, say, oh, the Department of Education really has no teeth. Don’t worry. You can do as you please.

And they ran that program — how they got the contract is a long story — they ran that program into the ground. And one good thing that has happened — there are many good things that have happened in 2021. But one of the good things that has happened is that the Biden Administration has taken that on and it’s undergoing substantial reform and the people who were promised a cancellation are going to get it.

Nikki Nolan: How has your empirical research impacted your ability to advocate on behalf of the students, families, and taxpayers?

Jon Oberg: As I’ve said, I’m a political scientist, a behavioral scientist, a person who looks at empirical data in order to evaluate whether or not programs are working, whether they’re working as intended. One of the disappointments that I’ve had is that although a lot of my litigation work is well known and appreciated in many quarters — in some quarters it certainly has not been appreciated, in many quarters it is. A lot of my other work I think was more important and I’m still looking for people to understand what that was about. In 1997, I published a work about student aid fungibility in two competing versions of federalism in which I identified that we were on the wrong track, in how we were using our programs. And that is, you know, a quarter-century ago. That was based on empirical research.

It has been cited in other scholarship, but not a whole lot. In 2002, when I was in the research office at the Department of Education, the Institute of Education Sciences, I did a paper that looked at the data from the National Center for Education Statistics on the distribution of loans by demographic categories.

And I came up with startling conclusions and tried to circulate them, within the research community. One was that people were taking out private loans when they still had federal loans, and better terms. I did get some traction on that. The word went out into the higher education community, among the financial aid people, that they should really not load students’ financial aid packages up with private loans before they exhausted loans with better terms, especially the low income.

Another finding in the paper was whether Pell Grants went up or went down, borrowing went up. This challenged the conventional wisdom that, oh, the loan problem wouldn’t be there if the grants had kept up. This confirmed my earlier work, about the fungibility of Pell Grants and revealed how institutions use financial aid packaging in order to move money around so as to benefit what the institution thinks its needs are, rather than the needs as spelled out in the federal legislation. I found that in fact, the money was shifted around in financial aid packages to the great disadvantage — and this was not a surprise to me — of the black low income.

The other demographic categories were not so adversely affected. And I wrote that up as a working paper and circulated it within the Department of Education. And it was read in several think tanks as well. I have written something on this. I do have a blog and a lot of the things I say here are available on the blog, but I do remember one reviewer, a prominent person in higher education think tanks, reading the paper and said, well, yes I agree with everything that is said in this paper, including the methodology and the conclusions, but we cannot say it outside of this room.

And so it was a lot of the research that I have done has not been well-received because, and you can see why, because, this was going against the grain of the institutional interests. They had their own priorities. And as many of your other people on your podcasts, I’ve said, everything just seems to be loaded up on the family and on the borrower, with no breaks whatsoever. No consumer protections. That’s a long-winded answer to how, you know, empirical research can inform policy. And that’s been a lot of our work in political science.

Nikki Nolan: We’re actually getting kind of close to the end. I want to shift into, you have an event coming up on January 13th, which is today. and I want to know how you got involved with the Scared to Debt documentary series. And can you tell me a little bit about that event?

Jon Oberg: Yes, happy to. How I got involved, I don’t really remember. Mike Camoin, the filmmaker, in New York contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in doing an interview and so on. And I said, yes. I’ve been involved ever since, including in some of their panel discussions. Their film has been shown to approbation around the country and it’s going to be a second installment that is going to be shown again. And then there’s going to be a panel discussion and I’m participating in that panel. That will be moderated by Professor Shermer, a very knowledgeable person. Jonathan Glater, who used to write for the New York Times and who used to call me for information at the Department of Education from time to time, will be a panelist as well. He is now on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as some other people on the panel.

Nikki Nolan: I’m excited and I’ll post the link and I’ll be sharing it out. So we’ve come to the end. Is there anything else that you would like to promote before we come to an end? It’s been lovely talking with you.

Jon Oberg: Well, yes, I would say if it hasn’t been clear, I would certainly like to see more attention paid in the borrower advocate community to flushing out the complicity of the government itself and how that happened. If there’s any way that I can assist the borrower advocate community, speaking as a person who has decades of experience on the inside, I would be happy to do that.

And I would like to draw your listeners’ attention if anybody’s interested in it and I think probably a lot of people are that, in addition to The Debt Trap and the Indentured Students books, there’s a wonderful book by Dan Moldea.

It is titled Money, Politics and Corruption in US Higher Education. And I was happy to participate in that. He interviewed me at great length, as well as people who were on the inside in for-profit higher education who tried to blow the whistle, as well as a long discourse by David Halperin, who’s been very active in this too. And I can’t recommend that book highly enough. There’s a great deal of information there.

I would also say that within the past couple of weeks, I have received from my lawyers the release of documents that we obtained through discovery in 11 years of lawsuits. A lot of it has been redacted, a lot of the great stuff isn’t there, but I have only gone through two of sixteen boxes. I would be happy to share them with any people who are policy analysts or historians or others who would like to go through the materials and to see what the emails were going back and forth.

Especially in the time when the Department of Education was so complicit in setting up these predatory systems. I have those papers and I, from time to time, blog. I put the findings on the blog. If people are interested in that, my blog is Three Capitals, my name is Jon Oberg; you Google that and you can see my writings on it.

Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here today. This was really illuminating.

Jon Oberg: Well, thank you for having me on and, I’ll be interested in who your future guests are. You’ve got a great podcast. Thank you.

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Matter of Life and Death is produced by Emma Klauber and me, Nikki Nolan. Emma also writes the information and transcript about each episode. A special thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music for this podcast.

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