According to the Hill, Betsy DeVos will do a trial run of debit cards for higher education.
This will enable the Department of Education to track where the money is going.
”The Education Department will be launching a pilot program to place financial aid dollars on debit cards — a move that would allow officials to track how that federal aid is being spent.
“The program, which was announced in a notice posted in the federal register this month and reported on by BuzzFeed News, would begin next month and include up to 100,000 students.
“Currently, institutions receive the federal dollars, applying them to students’ tuition bills and then provide students with the excess funds. Under the program, students would receive the funds on the debit cards.
“The draft proposal for the pilot program says it would “enable more informed customer decision-making that helps Customers understand the financial implications of their student loan debt” and provide students “real-time, continuous counseling” through a mobile app.”
Two things to note here:
1. Students are described as “customers.”
2. The debit card could be a trial run for K-12.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another brick in the wall for Big Betsy to control every aspect of who she thinks of as her lowly serfs, the people.
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If it’s a debit card, what’s to stop the student “customers” from simply taking all the remaining money out at one time in cash? Then Betsy’s little plan to track and monitor them with “real-time, continuous counseling” would be moot. This is exactly the kind of dodge that college students have always been good at figuring out, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it started to happen very quickly.
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Like so many other members of Trump’s cabinet, DeVos is a walking, talking conflict of interest. We need an overhaul of our ethics rules. There should be more more assuming that anyone running for office is ethical. We need very explicit rules that will prohibit conflicts of interest. We should forget the concept of a “gentleman’s agreement” as we have been invaded by the capitalist, barbarian horde.
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Correction: There should be no more assuming that anyone running for office is ethical.
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Students will get — sorry — “customers” will get “‘real-time, continuous counseling’ through a mobile app.” That’s a string of some very interesting words.
Counseling = financial counseling = marketing.
Real-time = computer algorithms
Continuous = annoyingly intrusive
And there it is again: we have another winner; it’s the monster with which all public schools are familiar; it’s more data collection! Big Data! That’s right, all you little people. You get to have your life analyzed through purchase tracking and app use tracking so you can be profiled by yet more computer algorithms which will lead to a lifetime of more annoyingly intrusive — sorry — “continuous”, computerized — sorry — “real-time”, marketing — sorry — “counseling”. Through mobile apps.
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How unsurprising that another layer of bureaucracy is being proposed by the anti-gov’t right wing, one that will doubtless benefit their allies and donors in the financial industry. If the funds are truly to be applied to tuition and other actual educational expenses, why burden students with more administrative nonsense when they are supposed to be focused on their studies? Especially when there are structures in place that do the payments already, and I’ve heard of no issues in tracking and/or auditing the use of those funds. Big data and marketing indeed. Will the use of the cards be limited to actual educational expenses? The rethuglicans sure seem to love parallel, redundant beauracracies.
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What’s the overdraft fee? Kids overdraft all the time…
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Of course, they won’t be able to use it for birth control or anything else that Betsy considers “evil”.
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HOLY C–P!
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I have commented on a similar vision for access to and distribution of money from education savings accounts, with Amazon as the general model for serving customers. The online market-place will offer a large menu of “qualified” providers of education products and services. Customer ratings enter into the definition of “qualified” products and services. The prototype is being piloted this year in Florida students who qualify for either of two “scholarship” programs.
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Let us guess which banks are going to issue the debit cards.
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Russian banks
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