It took the Obama administration just a few months after taking office in 2009 to start looking into the looming scandal of for-profit higher education: Businesses, of both the strip mall and the Wall Street variety, were using deceptive and predatory practices to lure veterans and low-income students into poor quality college programs, in order to cash billions in federal grant and loan checks. But it took that administration almost eight years to take steps — through regulations and enforcement actions — to address the problem seriously.
Then, before reforms could be sustained, our country in 2016 made the awful mistake of choosing as its new president a career con man whose scams included his own predatory, unaccredited real estate school, Trump University. Trump hired education secretary Betsy DeVos, who declared it was the students, not the for-profit college executives, who were the con artists. DeVos hired a gang of former predatory school executives to gut the enforcement effort and reduce the Obama regulations to rubble.
As a candidate, Joe Biden promised to end aid to for-profit schools that are not delivering for students. But so far his administration is not keeping that promise, and blatant scam operations remain in the federal aid program. This day, more Americans will be tricked by predatory companies into enrolling in overpriced college programs that will ruin their financial futures.
The Education Department’s Tradition of Coddling Schools
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