If what’s past is prologue, then it appears that we are seeing the beginning of yet another boom cycle for for-profit colleges at the cost of students and taxpayers. While the recently unveiled House Republican higher education bill would also reopen the floodgates to fraud, waste and abuse, the Department of Education recently held hearings as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle two key regulations designed to ensure that unscrupulous colleges don’t prey on students and the federal student aid system. This campaign aims to reverse Obama administration efforts to guard against very poorly performing career college programs and misleading business practices that the for-profit sector challenged vehemently on Capitol Hill and in the courts. It’s a disturbing example of the weakening bipartisan commitment to accountability in this sector.
The need for effective oversight of for-profit colleges is well documented and longstanding. Abuse in this sector and efforts to curtail it have a 70-year history – both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower took action to crack down on for-profit colleges that were defrauding returning veterans trying to use the GI Bill to get ahead. The administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush also strengthened oversight, especially through the rewrite of the federal law in 1992 after a bipartisan Congressional investigation, but later administrations weakened it, setting the stage for rapid growth in for-profit enrollment in the late 1990s and 2000s, peaking during the Great Recession.