It is now confirmed: Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos are trashing the Obama rules created to protect students and taxpayers from scam for-profit colleges. The purpose of these rules is to determine which career training programs are actually helping students build careers, and channel taxpayer dollars to those schools, rather than to overpriced, low-quality schools that are systematically deceiving and ripping off students.
For-profit colleges have donated big money to the GOP, Trump owned one, DeVos invested in them. An executive from predatory Bridgepoint Education, Robert Eitel, now works at the Department of Education.
The for-profit college industry has relentlessly opposed the Obama rules, spending millions of our tax dollars to hire lawyers and lobbyists to try to defeat them. Now they appear to have prevailed. This is blatant corruption of policy by a predatory industry, one that has faced numerous law enforcement investigations for fraud. This is the opposite of draining the swamp. Under Trump, the swamp runs everything.
The students -- veterans, single parents, immigrants, and others -- whose financial futures have been ruined by predatory for-profit colleges are increasingly standing up for themselves, and they have strong allies in Congress and among civil rights, consumer, veterans, labor, and student organizations. If the Trump administration wants to stand with for-profit college barons who have enriched themselves with taxpayer dollars while misleading and abusing students, they will face a sustained public fight. Americans desperately need stronger options to train for careers; that is what we should be investing in, rather than supporting blatant fraud operations run by scam artists working in strip malls and on Wall Street.
This article also appears on Republic Report.