Don’t fail the students at for-profit schools in US

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to make life a lot easier for predatory for-profit colleges and a lot tougher for students lured by overblown promises of jobs that never materialize.

For years, some for-profit colleges have left devastated students in their wake — often veterans and struggling workers who waste years to obtain worthless degrees and take on enormous student debt only to face poor job prospects. The upshot? Some in the industry get rich. Students get suckered. And taxpayers get stuck holding the bag for millions of dollars in defaulted loans.

The Obama administration came down hard on the industry and spent years honing a regulation to make career programs more accountable.

What has the Trump administration done? Last week, DeVos took the first step toward dumping the rule and removing potential punishment that has forced some schools to shut down and others to clean up their acts.

The rule requires colleges with career programs to report graduates’ student debt compared with their incomes to ensure that the debt isn’t out of proportion to what they earn. Federal law mandates that schools prepare students for “gainful employment,” and students shouldn’t be forced into the poor house by enormous loans that got them nothing of value. The rule makes sense. Programs that repeatedly fail to meet the modest government standard — that a typical student’s loan payments not exceed 12% of his yearly earnings — lose their eligibility for three years for student loans and grants, the life blood for most of these programs.

Last year, when the Obama Education Department released its first set of statistics, nine out of 10 colleges, including public, private and for-profit institutions, had no failing programs.

Of the more than 800 programs that failed, most were at for-profit schools while a sprinkling were at nonprofits. One of them was Harvard University’s A.R.T. Institute, a graduate theater training program, where median student debt was $78,000 while graduates earned, on average, a meager $36,000 a year.

DeVos wants to replace the rule with information posted on the department’s college information website, College Scorecard, on the median debt and median earnings of graduates.

Sounds good, as far as it goes. The more information prospective students have, the better. But it is not a substitute for government accountability or for denying federal dollars to schools that don’t deliver the product they’re selling.

Jettisoning industry accountability comes as no surprise. Since taking over the department, DeVos has hired several former for-profit leaders for top department jobs and has modified or otherwise neutered rules and programs meant to clean up the for-profit sector.

The industry and its allies like to frame the for-profit issue as a fight waged by Democrats and the Obama White House against business. That rewrites history.

For-profit colleges caused so much damage in the 1980s that conservative icon William Bennett, President Ronald Reagan’s Education secretary, called them “an outrage perpetrated not only on the American taxpayer but, most tragically, upon some of the most disadvantaged and most vulnerable members of society.”

As long as that’s true for even some schools today, the government — whether run by Democrats or Republicans — should be on the case.