Rein in abuses of for-profit education institutions

A spot-on editorial in the NYT today on how the DOE needs to stand strong on regulations to rein in the abuses in for-profit higher ed:

The for-profit industry is fighting hard against even the more limited proposed rules, and it is lobbying Congress to stop them. It claims that the new federal requirements would limit educational opportunity, particularly for poor minority students who might not qualify for traditional private or public colleges. The facts, however, show that for-profit schools often hurt the poor by luring them into questionable programs that cost considerably more than comparable courses of study at community colleges.

According to federal data, graduates of two-year, for-profit career training programs average a loan debt of $23,590. By contrast, most community-college graduates owe nothing.

The Department of Education recently reported that, of the thousands of for-profit programs it analyzed, an astonishing 72 percent produced graduates who, on average, earned less than a high school dropout who worked full time. This means that the most debt-ridden students are unlikely to earn enough to ever repay their loans. While students at for-profit colleges are 13 percent of the total higher education enrollment, they account for nearly half of all student loan defaults.

The department's analysis, which covered both for-profit and nonprofit career programs, found that 98 percent of the students enrolled in the lowest-performing programs are in for-profit schools.