Last year, congressional Republicans finally accepted that it was really dumb for the government to keep providing billions of taxpayer dollars to send students to college programs that on average leave graduates worse off than when they start. After fifteen years of opposing the Obama-Biden gainful employment rule, which would have cut off federal aid to many such programs, Republicans included in their Big Beautiful Bill a provision, renamed “Do No Harm,” that used a similar approach. The first-term Trump administration had cancelled the gainful employment rule, but, in an encouraging move, Trump II went along with the new provision.
In January, the administration, tasked with creating regulations to implement the “do no harm” law, pushed and even threatened negotiators representing various education stakeholders to agree to a consensus rule that falls short of adequate protection in many respects, but at least extends the law’s coverage to some shorter-term, non-degree programs that the Beautiful Bill had failed to reach.
The new rule will penalize some of the worst programs, many of them in the for-profit sector, but it will leave many poor value programs in business. Still, it could have an impact if it were part of a broader administration effort, led by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Under Secretary Nicholas Kent, to protect students and taxpayers by aggressively investigating allegations of deceptive and predatory college conduct and holding violators accountable.
The Department in the past year has implemented a few other positive initiatives, such as warnings on federal financial aid applications about schools with low earnings levels for graduates.
But unfortunately, other evidence indicates that this administration is actually weakening efforts to curb predatory college abuses. The lack of action is sending a signal to bad-behaving colleges that if they abuse more students, the federal government, at least, may not do much about it.
That’s a real problem, which will have bad consequences. Despite the well-publicized collapse over the past decade of some of the worst predatory college chains, including Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech, many terrible schools, with recent incidents of deceptive conduct, remain very much in business, still enrolling thousands of students, still getting billions from taxpayers. They include giant chain operations Perdoceo Education Corp., Covista, Grand Canyon, International Education Corp., and the University of Phoenix.
When I had an opportunity recently to alert Under Secretary Kent in person to these ongoing abusers and urge him to ramp up investigations and accountability for deceptive practices, he responded that the Department had limited resources, and he cited other enforcement priorities — civil rights and campus security — as critical.
Of course, the limited resources are to a substantial degree the result of the Trump effort to fire thousands of Department of Education staffers and, eventually, to abolish the Department altogether.
Moreover, for this administration, civil rights in higher education has mostly meant aiding white people who object to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; curbing protests critical of Israel; and persecuting transgender students. And avowed support for campus safety has not prevented this administration from undermining efforts to protect victims of campus sexual assault.
But even if you side with the administration on those issues, pursuing such efforts should not be an excuse for ignoring that billions of taxpayers dollars are still going to fraudulent schools that ruin the lives of American students — veterans, single parents, rural residents, and others seeking better lives through higher education.
One of the worst actions this Department of Education has taken was its disgraceful decision last year to cancel a $38 million dollar fine imposed on Grand Canyon University in 2023 after a meticulous investigation by Department investigators documented that Grand Canyon had lied to more than 7,500 doctoral students about the costs of their programs. A Department spokesperson last May justified the decision to let Grand Canyon off the hook by repeating the school’s phony claim that the Department under Joe Biden had pursued Grand Canyon because it styles itself as Christian: “Unlike the previous Administration,” Ellen Keast said, “we will not persecute and prosecute colleges and universities based on their religious affiliation.”
Beyond the shameful decision to protect Grand Canyon, rather than its students, the Department is implementing broader rule changes that help predatory schools.
In January the Department cancelled a Biden-era reform that required all for-profit college owners to put their signatures on agreements with the Department, accepting personal liability for potential abuses in order to keep access to student aid dollars. That requirement was an important deterrent to predatory behavior. Now it’s gone, demoted to an optional measure that this Department is unlikely to utilize much.
Kent is also aggressively pushing to have the Department swiftly recognize new accrediting agencies, some with ties to lax accreditation practices or right wing culture attacks, as gatekeepers for federal aid, blithely dismissing concerns that a rushed process might lower quality and integrity standards.
The administration’s trashing of college accountability efforts may be understood in part as a reprise of a striking feature of the Trump I administration: the placement in key higher education roles of people tied to the for-profit college industry. Trump II looks just as bad, if not worse, than Trump I in that regard.
Nicholas Kent was once an executive of Maryland-based Education Affiliates (EA), which ran into law enforcement problems for deceptive practices, and was later a top lobbyist for the for-profit colleges’ main trade association, CECU.
Marc Rowan, the billionaire prime mover beyond a series of letters from the White House threatening colleges if they don’t adopt the administration’s right-wing priorities, runs Apollo Global Management, the private equity owner of the University of Phoenix, a school that has repeatedly faced law enforcement actions for predatory deceptions.
Robert Eitel, appointed by McMahon to serve on NACIQI, the Department’s advisory panel overseeing accreditors, was a top executive for two of the worst predatory college operations, now-demised Bridgepoint Education (later called Zovio) and still-going Perdoceo (then called Career Education Corp.), which last year generously donated $50,000, most of it derived from our tax dollars, to Trump’s inaugural committee.
Trump’s Pentagon warlord, Pete Hegseth, while he was a Trump-favored Fox TV host, was also a paid shill for for-profit schools, when they were seeking to get Trump, in his first term, to block legislation, supported by leading veterans groups, aimed at protecting military service members and veterans from deceptive schools.
And Trump himself, you will remember, owned unaccredited Trump University, which in 2016 paid $25 million to settle claims by students and state attorneys general of deceptive practices. Florida’s attorney general dropped her own office’s investigation of Trump University in 2013, soon after Trump’s charitable foundation gave a political committee supporting her an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution. That attorney general was, of course, the current U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi.