Some Relief, and Fairness, to For-Profit Colleges, Thanks to DeVos

The Obama Administration, true to its statist, Leftist agenda, spend years waging an assault on private sector colleges and universities. The Trump Education Department, under the leadership of Betsy DeVos, is taking a different approach, giving some relief to these schools.

In If Betsy DeVos and her unscrupulous profiteers won't do their jobs, N.J. will, the New Jersey Star-Ledger attacked Betsy DeVos for rolling back the Obama-era assault on private, especially for-profit colleges. The Star-Ledger wrote:

For-profits aren't the ones lending students money, so don't care if they can't pay back it back. They encourage people in dire straits to take out as much financial aid as possible. Then they suck up this federal loan money like sponges, leaving veterans, single parents and others who live paycheck-to-paycheck with huge debts and no degrees.

I left these comments:

All colleges “suck up” federal loan money. Why single out for-profits? The problem of the disconnect between too-high student loan debt relative to career earning potential cuts across all higher education—including public colleges, which have ridden the government’s student loan gravy train to tuition increases four times the rate of inflation over the last several decades. Anyway, education producers, private or public, should be no more responsible for students who overpay than other businesses are for someone overpaying for cars, vacations, or anything else. Don’t the consumers of education have any responsibility for controlling their spending?

For-profit colleges sell education, like all colleges. They cater mostly to mature working poor and middle class students who are trying to improve their skills through education while juggling jobs, families, and other adult responsibilities. These schools largely succeed despite unfair competition from public colleges, which have the benefit of taxpayer subsidies that enable them to keep tuitions artificially low. True, there are some unscrupulous actors, as in every field. But the Left, due to its irrational hatred of profit-seeking and private enterprise, is waging a war against private colleges, hoping eventually to eliminate them and gain increasing government control over higher education. Kudos to DeVos for rolling back the Left’s discriminatory assault on private colleges.

The government should not be involved in lending money to students at all. But so long as it is, and so long as it regulates these loans, it is morally obligated—and should be legally obligated—to treat all students and all educational institutions equally under the law.

Related Reading:

The Government’s Assault on Private-Sector Colleges and Universities

The Government’s Renewed Assault on Private-Sector Colleges.

Stamato's For-Profit College Hatchet Job

Obama’s “Free” Community College Scheme