Huffington Post has a startling expose of how a particular for-profit college paid employers to hire its graduates, but only temporarily.

This was done to pad its job-placement numbers.

This will please federal regulators and enable the college to say that its graduates are easily hired.

What they don’t admit: They are soon laid off.

Here is the story:

Eric Parms enrolled at an Everest College campus in the suburbs of Atlanta in large part because recruiters promised he would have little trouble securing a job.

He’d seen the for-profit school’s television commercials touting its sterling rates of job placement, and he’d heard the pledges of admissions staff who assured him that the campus career services office would help him find work in his field.

But after completing a nine-month program in heating and air conditioning repair in the summer of 2011 — graduating with straight As and $17,000 in student debt — Parms began to doubt the veracity of the pitch. Career services set him up with a temporary contract position laying electrical wires. After less than two months, he and several other Everest graduates also working on the job were laid off and denied further help finding work, he says.

It turns out that the college paid the contractor $2,000 to hire its graduates for at least 30 days.

Why would the college pay a contractor to hire its graduates?

Everest College’s $2,000-per-head “subsidy” program in Decatur, Ga., stands among an array of tactics used for years by the institution’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges Inc., to systematically pad its job placement rates, according to a review of contract documents and lawsuits and interviews with former employees.

More than a marketing tool to lure new students, solid job placement rates allow the company to satisfy the accrediting bodies that oversee its nearly 100 U.S. campuses, while enabling Corinthian to tap federal student aid coffers — a source of funding that has reached nearly $10 billion over the last decade, comprising more than 80 percent of the company’s total revenue.

When the Obama administration begins its public ratings of colleges, imagine the games that will be played to burnish the data that affects a college or university’s ability to get federal student aid.

Note: It is called Campbell’s Law.