This column by Gail Collins is a Must Read.

The bad news from the U.S. Department of Education comes so frequently that it is hard to keep track of it.

DeVos is clear in her goals: roll back the federal role in protecting students and taxpayers’ money.

One egregious example: she is diluting, diminishing, removing federal efforts to rein in for-profit Colleges. In fact, she has hired former executives and lobbyists from the industry to write the regulations. Some of her many investments were in the industry, which she obviously sees as part of the future. And surely she has not forgotten Trump University, the fraud associated with the man who appointed her.

Collins writes:

“DeVos is the superrich Republican donor who once led a crusade to reform troubled Michigan public schools by turning them into truly terrible private ones. Now she’s in the Trump cabinet, and she seems to be dedicating a lot of her time to, um, lowering higher education.

“When no one was watching she hired a lot of people that come from the for-profit colleges,” complained Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who feels the additions are far more interested in protecting their old associates than in overseeing them. Murray is the top Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, otherwise known as HELP. These days it’s hard to tell whether that’s a promise of assistance or a cry of distress.

“To oversee the critical issue of fraud in higher education, DeVos picked Julian Schmoke Jr., whose former job was a dean of — yes! — a for-profit university. Specifically a school named DeVry. Last year, under fire from state prosecutors and the Federal Trade Commission, DeVry agreed to pay $100 million to students who complained that they had been misled by its recruitment pitch.

“That sort of thing is getting to be common in the darkest corners of the for-profit world. For instance, there’s a now-defunct “university” that promised to show students how to get rich quick in real estate and wound up paying $25 million to settle the case. …

“Back to the Department of Education. One of DeVos’s top advisers, Robert Eitel, is on a leave of absence from a company that operates for-profits and once paid more than $30 million to settle charges of deceiving students about the loans they were getting.

“Which is, again, even more than that real estate school, where some students claimed they were encouraged by instructors to increase the limits on their credit cards. …

“There are well over 3,000 for-profit colleges and universities in the country, everything from tiny schools that promise to set you off on a career in cosmetology to conglomerates with campuses all over the world. Some of them have names that might seem intended to be confused with somebody else’s. (Not necessarily thinking of you, Brown College, Berkeley College, Columbia Southern University or Northwestern College.)

“Experts say some for-profits are fine. However, there have been a ton of horror shows in which low-income men and women are promised a path to life-changing jobs but wind up with nothing to show except huge loan bills.”