Aaron Ament wrote an article in the New York Times about the U.S. Department of Education’s abandonment of students who were defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges. Ament worked on these issues during the Obama administration.

“In 2016, after years of broken promises, deceptive recruiting practices and exponential growth in the for-profit college sector, things seemed to be changing for the better.

“Spurred by the creation of a unit in the Department of Education devoted to cracking down on predatory institutions, and the announcement of new protections for students, some of the biggest names in the industry voluntarily ended some of their most egregious practices or shut down, while others reached sweeping settlements with the government.

“Today, that investigative unit, which I helped create, is virtually dead. Its members have largely been assigned to other tasks by an Education Department that includes an alarming number of executives from those very same for-profit schools.

“The unit is the latest casualty of an administration that seems to think that big corporations need protection from consumers, rather than the other way around….

“In 2013, I took a job as a lawyer for the Education Department. Soon after, I started working with the California attorney general’s office to investigate fraud at Corinthian Colleges, based in Santa Ana.

“We learned the situation was worse than could be imagined at this publicly traded for-profit chain, which at the time was the beneficiary of more than $1 billion a year in federal student loans and grants.

“We heard of students recruited out of homeless shelters with false promises of jobs, and of others stashed in temporary jobs for less than a week so that the school could include them in the job placement rate it had to disclose to regulators and prospective students.

“These students would go on to amass student loan debt that their bleak job prospects would never help them repay….

“In 2013, I took a job as a lawyer for the Education Department. Soon after, I started working with the California attorney general’s office to investigate fraud at Corinthian Colleges, based in Santa Ana.

“We learned the situation was worse than could be imagined at this publicly traded for-profit chain, which at the time was the beneficiary of more than $1 billion a year in federal student loans and grants.

“We heard of students recruited out of homeless shelters with false promises of jobs, and of others stashed in temporary jobs for less than a week so that the school could include them in the job placement rate it had to disclose to regulators and prospective students.

“These students would go on to amass student loan debt that their bleak job prospects would never help them repay….

“Consider what happened at the for-profit DeVry University. Murray Hastie, an Iraq war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, was aggressively recruited by DeVry. Mr. Hastie was told that his G.I. Bill benefits would cover all of his tuition, in addition to giving him a monthly living stipend.

“However, he later learned DeVry was saddling him with more than $50,000 in student loans. When his P.T.S.D. worsened, Mr. Hastie left the school and sought treatment at a V.A. hospital. After leaving the hospital, he recounted in a forthcoming documentary, “Fail State,” he tried to enroll at his local community college, but found that all of his G.I. benefits had been exhausted….

“After Ms. DeVos took over, she hired several executives from the same for-profit institutions that the department was investigating. Former employees of Bridgepoint Education and Career Education Corporation, which both run for-profit colleges that were reportedly under investigation, are now working for her. Investigations into those colleges seem to have been dropped. A former DeVry dean supervised the very unit that is now being dismantled.

“At the same time, Secretary DeVos is also trying to bar students and state attorneys general from suing for-profit student loan servicers. And at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney has weakened the office assigned to protect students from financial abuse.

“Predatory colleges are being given a green light to return to their abusive ways. The message to millions of Americans lured by the false promises of predatory companies is clear: The Trump administration is not on your side.”