Every year high school juniors and seniors across America make a decision about their future. After graduating they have the option to join the workforce immediately — a choice that many people make, frequently for economic reasons. Other graduates decide to take the next step in education and go to college. We decided that by going to college, and spending money most of us don’t have, that we would be rewarded by higher-paying jobs and a more fulfilling career. It’s a dream that all of us are working towards as we accumulate debt.
That made the revelations about the aggressive marketing tactics and the selling of false opportunities by for-profit colleges all the more disheartening. Schools that profit on the dreams of their students but then don’t fulfill those dreams needed to be regulated, and they were. The Obama administration created financial penalties for colleges that made these false promises to their students, many of whom had to take out college loans to afford the tuition and books.
The Trump administration decided to remove this regulation.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos claimed that the rules set out by the Obama administration would be a burden on taxpayers. But what is a real burden on the taxpayer is paying tens of thousands of dollars for an education that turns out to be worthless.
There is an argument to be made in some cases that regulations are a hindrance on business. Governmental regulations do cause businesses to work harder, and sometimes the burden placed on businesses can be too high. The case with for-profit schools, however, is not like small businesses in other sectors of the economy. Often these schools’ main supplier of revenue is the federal government itself. Since a large proportion of students attending these universities are taking out loans, the government has a much larger impact on them.
The regulations created by the Obama administration targeted schools that were not providing a suitable education for their students. The rules were not overly burdensome and only stood to benefit those who could fall prey to sham schools peddling phony degrees.
Taxpayers would have to foot the bill if a fake school could no longer run under the pressure, but who does the Trump administration think paid the bills in the first place?