President Donald Trump’s culture of corruption is pervasive: He has put lobbyists in charge of regulating the industries they previously worked for and perverted the legislative process to help wealthy donors at the expense of everyone else. One of the most concerning examples of this corruption is the Trump administration’s cozy relationship with predatory for-profit colleges. Their close relationship has negative consequences for millions of Americans, including low graduation rates, less valuable credentials, and higher tuition and student debt costs.
Trump and his administration are currently propping up for-profit institutions, where students are four times more likely to default on their loans compared with their counterparts in less expensive community colleges. Eighty-eight percent of borrowers who graduated from for-profit colleges did so with student loan debt—a higher rate than that of both public and private nonprofit colleges.
While not all for-profit institutions are bad actors, the sector has been rife with predatory and fraudulent practices that make it easier for unscrupulous education corporations to take advantage of students. Predatory for-profits tend to go after potential students who are disadvantaged or have less economic security such as people of color, single parents, and older students. The institutions continue to survive using campaign donations and high-placed political allies to game the education system at the expense of the average student.