In America educational institutions have struggled with low graduation rates and the fact that graduates have failed to pay off their loans after earning degrees with “little value in the job market”.   Obama tried to strengthen consumer protections for those at for-profit colleges,  introduced a system called Scorecard that was designed to help students and parents make better  decisions about where to go to college, and allowed students to make fraud claims (viz. Trump University) if the tuition was useless.  In this case the government would help discharge the loans.  Colleges keep raising their fees, expecting the Federal government to underwrite them with federal aid. Obama resisted this.  All this annoyed the for-profit colleges.

Trump has now appointed Jerry Falwell, head of Liberty University to deregulate the educational business  and to loosen the rules for accreditation.  This is a potential disaster for education and for the students, and their parents, who commit themselves to ever more expensive education, in the expectation of getting top jobs..

Accreditors are supposed to maintain high quality in colleges, but they are paid by the educational institutions and therefore their efforts can be suspect.  It is difficult for parents and potential students to know ahead of time what they will be getting.  What so many do get is high grades but little extra knowledge, no extra critical thinking and poor teaching, and they don’t of course, know what they don’t know.  If regulations are eased or abolished there will be no way of being sure that any except the best known institutions are any good and not just money-making businesses, a type of college Jerry Falwell is well familiar with.  Apparently, only 38% of Liberty borrowers manage to pay as little as $1 on their student debt three years after leaving, and 41% of them earn less than $25,000 6 years after leaving.

The higher education industry is heading for a bust if Falwell is allowed to do what Trump wants.  No one will want to attend.  What’s the point?  Just keeping the lads and lasses off the streets?