The Obama administration has proposed a very simple "gainful employment" rule for preventing rent-seeking in the for-profit college industry. The rule is, as Kay Steiger writes, that institutions would not be eligible for federal loans if "less than 35 percent of students start paying down the principle on their loans after graduation and students’ debt ratio is either greater than 8 percent of their total income or greater than 20 percent of discretionary income." In other words, taxpayers won't be footing the bill for a useless education that leaves students with piles of debt. As Mike Elk wrote a few months ago, "Students enrolled in for-profit schools represent just 10 percent of all postsecondary students in the United States but account for 44 percent of all student-loan defaults." A bipartisan amendment to the continuing resolution guts the rule, and some "free market" Republicans in the Senate are fighting to make sure it doesn't get stripped out.
That's a pretty big deal, since as Pat Garofalo writes, for-profit schools make 90 percent of their money from the federal government. I think the government has a role in helping students from families that don't have a lot of resources get an education, but the government also can and should keep rent-seeking institutions from wasting taxpayer money providing a useless service. Even people generally opposed to government regulation should agree that if the government is going to spend taxpayer money to help people get an education, it should actually make sure that it goes to institutions that educate people rather than mire them in debt. The people who are opposing this rule, both Republicans and Democrats, are actually just defending the right of these institutions to waste your money.
The for-profit college industry is a real-life institutional version of the welfare-queen stereotype: Someone who games the system, provides absolutely nothing of any use to society at large while sucking up exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money to finance a lavish lifestyle. But it's hard to caricature an industry that makes so much money it can buy friends on both sides of the aisle. That only happens to the kind of people who get duped into bankrupting themselves while trying to get an education.