Doctoral dissertations aside, some conservatives are puzzled to learn of the prior Republican crackdowns on poorly performing and predatory for-profit colleges. Why would conservatives support laws and regulations that impose government-mandated accountability on for-profit colleges, instead of letting the invisible hand of the free market ferret out the institutions that thrive or fail?

The answer is simple. Far from being free-market paragons, accredited for-profit schools typically depend on federal student-aid programs for 75 percent or more of their revenues. (Trump University was an unaccredited for-profit school and thus ineligible for federal aid). Conservatives have long asserted the need to regulate for-profit colleges because they have long maintained that schools which depend heavily on federal aid ought to be held accountable for their use of taxpayer dollars.

President Eisenhower was the first GOP president to place restrictions on federal aid to for-profit schools. The landmark GI Bill of Rights of 1944 benefitted millions of veterans. But in the years before Eisenhower took office, the law also propelled a proliferation of shoddy for-profit schools intent on securing their shares of the new federal largesse for educating and training World War II veterans.

In the five years after FDR signed the GI Bill, the number of for-profit schools in the U.S. tripled to nearly 5,650 schools. More veterans actually used their educational benefits to attend for-profit schools rather than enroll in four-year colleges and universities. As for-profit schools mushroomed, recruiting abuses, misleading school ads, false job-placement claims, and training of veterans in fields with no job openings proliferated too.

A slew of investigative reports appeared with headlines like “Are We Making a Bum out of GI Joe?” and “How Many Wrongs Make a GI Bill of Rights?” In May 1948, Collier’s reported that the federal government was paying to have GI's take courses at for-profit schools to become ballroom dancers, amateur piccolo players, and chicken sexers—the latter being a course that taught trainees how to distinguish male chicks from females. The federal government, Collier’s concluded, had “squandered at least a half billion dollars supporting what in many instances is the greatest boondoggle of all time.”

After the Korean War ended in July 1953, the issue of how to provide educational benefits and pensions to those serving in peacetime took on new urgency. President Eisenhower flatly opposed extending educational benefits to peacetime soldiers and appointed the famed general Omar Bradley to head a presidential commission to study the issue.

The 1956 Bradley Commission report seconded Eisenhower’s opposition to giving peacetime soldiers educational benefits and concluded that “much of the training in profit schools was of poor quality.” The report noted that there was “no information on the number of veterans graduated from profit schools who were actually placed in jobs for which they were trained, but it was estimated in January 1951 that of the 1,677,000 veterans who attended profit schools, only 20 percent completed their courses.”