“The Department of Education is turning a blind eye to widespread fraud and abuse at for-profit schools that left thousands of students in debt without a meaningful education,” said Suzanne Martindale, a senior attorney for Consumers Union. “Instead of helping defrauded students cancel their debts and move on with their lives, these proposed rules would shield poor-performing schools from being held accountable for their misconduct.”

Critics accused Ms. DeVos of stocking her department with former executives of for-profit colleges and universities to free the industry from oversight. DeVos advisers include her senior counselor, Robert S. Eitel, and Diane Auer Jones, a senior adviser on postsecondary education, both of whom worked for Career Education Corporation, a company that operates for-profit colleges, and reached a $10.25 million settlement with the New York attorney general over charges that it had inflated graduates’ job placement rates. The department’s general counsel, Carlos G. Muñiz, worked as a consultant for the company.

“With the stroke of a pen, Secretary DeVos and her team of former for-profit college executives have proposed giving fraudulent institutions de facto immunity while effectively stripping their victims of a realistic path to debt relief,” said Aaron Ament, the president of the National Student Legal Defense Network.

When Ms. DeVos halted the Obama-era rules, she declared: “Last year’s rule-making effort missed an opportunity to get it right. The result is a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools, and puts taxpayers on the hook for significant costs.” She also criticized the Obama rules as being too lenient.

In December, she reversed an Obama-era policy of granting full debt relief for students by instituting a tiered system that granted partial relief for federal loans based on whether students went on to be gainfully employed. The decision was made, in part, because the department’s inspector general found that the Obama administration lacked a sufficient infrastructure to process claims.

A California magistrate ruled last month that the program violated the federal Privacy Act because it improperly used earnings data from the Social Security Administration. In its court filings, the department said it has sought information on more than 61,000 students, and had granted 10,000 of them partial debt relief.

Last fall, Ms. DeVos began revising the Obama-era rules, convening a committee of department officials, higher education advocates and for-profit college leaders to hash out a new approach.