Americans are smartening up and staying the hell away from school. We recently came to our senses and started avoiding law school. And now, we're avoiding fake colleges, as well. We'll make something of ourselves yet, fellow Americans!

Melissa Korn reports in the WSJ that the "For Profit College" industry—let's just call them fake colleges, in order to speak clearly and also to receive entertaining emails of protest from paid PR representatives—are now doing terribly. Which is great! Would you ever advise someone who was actually a friend of yours to go into deep debt in order to obtain a degree from "Devry" or the "University of Phoenix?" No, so we shouldn't let poor kids who don't know any better o vulnerable people just getting out of the military (prime recruiting targets) go do that, either. Some good news:

"Undergraduate new-student enrollment fell 25.6% at DeVry's namesake university in the quarter ended June 30."

"At Corinthian, which implemented changes to its recruiter compensation in April, new-student enrollment declined 21.5% in the first calendar quarter."

"Kaplan reported a 47% decline in new-student enrollment for the June quarter."

In other words, enrollment in fake colleges appears to be shrinking down to the point at which it may represent the number of students who, for various reasons, could actually get some use out of these degrees, rather than representing the maximum number of students that these schools could sucker through lying marketing ploys.

That's good. These days it's either college for your kids, or your retirement. Don't blow it.

[WSJ, photo via Shutterstock]