Congress invited predatory for-profit colleges to defraud military veterans when it wrote a loophole into the rules governing federal education aid. The loophole, added to the Higher Education Act in 1998, encouraged the schools to take the education aid of Americans who had served the country while giving them valueless degrees — or no degrees at all — in return.

A bipartisan bill pending in the Senate would close this loophole. But Congress has a lot more to do if it intends to curb these fly-by-night schools — for instance, by forcing the Department of Veterans Affairs to use the authority it already has to stop education fraud.

Congress amended the Higher Education Act two decades ago with what has become known as the 90/10 rule. The rule requires for-profit schools to get at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than federal student aid. This common-sense effort was intended to prevent the federal aid program from becoming the sole revenue source of inferior schools that could not attract private support. But Congress undermined the rule by allowing for-profit schools to essentially count some federal aid — including G.I. education benefits and Department of Defense tuition assistance — as privately raised.

Not long after World War II, sham schools sprang up to cheat veterans of their G.I. Bill benefits, with fake courses, false attendance records and the like. One federal report published during the 1950s concluded that hundreds of millions of dollars had been “frittered away on worthless training.” Another 1950s report estimated that of the more than 1.6 million veterans who had attended for-profit schools, only one in five had completed the course of study.