Julian Schmoke was the villain this week. Outrage erupted following the news that the Trump administration has picked the former for-profit college dean to run a division of the Education Department—and not just any division, but the Student Aid Enforcement Unit, which polices fraud by higher education institutions. For-profits are notorious for fraud, and between 2007 and 2012 Schmoke worked in various academic positions at one of the schools most responsible for that notoriety: DeVry University. Last year, DeVry settled for $100 million in a federal lawsuit alleging that it engaged in false advertising, spreading overblown claims about the success of its graduates. So it’s no wonder that news of Schmoke’s appointment was met with alarm. “This is like the fox guarding the hen house,” Senator Dick Durbin tweeted. Other Senate Democrats piled on, in what appeared to be coordinated hen house messaging. Senator Chris Murphy chose an even more evocative metaphor:

This is a joke, right? Basically akin to nominating influenza to be the Surgeon General. https://t.co/dxyznIfgZz — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) August 30, 2017

As The Atlantic’s Alia Wong was quick to point out, “Schmoke himself has not been accused of any wrongdoing, nor implicated in those alleged practices by any public report.” But neither does he have any experience in enforcement. He’ll be running this unit even though his former employer, in Wong’s words, “engaged in some of the very abuses the unit is charged with eliminating.” Worse, Schmoke’s position is being downgraded to focus on maintaining school “compliance” as opposed to pursuing the more aggressive and investigatory enforcement role carved out for the unit when it was created by the Obama administration last year.

“They’re effectively eliminating the enforcement unit without having to announce that’s what they’re doing,” said Maggie Thompson, executive director of Generation Progress, the youth engagement arm of the Center for American Progress. Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who served as a deputy undersecretary of education early in the Obama administration, agreed. “Essentially the enforcement division is out of business,” he told me.

All of this is part of a pattern under President Donald Trump, who famously ran his own for-profit school scam, Trump University. As Politico reported, “For-profit colleges are winning their battle to dismantle Obama-era restrictions as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rolls back regulations, grants reprieves to schools at risk of losing their federal funding and stocks her agency with industry insiders.” That’s despite the industry’s history of exploiting low-income students and veterans, leaving graduates saddled with debt, and failing to make good on promises of job prospects. But while DeVos’s actions may be trademark Trumpism, they are also continuous with a long history of fleecing that has been going on since World War II.







No one was more dismayed this week than the Obama veterans who worked to crack down on for-profits, who described the rollbacks as one step forward, two steps back. Clare McCann, who spent two years at the Education Department and is now the deputy director for federal higher education policy at New America, didn’t mince words. “It sucks,” she told me. “It’s hard to watch a lot of this stuff thrown out in a really reflexive way, and it’s hard to think about all the promises we made to students about how we were going to improve their lives.”