For investors, it was an impressive story: Bridgepoint Education used seed money from Warburg Pincus in 2005 to buy a struggling religious college with 300 students in Clinton, Iowa, and turned it into an online behemoth with 78,000 students and $216 million in profits last year.

But the saga of Bridgepoint’s Ashford University, retold at a hearing on Thursday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was instead presented as a case study in how a for-profit higher education company can put profits ahead of education  and how poorly the accreditors are keeping up with the rapidly expanding industry.

Using data from federal filings and documents provided by Bridgepoint, Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the committee, described an institution that gets 86 percent of its revenues directly from the federal government, but sees the vast majority of its students drop out, burdened with student-loan debt. Of the students who enrolled in 2008-9, for example, 84 percent in the associate degree programs were gone by September 2010 (63 percent had left the bachelor’s programs).

Bridgepoint employs 1,703 recruiters, the senator said, but only one employee is charged with job placement.