John Oliver has a knack for exposing industries that prey on vulnerable Americans under the guise of helping them get their lives on back on track. In August he took the payday loan industry to task, and last night he educated viewers on the deplorable tactics of for-profit schools such as the University of Phoenix and ITT Tech. You know the ones. You've seen the commercials.

It's no secret that student debt is getting worse and worse. As state funding is cut, universities are forced to raise tuition to compensate, passing the financial burden onto students. Seven out of 10 students graduate with debt, and those who owe are currently on the books for over one trillion dollars, a figure that, as Oliver points out, is larger than what Americans owe for both credit card and auto loan debt.

What many people don't realize, though, is how large of a role for-profit universities play in this astronomical number, which has tripled over the past 10 years. A third of student loans come from for-profit universities despite their accounting for only 13 percent of the nation's students, and the reason for this is that these publicly traded institutions value taking the money of vulnerable Americans far more than they care about actually educating them.

Not only are for-profit universities more expensive than most of us realize — five to six times the cost of community college and up to twice as expensive as four-year state schools — the shameless ways in which they recruit students will make your skin crawl. For one, they spend twice as much on marketing as they do on teacher salaries, which can't really be that surprising considering how Devry and ITT Tech commercials were just as big a part of the '90s as Pop Rocks and Saved by the Bell. Even worse, they train recruiters to attack potential enrollees' "pain points" such as, say, not wanting to work at McDonald's. Even worse is the way they go after veterans, who are desirable because their G.I. Bill money can go into the 10 percent of for-profit universities' funding that isn't required to come from federal loans. Oliver points out one instance in which a recruiter for Ashford College went to a Wounded Warrior program to sign up veteran brain-damaged marines who could barely understand which classes they were registering for. "I'll say this for for-profit schools," says Oliver. "They've just given us a first-class education in the depths of human depravity."

But Oliver brings the segment home by emphasizing that even if for-profit schools weren't part of the equation, student debt would still be a serious issue in America. They're a big part of the problem, but this is a systemic issue. "Our leaders have decided that while education is incredibly important, it's not important enough to actually pay for," Oliver says.

His advice to college students about to graduate with a number hanging over their head? Go out there and live it up while you can, as these may in fact be the happiest days of your life. Watch below:

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