We in America believe in starting over — and over and over.

Take Sheri, who was a 47-year-old stay-at-home mom when I spoke with her. In her previous job as a customer support representative at a hospital, the Massachusetts mother of three spent her time paging doctors and in return made a very modest hourly wage. But in midlife, she decided to retrain in the hopes of making a better salary to help cover her kids’ college tuition. She said that she was easily lured by the promises of a for-profit college offering an advanced degree in health care management.

“They sucked me in, telling me I could study in my own time, when my kids were asleep,” Sheri told me. “They said that I didn’t have to pay money up front. It was very appealing.” That all changed when she got an injury halfway through the program and could no longer use her computer keyboard to type her papers. The school administration told her she would have to drop out and reregister. The school wouldn’t apply her credits or the money she had already spent to future course work. So she left.

When I last spoke to her, she and her family owed $16,000 in student loans.

Over the past few years, I’ve spoken to a number of middle-aged people who, like Sheri, retrained in midlife and accrued new student debt. Some started their attempt at a professional upgrade after taking a pause from the work force to have kids — a story so familiar to many of us that it could serve as an omnipresent soundtrack. One middle-aged father of four went back to school to study tech. His degree from the ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit college that is now defunct, left him $59,000 in debt and employed at close to the same earning capacity he was before he started the program.

I call the businesses propelling that promise of reinvention the “second-act industry,” and it includes for-profit universities, certificate programs and coaches getting in on the new trend — all of them helping, for a fee, people who are trying to get back into or ahead in the work force. Indeed, some of these schools were even tied to our president, like the troublesome for-profit Trump University, which separated many hard-up aspirants from their money (and was later sued and settled).