Say this for Betsy DeVos: The secretary of education has shown an impressive commitment to rescuing her friends in the for-profit college business from pesky measures to rein in their predatory behavior. As pet projects go, it lacks the sulfurous originality of her emerging idea to let states use federal dollars to put guns in schools. But it is a scandal nonetheless. Given the choice between protecting low-income students — and, by extension, American taxpayers — and facilitating the buck-raking of a scandal-ridden industry, Ms. DeVos aggressively pursues Option B.

This summer has been a fertile period for the secretary. A couple of weeks back , her department formally introduced its plan to jettison so-called gainful employment rules. These 2014 regulations require that, to receive federal student-aid dollars, for-profit colleges — along with certain programs at nonprofit and public institutions — must maintain a reasonable debt-to-income ratio among graduates. If a program’s attendees typically rack up massive student debts and then cannot find decent jobs, the program is deemed a failure. Programs that fail in two out of three years become ineligible to receive the taxpayer-backed loans and grants with which so many students finance their schooling. The rules also require for-profit programs to make clear in their promotional materials whether or not they meet federal job-placement standards.

Ms. DeVos, delighting industry executives, promptly hit the pause button on these regulations upon assuming her post. Now the pending demise of the rules has been made official. Ms. DeVos contends that the system, put in place by President Barack Obama after bloody battles with the for-profit college industry and congressional Republicans, capriciously targets the sector. She has had far less to say about the industry’s eye-popping overrepresentation in fraud complaints. A recent review of “borrower defense claims” — requests for loan relief filed with the Education Department by students asserting they were defrauded or misled by their schools — found that almost 99 percent involved for-profit institutions.