Under the Trump administration, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is on a mission to roll back Obama-era measures designed to ease the debt burden on students attending for-profit schools, and make these institutions prove their graduates emerge gainfully employed. The lucrative and predatory for-profit higher education sector — which disproportionately exploits Black students who find themselves sinking in debt and with worthless degrees — found itself in check with the safeguards put in place in the previous presidency. However, under President Donald Trump — who was sued and settled for $25 million for maintaining a fraudulent for-profit real estate school called Trump University that swindled students with exorbitant fees and false advertising — the schools themselves are being protected. President Obama instituted the regulations requiring schools to prove they provide gainful employment to their students, with the government cutting off federally guaranteed student loans to schools whose students could not afford to pay off the loans, as The New York Times reported. DeVos announced these measures, including a debt relief program for student borrowers who believed they were hoodwinked by for-profit schools who made promises upon which they could not deliver, would be eliminated. The program had forgiven at least $450 million in student loans. These safeguards to hold the industry accountable came in light of years of complaints that these previously unregulated companies used fraudulent and illegal methods to lure and take advantage of nontraditional students. While for-profit schools such as ITT Tech and Corinthian College were shut down for fraud and students were able to apply for relief under the “borrower defense” rule, now tens of thousands of students will find themselves saddled with debt, out of luck and with no recourse. A billionaire lobbyist who has championed the privatization of public education and has gutted civil rights enforcement in education, DeVos has killed the investigative team at the Department of Education that deals with fraud at for-profit colleges, and reinstated a for-profit accreditor that failed to meet federal standards. This as DeVos staffs up her team with lobbyists from the for-profit college sector, some of whom fought the Obama rules — such as Career Education Corporation — and worked for the very companies the department was investigating for widespread abuse — such as DeVry.