Under the Obama administration, the Education Department discouraged students from attending for-profit colleges, arguing recently<br />that the data showed “community colleges offer a better deal than comparable programs at for-profit colleges with higher price tags.”<br />The for-profit sector has about 8 percent of those enrolled in higher education, according<br />to the Education Department, but it has 15 percent of subsidized student loans.<br />In addition, Jerry L. Falwell Jr., an evangelical Christian leader who is president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.,<br />said he had been asked by Mr. Trump to lead an education task force dedicated to limiting “overreaching regulation.”<br />“The goal is to pare it back and give colleges and their accrediting agencies more leeway in governing<br />their affairs,” Mr. Falwell said in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education.<br />Mr. Gunderson said his group also wanted to overturn the decision to shut down the largest accreditor of for-profit colleges, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, and give it a year to repair the failings<br />that prompted the Education Department to shut it down last year.<br />Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said Mr. Trump had made several encouraging general comments about higher education —<br />that tuition is too high, that free speech should be protected and that student debt repayment should be based on income.
