Congratulations are in order for the for-profit college industry, which won a major court ruling this week—a judge ruled that the Department of Education could not penalize these fake schools just because they routinely destroyed the financial future of their graduates. Here are the outrageous DoE rules, which were struck down as "arbitrary and capricious," via the WSJ:

The rules would have required that a school meet one of three requirements for three of four years, or lose access to federal student aid: at least 35% of recent graduates are repaying their loans; loan payments eat up no more than 12% of graduates' average annual earnings; or payments consume no more than 30% of graduates' average discretionary income.

How dare government bureaucrats try to hold this nation's gunslinging free market educators to laughably minimal standards of financial fairness? The spigot of government money must never be turned off to America's dynamic Bloodsuckers of the Poor industry! Bloodsucking the poor is what has made this nation what it is. Look it up, in your wildly overpriced for-profit college textbook.

In a completely unrelated story today—I don't know why we're even mentioning it, just to save space I guess, efficiency and all that—a new study found that for-profit colleges are significantly worse than real colleges at giving their students, you know, any sort of payoff whatsoever for their degree. From Inside Higher Ed:

[For] those who started in associate degree programs, the study found "large, statistically significant benefits from obtaining certificates/degrees from public and not-for-profit but not from for-profit institutions." ...

And for both certificate and associate programs at both for-profit and nonprofit institutions, the most popular field of study is health. "We observe a large and statistically significant return to earning a certificate in health from a public or not-for-pro…fit institution," the study says. "In contrast, the point estimate for earning such a certificate from a for-pro…fit is close to zero."

But look, don't let the fact that a degree from a for-profit college will both A) destroy you, financially, with debt, and B) offer you no financial benefits whatsoever in your future career dissuade you from handing over all of your money to one of these disreputable and educationally worthless institutions, or persuade you to institute any type of rule that might slow the pace of this massive scam which depends upon exploiting the hope and ignorance of some of our nation's most vulnerable individuals. After all, Freedom Education America Jobs Skills Learning Future Free Market Your Family, and other buzzwords.

[Photo: AP]