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Immediately after the President was elected, borrower advocates and lawmakers expressed concern about what would happen to the current regulations aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable. On Tuesday, their concerns were validated. The Education Department announced that it would delay and renegotiate two of the previous administration’s signature regulations: the first aims to penalize programs whose graduates’ loan payments exceed a set percentage of their earnings, while the second simplifies the process for borrowers who say they have been defrauded by their colleges.

Today’s higher education legal landscape in the USA is characterised by a wave of issues, including inflated employment rates for recent graduates, inflated starting salaries, as is the case with law schools and business schools, and the employment formula linked to federal grants and loans recipients, as is the case with for-profits. This wave will bring more lawsuits.

In 2013, New York’s attorney general, sued the ‘Trump University’ for-profit company, asserting it had intentionally misled over 5,000 students into paying up to $35,000 for seminars and mentorship programs. The fraud lawsuit resurfaced this week, when a state appeals court unanimously denied a bid by the university’s owner to throw out the litigation. Two former Trump University students have also filed two separate class-action civil lawsuits in California.

The Department of Homeland Security arrested 21 people Tuesday on charges that they had recruited thousands of students through the promise of fraudulently obtained visas. At the center of the arrests was the University of Northern New Jersey, the brainchild of federal agents who masqueraded as representatives of a for-profit university to ensnare the recruiters.

The US government administration is creating a new office at the U.S. Department of Education dedicated to investigating and punishing illegal activity at colleges and providing debt relief to defrauded federal loan borrowers. Officials on Monday announced a new “enforcement unit” that will be charged with investigating misconduct at colleges, imposing administrative actions against colleges and resolving student loan debt relief claims linked to fraud. The administrative reshuffling will speed up and improve the quality of the department’s investigations of wrongdoing.

The president and CEO of a private college that catered to foreign students has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for defrauding the Department of Homeland Security by issuing phony visa-related documents to international students in exchange for tuition and fee.