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Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees. The investigative team had been created in 2016 after the collapse of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, which set off a wave of complaints from students about predatory activities at for-profit schools. The institutions had been accused of widespread fraud that involved misrepresenting enrolment benefits, job placement rates and program offerings, which could leave students with huge debts and no degrees.

More than 160 students — nearly 30 percent of the student body — at D.C.’s celebrated Duke Ellington School of the Arts live outside the city and are not paying the tuition required of suburbanites who attend the District’s public schools, an internal investigation has found. The findings, which city officials announced Friday, come amid intensifying distrust of the District’s public schools, stoked by scandals involving inflated graduation rates and a former chancellor skirting enrolment rules for his daughter.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted the head of a now-shuttered for-profit education firm. of billing the Philadelphia School District out of $800,000 meant to educate some of its most at-risk teens. The former president of the Bala Cynwyd-based Delaware Valley High School Management Corp. spent the money intended for education and counseling on upgrades to his beach house in Margate, N.J., and his $1.1 million, 13-room Gladwyne home.

The University of Kansas and North Carolina State University have become embroiled in the college sport inducement scandal after federal prosecutors in New York elected to expand the case, which involves German sportswear manufacturer Adidas. In September, a senior executive from Adidas, along with four assistant basketball coaches from the University of Arizona, Auburn University, the University of Southern California and Oklahoma State University, were arrested on federal corruption charges relating to the payment of inducements to star athletes.

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.

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.