It started with a grim but familiar warning from a longtime borrower—someone who’s watched the student loan system implode in slow motion and seen the worst actors escape accountability:
“Well this isn't good.
New accrediting agency for colleges run and operated by for-profit college goons....
I’m sure we will see scammy colleges take off again!”
The warning was in response to recent developments in higher ed accreditation: the rise of a new accreditor with leadership tied to the same for-profit institutions that helped build a trillion-dollar debt crisis. The borrower’s tone was weary, but not surprised.
I responded, because this wasn’t news to me either:
“Thanks. That’s how neoliberalism works. It never ends. So we have to continue fighting until we can’t fight anymore.”
But I didn’t stop there. I wrote what I’ve long felt—what I’ve heard from whistleblowers, from insiders, and from people still bound by NDAs that keep the truth buried:
“Yes, crooks and pigs and cockroaches have been around forever, and they all smell money.
Even people who claim to be on our side are not really on our side. That’s why so little good happens.
I have an NDA so I can't tell you everything.
Like so many others who’ve tried to expose the rot, I’ve spoken with whistleblowers across multiple campuses. I’ve seen clear cases of fraud swept under the rug.
“Should have buried the University of Phoenix with this one,” I wrote, referencing an investigation into schools using fake enrollment paperwork to defraud taxpayers.
“And someone should have taken this story,” I added, pointing to our own work at The Higher Education Inquirer:
What the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to See: For-Profit Colleges in the Military-Industrial-Education Complex.
“More than 30 years of grift and eight years of coverups.”
That article, like so many others exposing corruption in higher ed, was met mostly with silence. Whistleblowers risk everything, and still the stories too often disappear into the noise.
I used to have a trusted contact inside the U.S. Department of Education. But that channel dried up when the Trump administration came in and the revolving door between industry and government started spinning even faster.
So where does that leave us?
“What I’d like to see,” I wrote, “is for us to send a mole to work at AidVantage or one of the other student loan servicers.”
It’s not fantasy—it’s necessity. When the system protects grifters, when accreditors are captured, and when servicers lose records, miscalculate forgiveness, and dodge accountability, we need more than hope. We need infiltration. We need whistleblowers. We need truth.
The scam isn’t over. It’s reloading.
And we at The Higher Education Inquirer will keep exposing the crooks, pigs, and cockroaches—until we can’t fight anymore.
Sources:
Private correspondence with a longtime borrower, July 2025
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