For those pursuing a degree in higher education, there are innumerable tough decisions to be made: which dorm to live in, which language to plow through, which bars to frequent in those fleeting moments of free time. But not all students are so fortunate; some have the much weightier choices of feeding a family or taking an extra class, taking online courses or going to night school, or even whether to apply for federal aid while making minimum wage. These nontraditional students, then, have been greatly aided by a recent surge in for-profit colleges, those that offer alternatives to a public university’s learning environment.

From 2000 to 2008, enrollment at for-profit institutions made an astonishing 226 percent increase, with more than 1.5 million students looking toward the private sector to make their diploma dreams come true, according to U.S. Department of Education statistics.

“Institutions like ours grow for a reason,” Sharon Thomas Parrott, the senior vice president of Devry Inc., said last week. “There is an enormous unmet need.” Be that as it may, the DI Editorial Board takes issue with the practices these colleges have adopted in providing a service that sounds so solid in theory.

On June 24, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, submitted a 17-page report, compiled with the assistance of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, to a Senate oversight committee.

“There are growing questions about whether all students — and taxpayers by extension — are receiving value for their educational dollar,” Harkin said to members of the committee.

It was also the day hearings were set to begin on increasing government oversight and regulation of for-profit institutions. The DI Editorial Board overwhelmingly supports Harkin’s attempts to rein in this rapidly growing industry (U.S. Education Department data show for-profits as the fastest rising educational division) and subject companies to the same restrictions and regulations customarily applied to all commercial businesses.

The Education Department is considering several possible changes to remedy the inequities in these educators’ profits: enforcing rules to cap tuition costs directly proportional to prospective salary upon graduation; regulating college recruiters’ pay scales; and ensuring that the colleges repay a certain percentage of government loans and financial aid that go directly to their coffers, according to ABC News.

This last point is especially noteworthy as for-profit institutions “enroll about 10 percent of all college students in the U.S., but they receive about 23 percent of federal loans and grants,” reports the Christian Science Monitor. And according to numbers analyzed by BusinessWeek, a disproportionately large number of the students at for-profits — typically nontraditional learners from “lower socioeconomic backgrounds” — default on their government-backed loans. Harkin’s office noted that since 2007, nearly one in five students have been unable to repay their federal aid.

Thus, when up to 90 percent of a college’s profits are being served up by taxpayers and the government, we think it’s high time some regulatory guidelines were put in place. (Not to mention, policies to increase the abominable graduation rates the for-profits boast.) Steven Eisman, a hedge-fund manager and author of The Big Short, estimates that by 2020, nearly $275 billion in federal student aid will be left unpaid.

“If nothing is done, then we are on the cusp of what I believe is a new social disaster,” said Eisman, speaking to the committee. He declared for-profit colleges “as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime-mortgage industry.” We probably won’t see them boasting that in prospective-student brochures any time soon.

Naturally, during the first hearing, there were some dissenters. “One can argue that [the for-profit colleges] are too expensive and criticize them for their default rates, but it’s not the same as saying they’re in a straight rip-off business,” said Kevin Carey, the policy director of Education Sector in Washington, to the Monitor. The Editorial Board agrees that a blanket condemnation of all for-profit schools is unfair, yet the industry itself is so unsavory and manipulative that we can’t help but hope for stringent changes as a result of these hearings — and fast.

So next time you’re torn trying to decide between taking 12 or 16 semester hours, or how you should spend the income from your sold-back books, just be thankful that those are the toughest choices you’ll make in your college career. We can only hope that someday, no students will have to learn at the expense of others.