What's worse is the way for-profit colleges are abusing the system and taking federal loan dollars for subpar educations.
Their default rates are appalling, but that's to be expected when you charge $40k for a two year degree in Fashion Design. This should have been reigned in years ago.
More regulation isn't a panacea for regulation. The heart of the problem is that it's now a common belief that everyone must attend college, even for things that don't require a college education like communications or Fashion Design. The increased demand inflates the prices. Because of this, the government has made it easy to get loans for college, which acts to further inflate the prices. A better solution would be encouraging people that do not need a college education to not get one.
Yet non-profit colleges have a repayment rate of 95.3% while for-profit colleges sink to 83.3%. So it's not the 'only real difference'. But I'll give you that non-profits are not entirely blame free.
The better colleges are non-profit, which makes the non-profit group look better than the for-profit one. The higher quality students only go to non-profit colleges, and thereby lower the default rate of non-profits.
If a Devry student would not be accepted by Princeton (but would be accepted by Bumfuck U), it's unfair to compare Devry to the average of Princeton and Bumfuck. One should simply compare default rates of Devry and Bumfuck.
A financial advisor I know wrote a really good article about the value of a college education. It's available at http://financialtales.com/financial-tales/young-at-heart/a-t....