Dive Brief:

• The Hechinger Report profiles the increasing lobbying power of for-profit colleges in the federal electorate, spending more than $4 million in donations and lobbying in 2016 alone. 
• Six Republicans and four Democrats in the United States Congress are among the top ten recipients of the largest donations from schools and special interest groups supporting for-profit education companies. 
• For-profit donations for the presidential race are about half, percentage-wise, of the amounts to congressional races; about 30% to 72%, respectively. 

Dive Insight:

There is no great surprise that for-profit institutions would seek to reverse much of the Department of Education's attempts to regulate the sector now collapsing under increased public scrutiny, but it also continues the campaign of labeling the institutions as predatory institutions driven by profit margins and not student success.

Unfortunately, their efforts are a mirror image of large public and elite institutions which support sympathetic elected officials and ideals, and typically under illegal terms, to protect ballooning profits in endowments and institutional investments.