When I started at the Department of Education in the 1990s, student loans were a popular middle-class benefit. College affordability or student loan debt were rarely front-page news. Our dingy offices, a converted World War II warehouse, were a daily reminder of how our work seemed overlooked, too. But in those hallways—literally, my desk was in a hallway—we celebrated lower interest rates, fewer loan defaults, and record college enrollments.
When I returned to the Education Department a decade later, reports of deceptive recruiting tactics at for-profit colleges raised new questions about the value of college loans. My bosses wanted to know whether these abuses were widespread. Were they a few bad apples or a rotten…