Here’s just one example, via The Wall Street Journal. Last month,

Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s [Colleges, a for-profit college system with campuses across the USS] access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 US campuses.

Never mind that, among other things, DoE itself can’t figure out how to measure job placement for college graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the DoE, found itself tasked with generating just such a metric, but in 2011, it was forced to admit that the challenges of using institutional tracking of students, which include the reporting burden on institutions as well as the potential for inconsistent documentation and reporting, simply wasn’t feasible.

Then there’s the data the DoE demanded of Corinthian:

• a list of all students placed by name and Social Security number
• the students’ most recent telephone numbers and cell phone numbers
• graduation dates and academic programs
• job titles
• start dates
• employers’ names and contact information

Never mind the difficulty of collecting those data from folks who’ve already graduated and moved on with their lives. Think about the invasion of privacy this administration demanded Corinthian perpetrate on those graduated adult American citizens.

Corinthian couldn’t meet DoE’s data delivery deadline, despite having assigned an additional 100 employees the single full time task of collecting these personal data from its hundreds of thousands of students. As a result, it’s had to close its doors—that funding freeze.

This is this administration’s arrogance at its most powerful and its worst.