Military personnel have long been targets of predatory creditors, going back to the moneylenders who followed the Roman legions. More recently, payday lenders clustered storefronts around military bases. The latest development is that subprime operators are hawking degrees at for-profit colleges to former and current service members.
Holly Petraeus, who heads up service member affairs in the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has a powerful account in an op ed for the NY Times of the targeting of current and former military personnel by for-profit colleges, including some seriously brain-injured Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Appointing Petraeus, whose husband David is CIA director and former commander of American forces in Iraq and Afganistan, to this post was a stroke of genius. When general consumer protection arguments fail to get much traction, finding some military victims seems to help get the message across.