NEW YORK — A college or university, especially of a private variety, may not be "an eleemosynary institution," as Sen. Sam Ervin, of the Watergate hearings, might put it were he alive, but the American insistence on free-market notions has brought the matter to the other extreme in higher education. It has spawned education profiteers. Worse, many of these colleges get most of their "revenues" from the government.

The troublesome question of "for-profit colleges" came to the fore once again this past August, when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report on the fraud they encourage and the "deceptive and questionable marketing practices" they pursue. The Department of Education (DOE) followed it with findings that student loan default rates were rising — with rates at for-profit colleges (11.6 percent) twice as high as those at public ones (6 percent) and three times as high as those at private, nonprofit ones (4 percent).

More recently, there have been a barrage of news reports on the unseemly acts of these for-profit entities. One of them, "Scrutiny Takes Toll on For-Profit College Company" (The New York Times, Nov 9), described the lawsuits and other problems Kaplan faces. The GAO says there are 2,000 for-profit colleges, of which 15 are publicly traded corporations. Kaplan is one of the latter.