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GAO or the Government Accountability Office has released its last summer’s report after revision. This report deals with the practices governing recruitment in for-profit higher education institutions. The report firmly stands on its findings that these colleges misled potential applicants and encouraged fraud. The agency conducted many undercover investigations that softened many previous examples.

Democratic lawmakers and Obama administration, as we know, are in the process of pushing for tough regulation in the field of higher education and these revisions have come at an appropriate time. Some of the report conclusions were called into question said a Republican senator.

In at least 15 for-profit colleges, the recruiting process was examined by the original report released in August to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Senate Committee. This report included campuses such as the Corint-profit hian Colleges, campuses operated by the Apollo Group and Kaplan unit of The Washington Post Co.

Audio and video recordings were captured in encounters with representatives of colleges by GAO, the congress’s investigative arm’s undercover investigators posing as prospective students. The findings were widely reported and created a furore in the industry with executives from the colleges apologizing for undesirable incidents that placed them in bad light.

Critics reared their heads to push for stringent rules that will make it mandatory for colleges to demonstrate the value of courses with regard to gainful employment to avoid losing Federal student aid program access.

After the release of this report, many for-profit colleges’ share prices fell and this fuelled the initiation of a series of advertising campaigns and aggressive lobbying by the industry. They portrayed the efforts of administration as depriving education access to deserving students who are unable to get into traditional colleges for various reasons.

Key passages are changed in the revised report with a lot of edit in the detailed examples. Chuck Young, the spokesman for GAO clarified that revisions were made with additional information coming to light after further investigations. He also said that these revisions provided an additional perspective and context to the previously published report.

According to him, there were no significant changes to the overall report and findings. The ranking Republican of the committee Senator Mike Enzi, his letter to Gene L. Dodaro, the chief of GAO and acting comptroller said that this report raised a lot of troubling questions. He said that many allegations were undermined in the report with substantial revisions. He reiterated that Dodaro must explain why the changes were made at all.

There was no significant change in the report’s substance and the fact that for-profit colleges used fraudulent and deceptive techniques of recruitment for new student enrolment. Representing some for-profit colleges, the Coalition for Educational Success spokesman Lanny Davis said that the industry is portrayed less harshly now in the revised version of the report. Davis opined that this called into question the report’s credibility in the first place. There has been no comment so far issued by the spokesman of the Education Department Justin Hamilton.