Thanks for your perspective. You are correct, I have never personally sued anyone. I was given a great opportunity by one of these such programs and it has completely changed my life for the better. That's not to say all of them provide the same for all students, but I believe they deserve a fair defense at this point.
Glad to hear it. But given that, you should be strongly in favor of reasonable regulation.
These programs cost basically nothing to start, and the major qualification needed is marketing expertise, not technical or educational skill. And, as others have pointed out, the profits could be substantial.
No barrier to entry, an uneducated market susceptible to manipulation, and no easy way to evaluate product quality means that even if the early entrants are perfectly good, the incentives are such that I'd expect a lot of their competitors to be fools or scam artists, unable to deliver good results. In which case, the whole thing will get a bad reputation, harming not only a lot of students, but the programs who are doing well.
As a parallel, consider food quality and safety regulation. It's hard for a consumer to tell what's in a sausage. It's to the benefit of all quality sausage-makers to have enough regulation to make sure their competitors are all doing a reasonably good job. If any fool or criminal can jump into the business, the best case is that good producers will be trying to compete with companies using 30% dog food and old meat. But more likely is that a bunch of people will get sick, causing a giant scare where people, unable to tell good from bad, stop buying all sausage.
