The Trump administration has tapped Julian Schmoke, a former DeVry University administrator, to lead the Education Department’s student-aid enforcement unit. The move provoked complaints from critics who pointed out that DeVry recently settled several claims brought against it by regulators alleging it had engaged in some of the very abuses the unit is charged with eliminating.

Schmoke’s hiring was first reported by Politico on Tuesday evening, citing an internal email announcing the move. Schmoke, who most recently oversaw campus operations at a community college in Georgia, will be in charge of addressing allegations of illegal activities such as fraud by higher-education institutions.

DeVry, a for-profit college, has faced allegations that it was using deceptive recruitment tactics, misleading students about their career prospects, and distorting data provided to the federal government.

The institution’s parent company arrived at settlements with several government entities, including the New York attorney general earlier this year and the Federal Trade Commission in late 2016, the latter of which amounted to $100 million. DeVry Education Group, the parent company, subsequently rebranded itself as Adtalem Global Education.

“You have someone who was in the middle of the fraud era of DeVry now in charge of enforcing a rule that was designed to do precisely what has just been done to DeVry: to better regulate them and monitor them,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and expert on for-profit colleges. Cottom pointed, in particular, to regulations published at the tail end of Obama’s presidency aimed at protecting student borrowers against fraudulent higher-education institutions. (Schmoke himself has not been accused of any wrongdoing, nor implicated in those alleged practices by any public report.)

Read the source article at The Atlantic