Buoyed by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, America’s predatory for-profit colleges are renewing their multi-front fight to destroy a key measure to hold them accountable: the gainful employment rule. The new battle plan includes pushes in Congress and before the Betsy DeVos Department of Education, plus two new lawsuits aimed at the regulation, including one, in Arizona, that has not been previously reported. It looks like this harmful effort is rapidly gaining traction. It took the Obama administration nearly eight years of battling well-paid for-profit college lobbyists and lawyers to finally enact and implement this regulation, which has a simple, common sense premise: Career training programs that, year-after-year, leave graduates mired in overwhelming debt should lose eligibility for taxpayer-funded student grants and loans. Career education should make people financially better off, not worse off, and the rule aims to channel money away from programs that do harm — and channel it toward those honest, effective colleges that are genuinely helping students build careers. For decades, many for-profit colleges, through a toxic mix of high prices, low quality, and weak job placement, have promised more than they could deliver, and yet have been getting billions annually in federal aid, much of it spent on advertising and profits, rather than education. Many veterans, single moms, displaced factory workers and miners, and others struggling to build a better future have been deceived and abused by unscrupulous college owners, whose offices are in Wall Street suites as well as strip malls. The final gainful employment rule does not demand much; only the worst programs flunk its test comparing graduate earnings with debt levels. The first round of results, reported in January, showed that 98 percent of the flunking programs were at for-profit colleges. The for-profit colleges have never stopped trying to overturn the rule, even after federal courts decisively rejected two separate industry lawsuits. Now, however,