The website Pro Publica has a great piece up about how for-profit colleges are luring in prospective students with misleading online ads about a mythical “Obama Mom” scholarship program.

The whole piece is really worth a read, but one fact stuck out for me — a quarter of all Pell Grant money now goes to for-profit colleges and universities. That’s $7.3 billion dollars a year. And that’s before you start figuring in all the federal student loans these students are taking out.

These are mind-boggling numbers, particularly when you consider the hijinks that some of the colleges are up to.

Seriously. Go read the whole story. (And read this USA Today piece on a separate coming Department of Education crackdown on scammy for-profit programs, while you’re at it.)