Nearly two decades after California began regulating for-profit colleges and vocational schools to weed out "diploma mills," the state is not free of institutions that dangle exaggerated promises of better careers before students who end up jobless and deeply in debt. Yet state oversight of the schools, which enroll more than 400,000 students a year, could soon end.

The law that establishes the rules for 1,800 schools -- including hundreds in Los Angeles County -- will expire July 1...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic-led Legislature are trying to reach an agreement on how to refashion the law, but none is on the horizon...

In 2005, an independent monitor appointed by the Legislature concluded that state regulation of the schools "has been plagued by problems for the past 20 years" and that shortcomings identified repeatedly in audits still persist...

"It's hard to defend the [state], because no one seems to think it's doing a great job, but it seems to me it ought to be strengthened rather than weakened," said Stephen Burd, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute based in Washington, D.C...

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