Q:

Why attend predatory colleges in the US?

I just read this article about predatory colleges in the US:

S. Cagle, These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.

I am not from the US and didn't ask in the comments of that site because I wouldn't want to insult anyone concerned. 
I just wondered: before you enroll for any degree, would you compare what the college's officials say with reality? Like, looking on the internet to find people with a degree from that school who got jobs, asking a local employment worker, asking at a local employer if they would consider giving a job to someone with a degree from that school, etc.
How is it this article says the students were so young they could not possibly have known they were being tricked? If you are old enough to go into debt with thousands of dollars for a college education, how can you not be old enough to check for the quality of that education first?
Why would people attend predatory colleges?

A:

A few possibilities:

These people genuinely don't know any better. They think a degree is a degree. I would guess that they come from parents that did not attend college. A friend of mine started at a for-profit school because she really didn't know that there was a difference between my 4 year bachelor degree and her 12 month online degree.
People want to take shortcuts and these schools know that.
These schools spend a lot of money on commercials and marketing to try to convince people to attend. It isn't surprising that people would fall victim if you see a commercial for a school 3 times a day.
These schools also promote their currents/past students to help recruit their friends. I have certainly seen this on my own social media feeds.
I once had a manager at a large company that was working on a degree from a diploma mill because the company was imposing a new policy that all managers had to have a degree, but it didn't matter from where.

So to directly answer your questions: No, a lot of people probably don't look into the details of past student success. The type of people that would do this, aren't the ones being targeted by these schools. And even if they do, you're bound to find some successes (confirmation bias) which the school will proudly advertise.
Unfortunately, these types of schools prey on uneducated people, so while it seems like common sense to us, those people may really be getting tricked and yet the government continues to have surprisingly loose regulation.

A:

I was a professor at a major for-profit university in the US.  A couple campuses, out of many had been caught in scandal for preying on students financially.  The university, in my opinion, was not trying to scam people.  However, when you pay people to recruit students by volume, you will get bad apples.
I taught A+ certification.  The academic side was solid.  The teachers wanted to teach, the curriculum was correct.  The books, the labs, the premade tests, etc were all, in my opinion, extremely satisfactory.  If someone wanted to learn, they most definitely could.
My classes were filled with mostly inner-city students that were simply uneducated.  They could barely read or write.  They could only do the most basic of math problems.  I had one student told me he graduated with straight D's because his school didn't want to give him F's and hold him back for a year.  I had a couple of students who were there because they committed a crime and a judge told them it is either school or jail.  I had a few students who said they were there because their parents said it was go to school or leave the house.
There were a few students who definitely had potential.  Mostly, it was the older ones who wanted to do better in life.  They were there for the right reasons and were willing to learn.
Needless to say, it was not what I thought teaching would be.
The reality is, their  public schools failed them.  These students have no chance to go to a quality university.  Nor would they have a chance in a local community college.  They simply did not have the education needed.
So that's were the for profit schools come in.  They give these students a chance to learn a trade and be successful.  I do not believe they are out to fleece the students out of their money.  It does happen, but there are bad apples in every business.
The for-profit schools, admit people who can't go anywhere else.  However, some of those students are destined to fail.  But in reality, isn't every school like that?
Now, as an employer, I went to a local for-profit school to hire some low level IT techs.  We had one employee who graduated from that school and was extremely competent.  However, I interviewed many students who had just graduated, or were about to, and I was extremely disappointed.  Students who graduated from the school could not answer the most basic IT questions.  This school failed them horribly.  There is no excuse for having students graduate and not be able to do the basics.
So here is the real question:  Do you deny a student a chance at an education, given their odds might be slim?  

A:

Here are a couple of reasons that nobody seems to have mentioned yet.
One common reason why people attend these schools is that there simply isn't enough space in programs at non-predatory schools. For example, here in California if you want to become a nurse your best path is often to start at a community college taking classes such as chemistry and anatomy and physiology. But those classes are usually full, and many students simply can't get into them. They find themselves on waiting lists semester after semester. Here is an article describing one such student's experience.
And before we compare predatory schools too unfavorably with community colleges, we should take into account the fact that community colleges are astoundingly bad at producing educated students. Community college success rates are amazingly low, and in many ways these schools are incredibly inefficient. Since they have open admissions, they waste many precious seats in oversubscribed programs like nursing by giving them to students who don't have the necessary educational foundation or willingness to work hard.
Another thing to realize is that predatory schools basically exist because government policies are designed to subsidize the cost of education and make it easier for students to borrow money to get an education. These schools are experts in feeding at the public trough, and they do a very good job of hooking up their students with loans and aid. For students who don't have much money, these schools are often the only choice besides a community college that seems financially feasible.
In this respect, predatory schools are very similar to high-quality private universities. One of the big driving factors in educational inflation is the fact that social policy is designed to funnel money into the system. If government provides a 50% subsidy for a product, a natural response by the seller is to double the price and sell the same number of units.

