Pork U, now with 86% taxpayer filling
Mr. Romney offered another unsolicited endorsement for "a place in Florida called Full Sail University." By increasing competition, for-profit institutions like Full Sail, which focuses on the entertainment field, "hold down the cost of education" and help students get jobs without saddling them with excessive debt, he said.
~NY Times [emphasis added]
Last week,
part 1 of this diary concluded by pointing out a few problems with Mr. Romney's endorsement of Full Sail University, a for-profit enterprise whose majority investor is the international private-equity firm TA Associates. Just look at the three bolded statements above:
1) hold down the cost of education: A 21-month degree from Full Sail in video game art costs $81,000, double most public institutions. On average for-profit colleges cost nearly twice as much as state schools, and two-year trade schools are three to five times more expensive than community colleges.
2) help students get jobs: The for-profit college industry has at best a murky track record in the job placement department, because they sometimes don't make the information public, inflate their numbers, and bend the definitions. The administration is attempting to crack down on their job placement shenanigans.
3) without saddling them with excessive debt: Students leave Full Sail University with an average debt of $59,000, five times public-school graduates. Nationally, students who attend for-profit schools incur a $29,900 debt, while public college students leave $10,500 in the red. About 96 percent of students at for-profit schools take out government loans, while the figure is 48 percent at four-year public and nonprofit private schools, and only 13 percent at community colleges. In last week's diary, softserve's comment described how a $50,000 loan ballooned to a $105,000 debt—an all-too-common complaint on student websites.
I'm done thinking my situation will get any better. But I do NOT want this to happen to other people. There is nothing fair, just or right about it at all. There is NO reason a place like Sallie Mae should be able to give someone essentially government-guaranteed private loans at 15%+ interest while getting that money from the government at 1%. None...
I'm so tired of being told just to deal with it, that I took out the money and have to repay it. Fine. I took out $50,000. Explain to me why I've been paying $16,000+ a year to one loan and still owe $105,000 on it. Explain to me why that should be allowed to happen.
How do they do it?
One of Full Sail's competitors is nearby
Valencia College, which Romney didn't mention during his 30-second commercial for Full Sail. Valencia also offers an associate degree in video game art, which will run you $6,400, a tad bit less than $81,000, but Romney didn't recognized them for "hold[ing] down the cost of education." He also neglected to point out that Full Sail's CEO Bill Heavener, who is co-chair of Mitt's Florida fundraising team,
donated $85,000 to his campaign, and Kevin Landry at TA Associates chipped in another $125,000.
For more about Full Sail University, check out this blog of testimonials from former students; I doubt many of them donate to the school's alumni association. Full Sail is just one example of the dismal track record shared by too many for-profit colleges: high tuitions, low graduation rates, poor instruction, countless legal battles and terrible job placement statistics—leaving students with mountains of debt, all the while the schools' CEOs earn on average seven times more than the presidents of America's finest universities. Oh, and these goobers who "did build that" receive 86 percent of their profit from Washington. So it's interesting that they're supporting Mitt Romney, the so-called small government guy. Sure, he'll "reduce government" for programs that protect and serve the middle class and poor, but then channel those "savings" toward Wall Street.
The for-profit college industry is the perfect conduit for Romney's warped privatization vision: more for corporations and the 1 percenters who run them, while they deceive, exploit, trample and ultimately indenture the 99 percent. Romney and the private equity firms that own colleges, universities and trade schools share one goal: to further privatize education, which begins by undercutting the competition, public institutions, and steering students and federal resources to Stock Market State. Mitt Romney is among their most jubilant drum majors, and they're following, with wheelbarrows full of CorpEd cash.
With their dreadful reputation and track record, documented in Sen. Tom Harkin's investigations and hearings, how do the national behemoths, most of which are owned by private-equity firms, harvest the huge numbers they need just to sustain current levels, let alone grow? The granddaddy of them all, the University of Phoenix (UP), which boasts around 400,000 students and is owned by the gargantuan Apollo Group, has to recruit the equivalent of Ohio State University's student population every year, just to keep Apollo's stock price ticking upward. To reach and hopefully surpass those crazy numbers, the for-profits rely on convenience, shady marketing and recruitment tactics, government loopholes, and heavy-handed political pressure.
(Continue reading below the fold.)
Strip malls and the intertoobz
They are convenient, which is what spurred the University of Phoenix's growth in the first place and, on the plus side, forced many public schools to be more accessible. UP offered class schedules for working professionals, a demographic the for-profits target—schedules that aren't the old T-TH @ 1:00-2:30 only. They also threw semesters and traditional calendaring out the window; new classes start every five weeks or so. UP's campuses are, intentionally, more like office parks—usually near a freeway, 20 minutes apart, because that's as far as working adults will travel. It's nearly impossible to drive 10 miles on the freeways in Phoenix without driving past a campus.
For-profits also pioneered online courses, so you don't even have to show up. Nearby Grand Canyon University, a former 1,500-student Baptist school purchased by Significant Education in 2004, now claims 40,000 students, although more than 90 percent are online and will never set foot on campus (too bad, it's beautiful). Other universities like Capella are only online. Not only don't they need a sports stadium, campus commons, dormitory or any other social elements, they don't even need a friggin' building, except a room for big hard drives. At one time federal policies required colleges that receive public funds to teach at least 50 percent of their students on site, but that regulation was dismantled by Bush, Boehner and the for-profit lobby in 2006, giving rise to Internet U.
Where Don Draper seems principled
The for-profits also perfected the art of selling education, but while they're good at it, some of their marketing and recruitment practices will never be confused with reputable employment. According to a 2010 General Accounting Office report,
Undercover tests at 15 for-profit colleges found that four colleges encouraged fraudulent practices and that all 15 made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements to GAO's undercover applicants. Four undercover applicants were encouraged by college personnel to falsify their financial aid forms to qualify for federal aid… Other college representatives exaggerated undercover applicants' potential salary after graduation and failed to provide clear information about the college's program duration, costs, or graduation rate despite federal regulations requiring them to do so… Admissions staff used other deceptive practices, such as pressuring applicants to sign a contract for enrollment before allowing them to speak to a financial advisor about program cost and financing options. truthout
The worst of the education grifters dupe America in fancy websites and slick commercials, the way Walmart's perky TV people say how goddamn wonderful the big box is. Check out this polished ad from
Kaplan University, which airs nationally. There are dozens like it, lots of shiny happy people succeeding in their chosen careers. However, Kaplan only receives a
42 percent approval rating from students (the blog comments are devastating), and here's another
5-minute video featuring Kaplan University the "criminal enterprise." You might not read about it in the
Washington Post.
The Washington Post, by the way, cannot be compromised by the for-profit college industry for the simple reason that it is the for-profit college industry: Its wholly-owned subsidiary, Kaplan, Inc., from which the Washington Post Co. derives the majority of its revenue, is one of the biggest players in that business. There is plenty to suggest that this ownership has affected the paper’s coverage of the contentious for-profit college issue. Republic Report
Like the retail world, where the little guy can't compete with Walmart's PR blitz, the little guy in the world of education increasingly is a public college that doesn't have millions for marketing. Sure, lots of state schools' names now grace license plates, but Apollo Group, for instance, which owns the University of Phoenix and a half dozen other for-profit colleges,
spends $100 million a year on advertising. Collectively the largest proprietary colleges and universities
spend billions marketing because that's all most of them have to sell themselves—no campus, student activities or sports team, just a marketing narrative, told with all the scruples of a credit card marketing company.
The amount of money venture capitalists spend recruiting, and deceiving, students has skyrocketed—far more than, say, teacher pay, student services and campus-community alliances. The PBS documentary College, Inc. points out that most for-profit colleges spend about 25 percent of their budget on marketing and 10-15 percent on faculty. The typical public school spends less than 1 percent of its budget on public relations and marketing. In the PBS program, the industry's spokesperson sees no problem with their out-of-kilter marketing-faculty ratio, since the same is true, he says, of perfume makers, who spend more promoting the brand than making the ingredients in the bottle. He said that.
To make space for costly marketing tools, huge management salaries and shareholder returns, the for-profits keep instructional costs down by hiring untenured short-term faculty who receive few if any benefits. At places like ITT, this year's graduate could be next year's underpaid adjunct professor. The easiest way to reduce faculty expenses, of course, is to hire very few of them, which is one reason Ashford University lost its accreditation, plunging the stock price of Bridgepoint Education, the school's owner.
Although Ashford's student population is much larger than major state universities such as Ohio State and the University of Texas, it has only a few dozen full-time faculty members. HuffPo
Started by a former University of Phoenix VP, Bridgepoint Education employs more than
1,700 recruiters, and exactly
one person who's responsible for job placement. That's common. When Goldman Sachs and two private-equity firms bought giant
Education Management Corporation (EDMC), and installed
their man as CEO,
marketing and recruitment personnel increased from fewer than 1,000 people to 2,600. It's all about numbers, about churning customers through the turnstiles: "
a focus not on the academic outcomes that might build a school's reputation as a selling point but upon getting as many bodies as possible into their classrooms."
As long as enrollments are high, tactics and results can go squat on a cholla. "Everything became much more cutthroat," said Kathleen Bittel, who worked with 2,000 other cubicled phoneheads making 500 calls a day. "It was evil and slimy," said another recruiter Suzanne Lawrence. No wonder more than half the tele-recruiters hawking higher-ed diplomas have Wall Street experience. "They were the ones that did the best," Bittel said, "because they were so unscrupulous." She describes the training to exploit emotional weaknesses: "Your big job was to create trust, make them think you were their friend… If you weren't unscrupulous, you struggled." Another recruiter in PBS's College, Inc., Tammy Barker, told reporter Martin Smith, "They used to tell us, you know, 'Dig deep. Get to their pain. Get to what's bothering them. So, that way, you can convince them that a college degree is going to solve all their problems.'"
Part of their carnival barker sales pitch is a line of malarkey like, "Don't worry about the tuition, because most students get 99 percent of costs covered by federal aid." The 99 percent figure is a load of manure, just like the "federal aid" bull, which sounds like a scholarship or other free assistance. It's not, it's usually a government loan, which must be paid back—at 14 percent interest or more, leaving some students owing six-figures, indenturing them to the banks that own the colleges. But that's not the school's concern since they're paid regardless, mostly by taxpayers: just sign students up, get their name on the dotted line, and turn on the federal spigot.
To find students victims, the schools' sales reps regularly attend job fairs, persuading the vulnerable unemployed that they need a diploma to succeed in today's new economy. And, hey, there's easy government money! Beyond that, to identify potential customers, educational corporations buy sucker lists from businesses like QuinStreet, the same industry bottom-feeder that helped banksters find and exploit subprime mortgage victims. And how does QuinStreet find people? One way is their keen website, www.gibill.com, which, writes Chris Parker, "was made to look as if it was run by the government to help veterans but actually was just a lead generator for for-profit colleges."
A few months ago QuinStreet settled with 20 states, whose AGs filed fraud charges against the firm; they paid a $2.5 million fine and turned the deceptive website's URL over to the Department of Veterans Affairs. But QuinStreet is just one cog in a corporate machine that tricks, manipulates and defrauds veterans, who have that lucrative GI Bill.
Last year, eight of the top 10 educational institutions collecting G.I. Bill benefits were for-profit, taking in a stunning $626 million.… New Times
President Obama
addressed the sham practices in a recent speech to vets, accusing corporate colleges of attempting to "hoodwink" and "swindle" service members, even
brain-damaged veterans who may not understand the contract they're signing! Sadly, their swindles are paying off: for 2009-2011, private for-profit colleges
raked in 37 percent of the $4.4 billion that the VA paid out for tuition, but only 25 percent of the vets in school were attending for-profit colleges and universities. The upshot is that
taxpayers paid $4,642 to educate a vet at a public school, but $10,441 at a for-profit college. Worse yet, only
28 percent of veterans at the for-profits earn a degree, compared to 57 percent at public institutions. Last April, responding to complaints from veterans' advocacy groups, President Obama
signed an executive order designed to protect service members from the industry's most misleading, high-pressure tactics.
Veterans' groups say for-profit schools snare unsuspecting veterans with aggressive marketing, high-pressure sales calls and ads that falsely imply that their schools are exclusively approved for GI Bill benefits.
"What veterans hear is the aggressive marketing that's selling a product that isn't real—and pretty soon their benefits are gone," said Tom Tarantino, a veteran and GI Bill specialist with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, or IAVA. LA Times
Veterans are low-hanging fruit for the worst higher-ed parasites, but they don't stop there. It really doesn't matter where or how they find warm bodies:
The boom in for-profit education, driven by a political consensus that all Americans need more than a high school diploma, has intensified efforts to recruit the homeless... Chancellor University in Cleveland, which counts Jack Welch as an investor and features a weekly video for students by the former General Electric (GE) chief executive, explicitly focused recruiting efforts on local shelters after it realized that Phoenix, owned by Apollo Group (APOL), was doing so. Bloomberg Businessweek
Congress
has known about these despicable practices, which the schools say they've definitely ended, since at least the early 1990s, when Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA) held hearings that exposed the for-profits' practice of recruiting victims from homeless shelters and housing projects, even welfare offices. In 1992, Congress grew a spine and
prohibited corporate schools from paying recruiters based on their enrollment figures, but it seems they continued the practice anyway. In 2009, the University of Phoenix was fined
$76 million for paying sales reps on commission, and the giant EDMC is currently
embroiled in a lawsuit with the federal government, 11 states, and the District of Columbia for violating the law. George W. Bush, in cooperation with the for-profit industry, tried to end the ban legislatively. When that failed in 2002, the Bush administration changed the law itself.
Among other things, the revised rules allowed colleges to adjust the annual or hourly wages of recruiters up to twice a year, as long as the adjustment was "not based solely on the number of students recruited, admitted, enrolled, or awarded financial aid." In other words, the Department's leaders allowed colleges to expressly violate the law, which bars schools from providing any commission-based compensation to their recruiters. Higher Ed Watch
"They can afford to hire everybody"
One reason for Corporate U's dismal performance in the classroom and the real world is that the educational businesses, and that's what they are, spend more
on business than instruction. According to
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), who's held congressional hearings looking into for-profit higher ed,
"When compared to public and nonprofit schools, for-profit companies spend a smaller percentage of their funds on student education, reserving more for marketing, advertising, recruitment, and other noneducation expenses."
On average for-profit colleges
spend about $2,000 per student while public schools spend more than $7,000, but at some places it's a lot worse. In 2009, our old friend
Bridgepoint Education, whose majority investor is the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus,
spent less than $700 per student at Ashford University in Iowa, which will cost you about $24,000 a year. I'm no economist, but 700/24,000 is a good annual return. By comparison, nearby University of Iowa costs about $21,000 but they spend
17 times more per student. To be fair, Ashford did excel in one area: they spend more than $2,700 per student on nationwide marketing.
Ashford used to be called Franciscan University of the Prairies, a struggling 300-student Catholic school, before Bridgepoint bought it in 2005, mostly for its regional accreditation, the designation needed to qualify students for federal aid. That's Wall Street's latest and most productive scheme: Since accreditation for a new school can take 5 years or more, the captains of private-equity get around this by purchasing failing but already accredited schools, sort've like buying a restaurant for its liquor license.
By exploiting loopholes in government regulation and an accreditation system that wasn't designed to evaluate for-profit takeovers, they're acquiring struggling nonprofit and religious colleges—and their coveted accreditation. Typically, the goal is to transform the schools into online behemoths at taxpayer expense. Indianapolis Business Journal
Federal regulations prohibit the new owner from making drastic changes to the university's mission, in order to remain eligible for government assistance, but that's not been the history of these takeovers, such as when ITT purchased Daniel Webster College in 2010:
ITT ... wasted no time making changes at Daniel Webster. It renovated a main building and razed a dilapidated dormitory. It also dismissed one fourth of the staff, fired President Robert Myers, and has been accused by faculty members of misleading the New England accreditor, the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, based in Bedford, Massachusetts.
"ITT didn't really have much interest in anything other than having acquired a regionally accredited institution," said Myers, now president of the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont. "If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't have gone anywhere near ITT. The fundamental nature of the college has changed." Indiana Business Journal
Bridgepoint, which, in addition to Ashford University owns the University of the Rockies, has been handsomely rewarded for its deceptive sales tactics and loophole abuses. Ashford's nationwide
student population spiked from fewer than 13,000 in 2007 to more than 86,000 last year. Profits followed a similar trajectory: from $4 million to $216 million. And where did the money come from? A 2010 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee reported that
85 percent of Bridgepoint's profits came from Washington ($716 million total). That's close to the industry average: combined the largest for-profits receive
86 percent of their funding from public programs—more than $32 billion a year from the Feds. It's coin-op college, and taxpayers are the ones plugging the machines.
However, taxpayers seldom benefit from their investment, and certainly many students don't; too many are lied to about their school's accreditation and credits that won't transfer, drained of finances, and left with skimpy job prospects. Marketing takes a big chunk of the federal coin, but to no one's surprise, since it's private equity pulling the strings, most earnings end up with CEOs and investors. Last year Gregory Cappelli, CEO of Apollo Group, made $25 million. In 2009, Robert Silberman at Strayer Education, which operates more than 90 schools in 23 states, took home $41.9 million. In that same year, Andrew Clark at Ashford University was rewarded $20.5 million for losing the school's accreditation. Kaplan University's CEO Jonathan Grayer received a $76 million severance package when he left in 2008. By comparison, the highest paid Ivy League school presidents earn between $750,000 and $1.5 million. The CEOs didn't earn those obscene salaries and bonuses because their university had an exemplary graduation rate or a record of academic excellence and campus-community achievements. No, they signed up a shitload of unsuspecting students and conned the federal government out of millions of dollars.
The GOP and its predatory patrons on Wall Street (and Romney's Florida video proved he's a lifetime member) are shifting federal resources from the classroom, campus and community to boardrooms and bank accounts, while they blabber about the market performing better and costing less. They don't do either—just like private prisons and corporate healthcare are more expensive and less effective than the public variety (but rewarding for managers, investors, and suck-ass politicians). As noted, on average private for-profit institutions are almost twice as expensive as in-state tuition for public colleges and universities.
The ongoing hijacking of higher education will intensify if Congress chips away at regulations, and Corp U is working hard to help them do just that, with at least 14 former members of Congress on their lobbying team, including former House leader Dick Gephardt, and millions of dollars to throw around.
Some of the most powerful lobby shops in Washington have been employed in the fight: Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group; former Clinton special counsel Lanny J. Davis; numerous former staffers from the Department of Education and the education oversight committees on Capitol Hill. HuffPo
"There is so much money on the table,"
said Sen. Dick Durbin, "they can afford to hire everybody." Sen. Tom Harkin
said last year's higher-ed mugging of Congress was the most intense lobbying campaign he'd seen in more than three decades. Let
that sink in—not the military industrial complex, Big Farm, Big Pharm, or Big Oil. No,
for-profit education!
The for-profit industry is so rife with deceit that it's been billed the second coming of the mortgage-loan debacle. And the same people are behind it. Three-quarters of all for-profit students are enrolled at schools owned by Wall Street banks and private-equity firms. New Times
Wall Street is bodyslamming higher ed just like it did the home mortgage industry, after those pesky bank-investment laws were legislatively dismantled. Not surprisingly, private-equity firms and their schools' CEOs are throwing piles of cash at Mitt Romney, who has signaled that he'd undo federal regulations that impede the growth, and takeover, of Corporate U. Let's just remove
all pretense and protections, and allow banking houses to dominate education. What could go wrong?
He proposed to rescind the reforms undertaken by the Obama Administration to protect students and taxpayers from waste, fraud, and abuse by the for-profit college industry. [One] Romney policy would allow federal financial aid—presently about $32 billion a year—to continue to flow to even the worst offenders in the industry, schools that lure veterans and low-income students with deceptive and coercive recruiting practices, provide low-quality programs, and leave many students with insurmountable debt and ruined lives. Public Report
Election 2012: Corporate schools are for people, my friend
When the presidential candidates talk about a "choice" in this election, higher education is a theater where the differences couldn't be starker. The Romney-Ryan plan is a full-frontal assault on public schools,
cutting the Education Department, including the already-underfunded Pell Grants, by $115 billion, whereas under President Obama the number of Pell Grant recipients
has increased 50 percent. Plainly, the choice in November is between corporations and people, and, contrary to what Mr. Romney believes, they're not the same thing.
Romney has touted for-profit colleges as vital players in higher education. Their very presence, he argues, spurs competition, keeps costs down and expands access to higher education for millions of young adults and mid-career workers looking to shift to a new field.
Obama, however, has accused the industry of promising too much and delivering too little. Too often, he says, recruiters enroll students who do not have a realistic chance of getting a degree or landing a job in their chosen field—and who gain little from the programs except mountains of debt. HuffPo
In addition to cutting public funding, Romney and the for-profit lobby are undermining traditional education by trying to water down accreditation, accountability and oversight, allowing investment firms to slap "university" on any building and then tap federal resources. Because Congress never stipulated who would do the accrediting, probably figuring the education sector would police itself, dozens of
rubber-stamp accreditation mills have emerged to authorize the for-profits, reminiscent of credit-rating agencies that were in cahoots with the Wall Street firms they were supposedly monitoring. Led by Sen. Harkin, the administration is trying to push back against these bogus schemes:
The flaws attributed to accreditation in the report largely echo the committee's previous criticism of the process, including that accrediting agencies are guided by industry insiders who have an interest in preserving their peers.... Chronicle of Higher Education
Although colleges and universities must be regionally accredited in order to benefit from government aid (federal loans, GI Bill, Pell Grants), some schools are so piss-poor they
can't even meet the low standards set by friendly accreditation agencies. But far-right corporate toadies like the Heritage Fund
maintain that accreditation is an obstacle holding back progress, and once oversight is removed the free market will erupt in an orgasm of first-class, affordable higher-ed companies that'll make America smart, prosperous and free. Mitt Romney buys the corporatists' pitch lock, stock and barrel, arguing for unfettered access to public funds for even the worst for-profit offenders.
One federal policy that Romney and his pals in the for-profit sector hope to eliminate is the so-called 90/10 rule, which states that no more than 90 percent of a school's student population can be dependent on federal aid. In other words, at least 10 percent of students must pay their own way—through tuition or private scholarships, but not federal loans. Turning off the government gushers would force some for-profits, who exist totally on federal funding (the industry average is 86 percent) to close their doors, so you can bet the industry is bringing out the big bats to fight (and game) this regulation.
Corporate U is also trying to stop the Obama administration from defining what a "credit hour" means, since the for-profits play loosey goosey with the term because federal aid is tied to credit hours—the more hours, the more money. But there's no agreed-upon standard for what a credit hour is, writes Julie Margetta Morgan: "Some for-profit colleges have exploited this ambiguity by inflating their credits to the point where one school offered nine college credits for a five-week course."
The PBS documentary College, Inc. tracks another Obama regulation that says students, upon graduation, should be able to find "gainful employment" in their field of study, not just a minimum-wage job at Staples or Domino's, both owned by Bain Capital. Lobbyists went to bat to strip this language from the regulation and so far they've hit a double; a federal judge put the kibosh on that phrase, and we're still awaiting the administration's response. Romney said he would do away with the "gainful employment" requirement altogether. Corporate schools shouldn't be responsible for actually, like, doing anything.
Along with Republican Virginia Foxx (Crazy-NC), who has emerged as Corporate U's loudest cheerleader in Congress (you know, the goofball who said she has "no tolerance" for students who graduate with mountains of debt), Romney also wants to restore the loan program President Obama dismantled, where banks, not students or taxpayers, benefitted from the transactions. In the old system, the federal government gave the funds to banks, who took $60 billion off the top for management fees. Obama's revised program loans the money directly to students, making more funds available for student services but bypassing Wall Street, which doesn't make Romney or Virginia Foxx, who represents bank-saturated North Carolina, too happy:
This policy has removed the middleman, administrative costs and profits from the program, freeing up more funds for actual loans. To Foxx, this is nationalization and must be stopped. truthout
Are all for-profit schools rip-off artists? Of course not. I have friends who run quality charter schools, work at for-profit colleges, and earned useful degrees from commercial schools. The model
can work, so it's up to students and their families to research the choices and verify the promises. If you can't find the information on a school's website or in a brochure, ask recruiters about the school's graduation statistics, loan default rate, job placement history and teacher-student ratio. Unfortunately, the for-profit goliaths would like to hide that information because, in general, the industry's track record sucks, which is why they're fighting regulations that would require for-profit colleges and universities to disclose student debt statistics and other helpful information.
In a court filing last week, a key industry trade group pushed back against the Department of Education's attempts to make for-profit colleges disclose statistics that would indicate whether students are likely to take on huge debts they cannot repay. HuffPo
Lacking forthright data from the schools themselves, check out some of the consumer websites where students share experiences at for-profit colleges. They're pretty revealing and, sadly, addictive reading. In addition to Full Sail linked earlier, here are three more samples:
Ashford,
ITT,
University of Phoenix. The Department of Education runs
a website where students can calculate tuition costs;
similar websites are managed by education businesses and associations (make sure they're legit, not an industry front). Finally, student advocacy organizations like
Education Trust and some veterans groups help cut through the for-profit schools' fancy websites, tele-marketers' promises and happy TV commercials to provide the straight poop.
Also, the folks at the we-hate-Full-Sail blog maintain a section of quality art schools, places that are worth it—financially, socially and educationally. This country has some fantastic colleges and universities, and there is no friggin' reason why our taxes are being diverted from good public institutions to corporate boardrooms and shareholder accounts. The billions of public dollars that the for-profit education industry now gobbles up every year would be better spent rebuilding America's community colleges and state schools, so they are prepared to welcome our nation's learners—and honor and serve our veterans.
Today's private for-profit education sector isn't the correspondence school you may remember from comic books and matchbook covers: "Draw this girl!" The new guys represent multi-billion-dollar private equity companies, and with their aggressive lobbying and large campaign contributions, the Corpos are undermining public-sector education at the same time they're enriching private-equity poopheads like the CEO who hosted Romney's secret-video fundraiser. As Madeline Kahn might say, "Gee, what a guy." That's where our higher ed money is going.
Yes, some for-profit leviathans have cleaned up their act, and even their toughest congressional critic, Sen. Tom Harkins, commends them. But the improvements are mostly the result of pressure from Congress, the White House and new federal regulations, not because they've suddenly sprouted a conscience. A Romney administration would undo recent regulations and reverse much of the progress, further jeopardizing public institutions, reducing federal aid, bolstering commercial education factories, and benefiting Wall Street but little more—certainly not students, taxpayers and their communities.
A recent poll of private-equity leaders in the world of for-profit education makes it very clear which candidate they're backing:
Asked how concerned for-profit colleges should be about a second Obama term, 38 percent expressed strong concern—and another 21 percent checked the box labeled "Panic!" HuffPo
Here's to a little panic next month.