Game over, despite the fact that producing tar sands oil, the kind to be carried by Keystone XL, is one of the dirtiest energy processes of all, harming local communities and contributing heavily to global warming, at a time when scientific evidence shows that global warming is ever more intense.  Game over, despite the fact that recent pipeline leaks of the kind of oil to be carried across our country by Keystone XL have proven extremely harmful and difficult to clean up.

But it’s not just such scientific evidence that might cause us to question the assertions offered in the National Journal article. There’s also the fact that the journalism outlet that published the article, and at least one think tank cited in the article, have received money from the oil and gas industry. The reporter and the people quoted may well have come to their own honest conclusions about Keystone XL. But when money so heavily corrupts politics — when special interests spread their cash not just to politicians but to the advocacy groups and media companies that host and contribute to policy debates — as happens so often these days, it’s hard to sort out which opinions have been reached honestly and independently and which have been effectively bought.

One of the experts cited by National Journal for the proposition that Keystone XL is no big deal, and is a distraction from the broader energy debate, is Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, who, according to the article “has advised Obama on energy and climate issues and is close with the administration.” Grumet, an energy specialist who was indeed a key Obama 2008 policy adviser, is quoted as saying, “We are essentially jamming our national energy policy debate through a 30-inch pipe. It’s an unfortunately narrow space….”

The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) is a Washington think-tank, which purportedly stands for the principle that Washington needs Democrats and Republicans to come together for sensible solutions to our policy challenges. But in practice the outfit often seems more like a voice for corporate interests in Washington, and nowhere is that more pronounced than in the energy sphere.

Earlier this year, the BPC released a report of its energy policy commission, chaired by former Senators Trent Lott, Republican, and Byron Dorgan, Democrat — bipartisan!  The report found that “climate change is a significant issue” — but then did nothing with that insight. Instead, the report called for accelerating oil drilling offshore and on federal lands, as well as the hazardous practice of underground hydrofracking for natural gas. The report includes no recommendation to cap or tax the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

What was not highlighted at the BPC event launching the report was that both Lott and Dorgan are lobbyists for numerous companies in the oil and gas industries.

National Journal covered the BPC’s Lott-Dorgan energy commission, breathlessly noting that the former senators were “working together on a blueprint for energy legislation” and that “their effort could gain traction: Both are held in high regard by their former colleagues, and the BPC is a serious player in the energy debate.” In another piece, the National Journal called the BPC “an influential group that’s helped to shape federal policy on both energy and health care—and that has the ear of the White House and congressional leaders.”

But the National Journal didn’t question whether Lott and Dorgan’s large consulting fees from energy companies might affect their views of policy.

National Journal also did not report in these fawning pieces that a large percentage of the donors to the Bipartisan Policy Center are companies in the oil and gas field, including:

•  ExxonMobil Foundation
• American Gas Association
• Entergy Corporation
• Alliance Energy
• America’s Natural Gas Alliance
• Chevron Corporation
• ConocoPhillips Company
• Energy Future Holdings Corporation
• Exelon Corporation
• PG&E Corporation
• Pioneer Natural Resources
• Schlumberger Limited
• Shell Oil Company
• Southern Company

Corporate donors sometimes do seek explicit quid pro quo arrangements from non-profits they support — policy endorsements in exchange for cash. But they don’t always need to. Some think tanks are simply created as front groups for a given industry, so there’s nothing to corrupt. In other cases, a group might start out with a genuine independent policy mission, but the organizations’s management, acutely aware of the need to raise money to keep the non-profit going, find themselves setting boundaries that avoid criticizing corporate donors or undermining their policy stances.

I don’t know what is going on inside the Bipartisan Policy Center. But they sure take a lot of oil and gas money. And their “bipartisan” conclusions sure sound like oil and gas industry wish lists.

But then, their admirer National Journal is itself a recipient of financial support from such interests. Events on energy policy hosted by National Journal and its parent company, Atlantic Media, have been sponsored by the American Gas Association (AGA), natural gas and pipeline companies CenterPoint Energy and Spectra Energy, and oil company BP.  AGA ads also popped up over and over on the National Journal website as I researched these connections.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, and BP are among the many energy interests lobbying Washington on the pipeline issue.  All run Gulf Coast refineries that could be recipients of oil from the Keystone pipeline.

Media companies, like think tanks, need new sources of revenue to stay in business, and these types of compromises are happening every day, at a range of publications and on a range of issues. Atlantic and National Journal also have accepted as energy event sponsors the American Lung Association and alternative energy interests. But the company’s ongoing acceptance of largesse from the oil and gas industries — something that environmental advocates cannot so readily purchase — coupled with their unquestioning awe of the BPC think tank, which seems even more compromised, does raise questions about their coverage.

Last week’s National Journal story did note that Carol Browner, previously Obama’s top White House environmental official, has called proceeding with the pipeline “deeply troubling.” But it quoted two additional Obama advisers in support of the thesis that Keystone XL doesn’t matter much: Former Obama energy policy official Joseph Aldy, now at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Jason Bordoff, who, as described in the National Journal article, “left the White House this January after advising Obama on energy and climate issues in senior policy positions since April 2009.” Bordoff is quoted as saying, “I don’t know how much building or not building one pipeline is going to affect either how much oil is produced in Canada or in global greenhouse-gas emissions.”

The line taken by all these Obama-linked experts — that one little 1,700-mile pipeline won’t tip the balance on the global environment, and we should instead focus on the big picture — sounds plausible.  But oil and gas interests have and will continue to spend millions on lobbying and round-the-clock TV ads to block progress on the big picture, whether or not the Keystone pipeline is approved. And environmental experts say that no progress on larger issues can justify the environmental harms that will be caused by extracting and burning the oil in the Canadian oil sands and building the Keystone pipeline.

Bordoff is now the director of Columbia University’s new Center on Global Energy Policy, which launched last month with a speech by Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon. While I don’t doubt that Bordoff is speaking his own mind, I’m wondering if his new Center is accepting, or planning to accept, financial support from oil and gas companies.

This article also appears on Huffington Post and Grist.

Panetta served on the Corinthian board before, just prior to joining the Obama Administration as CIA director in 2009. Since then, as the debate over for-profit colleges has heated up, the public has learned a lot about Corinthian. It’s too bad this information didn’t trouble Panetta:

• Corinthian is under investigation by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and at least six state Attorneys General: California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Oregon.

• California’s Attorney General found that Corinthian falsified students’ employment records to inflate the company’s job placement rate for graduates.  In 2008, the company paid $6.6 million to settle the investigation out-of-court.  An investigation by WFAA-TV in Dallas found that Corinthian falsified employment records of Texas students.

• 66.5 percent of Corinthian associate degree students drop out, as do 59.2 percent of its bachelor’s degree students.

• An associate degree in business at Corinthian’s Everest College in Florida costs$46,792, while the same program at Miami Dade Community College costs $6,453.  A bachelor of science in business at Everest in Florida costs $81,680; the same degree from the University of Florida costs $24,458.

• Three-quarters of students who attended Corinthian-owned schools were unable to pay down any principal on their student debt in 2009, according to data from the Department of Education.  Thirty-six percent of Corinthian students default on their loans within three years – the highest rate of all publicly traded for-profit education companies.  Worse, Corinthian spent $10 million in 2010 to “manage” student defaults– repeatedly telephoning students to convince them to enter interest-bearing loan forbearance or deferment — in order to be able to report lower default rates to the Department of Education.

• Last year, the Education Department released information about which career training programs and for-profit colleges are passing — and which are flunking — its new “gainful employment” rule.  The Obama Administration watered down this regulation last year after a massive lobbying campaign by the for-profit college industry, and the rule imposes only the most minimal standards, measuring how many students are paying back their loans and how much debt they have compared to their inc0me. Corinthian’s Everest College and Universities performed the absolute worst of all schools — 43 out of 143 programs at those schools failed each of the three gainful employment tests.

• In 2009, Corinthian received at least 89.4 percent of its revenue from federal taxpayer dollars, with Pell grants, student loans, G.I. Bill funding and other aid  totaling $1.4 billion.

• Because federal aid still doesn’t cover all the cost of attending Corinthian, in 2009 and 2010 the company made private loans totaling $240 million to its students at an average interest rate of 13 to 15 percent, with some students paying as much as 18 percent.  According to its own internal analysis, Corinthian estimated that 55 percent of students with these loans will default.

• Corinthian spent between $5 and $10 million on an advertising campaign to block federal accountability standards.

Last year, Morial’s Urban League accepted $1 million in aid from Corinthian.  When I tried to ask a question of Morial and Corinthian Colleges CEO Jack Massimino on the conference call announcing the gift (paid for mostly with our tax dollars), the moderator announced that there were no more questions, and the call ended early.

The Urban League’s mission is “to provide economic empowerment, educational opportunities and the guarantee of civil rights for the underserved in America.”  Corinthian’s record shows that it accomplishes just the opposite — it takes students’ money and often leaves them deep in debt without giving them real training for a better career.

Fortunately, low-income communities have other strong advocates standing up against the abuses of for-profit colleges.  The NAACP, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Hip Hop Caucus, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the National Council of La Raza are among the groups supporting President Obama’s approach to holding the for-profits accountable. A majority of members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted in 2011 to back this Obama initiative, and Rep. Keith Ellison and others spoke with conviction about the importance of this issue.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), has written to Donald Graham, the CEO of The Washington Post company, noting that Kaplan, the for-profit education business owned by the Post, had shut down a dental assistant program in Charlotte, NC, after students complained that they had been misled about the credentials they would receive.  Waters wrote to Graham that such incidents illustrate the importance of federal rules to protect students and taxpayers from bad practices in this industry.  She concluded, “I will continue to fight against any and all so called ‘educational programs’ that exploit and mislead those who simply want a good education and a better life.”

Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans, is now formally on the wrong side of this issue.

Panetta’s long and distinguished record of public service cannot excuse his endorsement of Corinthian. In fact, as with Morial, it makes it even worse that Panetta has lent his name to Corinthian. Especially because for-profit colleges have a particularly bad record when it comes to abusing our service members and veterans.

Last year, in remarks at Fort Stewart, Georgia, President Obama warned our military service members that some for-profit colleges “aren’t interested in helping you…. They are interested in getting the money.” He called the schools’ conduct “disgraceful” and told the troops that these schools are “trying to swindle and hoodwink you.”  Holly Petraeus, who directs service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has said that predatory for-profit colleges “see service members as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform.” Senator Tom Harkin has issued an extensive report documenting how for-profit colleges use deceptive and coercive recruiting tactics to lure our troops and veterans into costly programs that provide worthless credits or degrees — and huge student loan burdens.

Corinthian is the number seven recipient of GI Bill funding among all colleges in America.

The for-profit college’s trade association, APSCU, has now attempted to deflect all the criticism by having Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, serve as keynote speaker for the group’s upcoming convention. APSCU’s website makes plain why they want Mullen to appear on their stage; APSCU boasts that Mullen’s appearance at the convention “will be a truly extraordinary moment for private sector education, bringing increased visibility and respect to the sector.”

Now with Panetta on board, the for-profit college industry has another talking point to claim that it is military friendly. But it’s not. Didn’t they hear the President? Panetta should resign his new position, and instead support veterans’ groups that are working to ensure that our troops, vets, and their families have access to quality, affordable, education opportunities that help them build careers.

So why is Suze Orman — who calls herself  ”undeniably America’s most recognized expert on personal finance” — teaching an online personal finance course at the University of Phoenix, the biggest of these controversial for-profit colleges?

Last week, celebrity guru Orman spoke at a Capitol Hill event and warned students about taking on too much loan debt. But at the same time she announced that she is launching the online University of Phoenix course. As Orman recently explained,  “You interact with this course… You’re going to leave with a will, a revocable living trust and making sure you have the right kind of insurance. When you’re done with it, oh, you will have your act together.” But if you’re taking the course, um, you’re at the University of Phoenix, and as a result you may end up in real financial trouble anyway.

Granted, there are worse institutions than the University of Phoenix, and many of its graduates have indeed gone on the productive careers. But for many students, the school has turned out to be a financial disaster. And Orman’s decision to join the  University of Phoenix faculty and thus give her seal of approval to the institution does a disservice to Americans across the country who count on her for unvarnished and useful financial advice.

A poor educational record

Apollo Group, the owner of University of Phoenix, gets about 89 percent of its revenues from federal financial aid programs. Much of that is in the form of student loans, and because of Phoenix’s high prices, many students must take out additional high-interest rate private loans to cover all the costs. Tuition for an Associate’s degree in Business at the University of Phoenix Online is $24,500. The same degree costs $4,087 at Phoenix College in the Maricopa Community College system in Arizona. A Bachelor’s in Business at the University of Phoenix costs $74,575, while the University of Arizona charges $44,200 for the same degree. So students who attend the University of Phoenix usually end up borrowing, and owing, a lot of money.

They may often enroll precisely because they have bad information. The University of Phoenix, like many for-profit colleges, has used high-pressure, deceptive boiler room tactics to recruit students. A comprehensive investigation by the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee unearthed University of Phoenix recruiting manuals instructing staff to create a false sense of urgency about signing up. One advised, “Do not tell the student we have classes running every week unless you can agree on a start date, or rolling start dates is a selling point.”  Another said to tell prospective students, “it looks like I might be able to squeeze you into” the next start date.

Likely because of deceptive recruiting, high costs, and weak programs, a large percentage of University of Phoenix students never graduate. The Senate investigation found that of the 280,000 students who had enrolled at the University of Phoenix and the other Apollo school, Western International University, in 2008-09, 60.5 percent had dropped out by mid-2010 — higher than the 54 percent overall dropout rate of for-profit colleges.

Schools like University of Phoenix with high dropout rates also have high loan default rates, and Phoenix’s has been rising steadily as the company’s enrollment and revenues have increased. By 2008, more than one in five University of Phoenix students was defaulting within three years of leaving the school — nearly twice the default rate of students at public and non-profit colleges. The company told investors last year that it expected the 2009 default rate to be 26.7 percent.

Federal regulations are designed to cut off financial aid to schools with default rates above 30 percent, and it appears that Apollo and other for-profit education companies have addressed this risk by pressuring broke students to put their loans in “forbearance” status, rather than defaulting; forbearance is a paper solution that does nothing to help the student, but allows the school to keep the federal aid pouring in.

What do the students get for their high tuition payments and big loan debts? The Senate investigation found that Apollo spent $892 per student on instruction in 2009 — “one of the lowest amounts spent on instruction per student of any company analyzed.” By comparison, the University of Arizona spent $11,128 per student on instruction.

Meanwhile, Apollo in 2009 devoted $2,225 per student — 23.7 percent, or $935 million — to marketing and recruiting. Last year when Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) introduced a bill to bar for-profit colleges from spending taxpayer money on marketing, Apollo attacked them for offering “misleading rhetoric.” The Senators had singled out Apollo for employing more than 8,000 recruiters in 2010. Advertising Age recognized Apollo as one of the top 100 spenders on U.S. advertising in 2009  – $377 million, more than Apple.  But instead of thanking Senators Harkin and Hagan for authorizing — and taxpayers for providing — most of the money to pay for these ads, and for sponsorships of everything from New Yorker magazine education panels to Good magazine’s education website to Arizona’s University of Phoenix Stadium, Apollo lashed out.

Apollo also devoted $2,535 per student in 2009 — 27 percent of its revenue, or $1.1 billion — to profit. And that was in addition to the enormous salaries Apollo paid to its top executives. In 2009, Apollo founder and Chairman John Sperling got paid $8.6 million, more than 13 times the salary of the president of the University of Arizona. Co-CEOs Charles Edelstein and Gregory Capelli shared another $3.4 million.

Investigations of misconduct

University of Phoenix also has repeatedly been charged with fraud and other misconduct.

In 2003, two former employees sued Apollo under the federal False Claims Act, alleging that the company had defrauded the U.S. Department of Education by obtaining federal student aid based on false statements of compliance with federal rules that prohibit schools from paying recruiters based on the number of students they recruit. Apollo settled that case in 2009 by paying out $78.5 million. In 2004, the Department of Education brought a separate suit for these violations, resulting in Apollo paying another $9.8 million.

Thirty-two state attorneys general are working together to investigate for-profit colleges, and some of them are pursuing allegations against the University of Phoenix. Florida’s Attorney General has subpoenaed the school as to “misrepresentations regarding financial aid” and “unfair or deceptive practices regarding recruiting, enrollment, placement, etc.” Delaware’s attorney general has subpoenaed Phoenix regarding its business practices. The Massachusetts AG is pursuing whether the schools engaged in deceptive actions with respect to recruit and financial aid.

In 2010, Apollo disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had requested information from the company about its insider trading policies relating to stock sales made by John Sperling and his son Peter in 2009. In April 2012, the SEC announced it was investigating the company for insider trading following a February 2o12 announcement of lower than expected earnings.

And this February, the University of Phoenix announced that it expected to be placed on probation by its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. The accreditor charged that the school lacked sufficient autonomy from its corporate owner, Apollo, and it also raised concerns about dropout rates and the school’s overreliance on federal aid. (The normally docile accrediting bodies have come under pressure from government authorities to start taking their duties seriously.)

Instead of atoning for its poor record, the company has been defiant. Apollo founder John Sperling, now 92 years old, is a major donor to Democratic and progressive causes, and he has used that status to personally pressure prominent people in Congress and elsewhere in Washington to undermine Obama Administration actions that would hold for-profit colleges accountable.

Orman and Phoenix

None of this seems to bother Suze Orman. Well before she announced that she was going to teach her finance class at the University Phoenix, in December 2011, Orman wrote an article in USA Today warning families, as she did last week in Washington, of the “skyrocketing costs” of college and urging them not to attend schools they cannot afford. She blamed colleges for failing to explain to students the real costs of attending. But she singled out one school for praise:

Fortunately, a few universities are realizing their duty to step up to the plate by themselves. The University of Phoenix, for example, makes all its students go through a free and mandatory three-week orientation course to make sure they understand the full costs of college before they sign on the dotted line. These efforts are encouraging.

Was Orman already being paid by Apollo at this point, or did she really decide that of all the colleges and universities in America, the one most worthy of being singled out for praise was the University of Phoenix? I don’t know. My efforts to contact Suze Orman to hear her side of the story produced no response.

But here’s a clue. The Phoenix’s three-week orientation workshop mentioned by Orman is required for prospective students who have fewer than 24 college credits to help them determine if they are “ready for the challenges of earning a degree — and if our University is right for you.” The 2013 syllabus for the workshop shows that new students will view four videos featuring none other than Suze Orman! (Titles: “What is Your Learning Path?”;  ”Why Do You Want to Go to School?”; “Invest in Yourself”; and “The Value of a Degree.”) When Orman singled out the Phoenix orientation course for praise in her USA Today article, she forgot to mention that she was, or would soon be, one of the instructors.

Orman certainly seems to be building a strong bond with the school. In January 2012, the University of Phoenix Facebook page posted a link to a new debit card marketed by Orman and asked, “We need your feedback about The Approved Prepaid MasterCard from Suze Orman! Would it be valuable to University of Phoenix students? Let us know what you think.” The school may not have gotten the answer it wanted.  A number of commenters responded that the card would in fact be a bad deal for students, and others have concluded that the Suze Orman Prepaid Mastercard is a bad deal for most people.

So why is Suze Orman giving her stamp of approval to the University of Phoenix? Attending that school may not end up being a good deal for you, but presumably the relationship is a good deal for her.

This article also appears on Huffington Post. 

The owners of America’s big for-profit colleges have developed a big bag of tricks to keep tens of billions of federal dollars flowing their way, regardless of the bad consequences for students and taxpayers.  Every time we think we’ve seen it all, a new brazen tactic emerges. Here’s the latest:

The nation’s second largest for-profit college businesses, troubled Education Management Corp. (EDMC), last year designated a Canadian college that it owns as a satellite campus of one of its U.S. colleges located 1500 miles away across the border. That questionable merger might have allowed EDMC, which is 41 percent owned by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, to evade a U.S. law aimed at protecting students against predatory schools peddling useless degrees.

The federal law, the 90/10 rule (20 U.S.C. section 1094(a)(24)) requires for-profit colleges to obtain at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than U.S. Department of Education-backed student grants and loans. The purpose is to keep federal aid away from schools on which almost no students would spend their own money, and that almost no outside scholarship fund would support. For-profit colleges now receive 25 percent of all of this taxpayer education money — some $33 billion a year.  But many of these schools offer a toxic mix of deceptive marketing and high-priced, low quality programs that often leave students with worthless credits, unimproved job prospects, and insurmountable debt. With 13 percent of U.S. college students, for-profit colleges now account for 47 percent of federal student loan defaults.

Some public attention has been focused on efforts by for-profit colleges to evade this 90-10 rule by relentlessly recruiting US troops and veterans, who receive military education benefits that, through manipulation by for-profit college lobbyists, somehow count toward the 10 percent non-federal aid measure. But it appears that for-profit colleges may also be engaged in merging campuses to accomplish the same aim, and keep federal money pouring into their coffers. And this new wrinkle, merging with a foreign campus, where most or all students would not be eligible for U.S. financial aid, opens up another loophole that, if unchecked, could subvert the purposes of the 90-10 law.

In 2012, EDMC made its Canadian campus, the wholly-owned Art Institute of Vancouver, a satellite campus of another EDMC school, the Art Institute of Phoenix. “Ex EDMC,” an anonymous commenter on one of my articles on Huffington Post, wrote last September that EDMC undertook this merger “in order to prevent AI Phoenix and its many satellite campuses from exceeding the 90% of revenue from U.S. government student loan threshold.” The poster added, “Approximately 90% of The Art Institute of Vancouver’s students are from Canada and none are eligible for U.S. government student loans (Title IV) for now.” The commenter claimed the merger was ”an intentional and apparently unethically [sic] attempt by EDMC to circumvent the 90/10 rule.” Ex EDMC concluded, “It is unclear why the U.S. Dept. of Education would allow any U.S. school to simply designate a foreign school with no Title IV funded students as a U.S. satellite campus in order to avoid being held accountable to the 90/10 rule.” (Ex EDMC posted a nearly identical comment on this website. The comments were hiding in plain site until a former for-profit college student, who is engaged in exposing the misdeeds of this industry, pointed them out to me.)

I was unable to locate Ex EDMC or to verify that he or she was ever actually affiliated with the company. I sought EDMC’s comment on the claim that the merger was undertaken for purposes of evading the law, but EDMC’s response (see below) did not shed much light on the situation. I would certainly be pleased to hear from Ex EDMC or anyone else with knowledge of what happened.

EDMC’s SEC disclosure forms do show that the Art Institute of Vancouver switched from being an independent campus accredited by a Canadian agency in 2010-11 to being a satellite of the Phoenix campus and thus accredited by the U.S. Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), at least by the time of a September 12, 2012, SEC filing.

A comprehensive report on the for-profit college industry released in 2012 by Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, found  multiple schemes employed by for-profit colleges to evade various requirements of federal law. This was one:

Since for-profit colleges report 90/10 figures by [the federal] Office of Postsecondary Education ID (OPEID) numbers, instead of by campus, and one OPEID may contain multiple campuses, some companies consolidate and switch campuses between OPEIDs to lower their reported 90/10 number regardless of the proximity of the campus.

Harkin’s report noted that one of the other big for-profit college companies, Career Education Corporation, had recently sought approval from the Department of Education to consolidate 19 of its campuses into one; six of those campuses were over the 90 percent limit on federal aid. The Harkin investigation also found:

EDMC discussed internally a consolidation and reorganization of its campuses in late 2009 in part to address concerns with 90/10 issues at some campuses.

The Harkin report concluded that some for-profit colleges may also have been merging campuses to evade a separate federal provision, one that removes campuses from eligibility for federal aid if too many of their former students are defaulting on their student loans.

Harkin subsequently raised these issues with the Department of Education. A December 2012 letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan from Harkin and seven other Democratic Senators charged that “there is evidence” that for-profit colleges have merged campuses for federal reporting purposes “to avoid potential sanctions, including loss of federal financial aid eligibility.” In a recent letter responding to Senator Harkin, Secretary Duncan addressed the concern about using mergers to avoid the loss of federal aid eligibility under the 90/10 rule, but he wrote “nothing in the statute or regulations currently prevents companies that own more than one institution from applying for Department consent to combine them, or from applying to shift additional locations from one institution to another, in order to maintain eligibility under those provisions.”

However, the fact that “nothing … prevents” for-profit colleges from applying for consent to merge designations does not mean the Department of Education is required to approve every merger, no matter how questionable. And, as far as I know, no one has publicly pressed the issue of a for-profit college combining foreign campuses with U.S. campuses as a convenient way to evade the law.

I asked Barmak Nassirian, one of the smartest and most principled higher education experts, for his reaction. He responded:

I hadn’t heard of this novel scheme, but, if the allegation that EDMC is merging a Canadian stand-alone with a U.S. campus is true, it would certainly provide a new twist on Harkin’s concerns about the gaming of 90/10. Given the very high cache that U.S. credentials enjoy in many countries, I could see the for-profits setting up loss-leader “branch campuses” overseas, just to earn their 10 cents on the dollar there. This would be somewhat complicated by [U.S. Department of Education] Title IV regulatory requirements, as well as by local regulations (if any).

I contacted Jacquelyn Muller, Vice President for Communications and Public Relations at EDMC and asked her: Why did EDMC decide to make the Art Institute of Vancouver a satellite campus of the Art Institute of Phoenix? Was compliance with the federal 90/10 rule a consideration?  What does the Art Institute of Phoenix compliance with the 90/10 rule look like since the combination if you remove revenue from the Vancouver campus? Did the U.S. Department of Education provide consent for that combination? If so, when did EDMC make that request, and when did the Department approve it? Did the Department require that Art Institute of Vancouver obtain ACICS or other US accreditation? Did the Department mandate any additional actions in order for the merger to occur?

Muller sent this response:

The decision to make The Art Institute of Vancouver a branch of The Art Institute of Phoenix was approved by the Ministry of Advanced Education of British Columbia, ACICS (the institutional accreditor of The Art Institute of Phoenix), and the U.S. Department of Education. As a result of this change, students attending The Art Institute of Vancouver may now graduate from a U.S.-accredited institution and U.S. students who are eligible for U.S.-based Title IV aid will have the opportunity to apply for aid to study at The Art Institute of Vancouver, which has been recognized by The Princeton Review as one of the top ten “Undergraduate Schools to Study Video Game Design” for 2013.  Education Management is committed to providing students from a variety of socioeconomic and educational backgrounds the opportunity to improve their lives through higher education, and to assisting in improving and educating America’s workforce.  We remain dedicated to offering every advantage to our students in their pursuit of their career goals.

I asked the same questions of the U.S. Department of Education. Rather than express any concern about an action that had the potential to abuse the requirements of its own law, the Department told me only this:

We reviewed the application under the existing procedures and requirements, and Art Institute of Vancouver was approved as an additional location for the Art Institute of Phoenix last August.

The Department may not have anything to say about the EDMC action now, but there could be regulatory solutions to this problem. The Institute for College Access and Success, a non-profit focused on higher education policy issues, has already proposed reforms to address the issue of evading the 90/10 rule and the default rate rules through mergers generally: The Department of Education could either prohibit changes in OPEID reporting units, or require continued compliance under previous OPEID numbers for at least three years after any change. As to the specific evasion embodied by EDMC’s action, Nassirian suggests that we consider refining 90/10 to provide that schools obtain at least 10 percent of their revenue from non-federal money earned within U.S. borders.

According to the memo:

The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.

The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.

Luntz then offered GOP candidates some “LANGUAGE THAT WORKS.”

“We must not rush to judgment before all the facts are in. We need to ask more questions. We deserve more answers. And until we learn more, we should not commit America to any international document that handcuffs us either now or into the future.”

Finally, Luntz provided a blueprint for best delivering this message:

You need to be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message. People are willing to trust scientists, engineers, and other leading research professionals, and less willing to trust politicians. If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians.

(Emphasis in original.)

Years later, Luntz seemed to admit that climate change was real, but his old memo describes well the strategy still used today by many GOP politicians, by corporations in the oil, gas, and coal industries, and by think-tanks funded by those industries: (1) Pretend the scientific evidence of danger is murky, even when it’s overwhelming; (2) hire scientists, or people who seem like scientists, to promote your claims; and (3) insist that it’s too risky to the economy to do anything about the problem.

A notable recent use of this strategy was from GOP star Senator Marco Rubio, who last month declined to accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that the climate change of recent decades has been caused by human activity. “Well, first of all,” he said, “the climate’s always changing.” He added, ”I know people said there’s a significant scientific consensus on that issue, but I’ve actually seen reasonable debate on that principle.” Rubio then warned that reforms aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions “will have a devastating impact” on the U.S. economy.

But this whole strategy was hatched long before Luntz’s memo, and long before global warming became a central issue. Corporate-funded pseudo-science denial has been around for decades, with particular focus on denying the health risks of tobacco, and denying that burning fossil fuels was a major cause of dangerous acid rain, before conservatives and corporations got around to denying climate change.

One of the founding fathers of this strategy is linked to all three of those denial efforts. As President Obama calls for action on climate change, to help  prevent further rises in temperature and future Katrinas and Sandys, we should study the methods of one Alan W. Katzenstein, and figure out how to overcome such obstruction of the truth.

Alan Katzenstein, according to his resume, received a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1942. A bio he circulated claimed he had “a background in chemical and biological sciences,” but his only graduate degree was an MBA from New York University. Katzenstein’s resume says he worked on “product development, quality control and Navy and Air Force organizations” for a decade, and then spent 15 years working at advertising firms in New York before starting his own company, Katzenstein Associates in 1973. He described himself on his resume as a “Consultant on public affairs and issue management.” Rather than a scientist, Katzenstein was a PR man.

By the early 1980′s, Katzenstein was working as a consultant to the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of power companies, most of them dependent on coal. Public concern was mounting that burning of coal and other fossil fuels was contributing to acid rain — increased acidity of precipitation that harms waterways, soil, trees, buildings, statues, and, ultimately, human health.  Clear scientific evidence from the EPA, the National Research Council, and other bodies showed that sulfur dioxide emissions from burning coal was helping cause acid rain. Katzenstein went to work to prevent new regulations, producing a torrent of articles, op-eds, letters to the editor, and more, with titles like “The Real Facts About Acid Rain.”

He was well on the way to developing his rhetorical Katzenstyle: Essentially, “We don’t know for certain that my client’s product causes harm, so let’s not rush into doing anything about it.” A November 1981 acid rain report that Katzenstein authored for Edison, “Understanding Acid Rain,” read like a model for Luntz’s memo; it offered questions like, “Is it possible that power plant emissions are not the primary cause of acid rain?” Well, of course, anything’s possible.

Katzenstein was particularly effective at placing his acid rain denial material in the Wall Street Journal.  In November 1981, a group called the “Coalition for Environmental Energy Balance” ran in the Journal a Katzensteinian paid advertisement, arguing that “[t]here is a great deal still unknown” about acid rain and that pending legislation to control it was “overreaction and ovverregulation” that could dramatically increase consumer electric bills. A similar ad that ran in the Journal and also the New York Times and Washington Post, this time sponsored by Edison Electric, offered readers a “free updated fact book” — Katzenstein’s acid rain report.

In June 1984, the Journal published an op-ed by Katzenstein entitled ”Acidity is Not the Major Factor” in which he pressed the argument that most of the acidity in lakes occurred naturally, rather than being caused by fossil fuels. His piece prompted a letter to the editor from a forest ecologist who said Katzenstein “made several assertions” about research findings in which the ecologist had played a role and “all of them are incorrect!” The ecologist wrote: “These results have been published widely. It is apparent that Mr. Katzenstein’s sole purpose is to confuse the acid rain issue.”  That same year, a forest ranger wrote to the magazine The Rotarian asserting that Katzenstein, in an article in that magazine, mischaracterized the ranger’s remarks, citing him for the proposition that DDT was destroying the food supply for wildlife in the Adirondack region of New York, when in fact the ranger blamed acid rain.

The Wall Street Journal, though, soon published its own editorial, expressly endorsing “a 49-page booklet, ‘Understanding Acid Rain,’ by Alan W. Katzenstein, a technical consultant to the Edison Electric Institute.” The Journal backed Katzenstein’s claim that the main source of acid in lakes was decaying organic matter, and it recommended that the EPA read the document and defer action on acid rain for “say, the next 20 to 200 years.”

Katzenstein’s propaganda effort may have helped delay policy changes to address acid rain for almost a decade. Fortunately, industry opposition ultimately failed. In 1990, Congress passed legislation to contain these emissions. And it worked, significantly cutting emissions in a highly cost effective manner. The Economist in 2002 wrote that the legislation was probably “[t]he greatest green success story of the past decade.” Even the Journal by then had admitted that the acid rain legislation was “fabulously successful.” (The law reduced acid rain by heavily decreasing emissions of sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen. Unfortunately, carbon dioxide emissions from burning of fossil fuels, a key cause of global warming, also continue to acidify the world’s oceans and threaten marine life and fishing.)

While in the midst of the fight to delay solutions to acid rain, Katzenstein sold his expert denial skills to another troubled industry whose products had been causing immense harm: tobacco.

In 1987, with Congress on the verge of banning smoking on shorter U.S. flights, because of concerns about the health dangers for non-smokers, Katzenstein went to work. In February 1987, the New York Times published a letter from Katzenstein questioning the link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer.  In April, the Tobacco Institute, a non-profit group funded by cigarette makers, circulated to media a report, “Environmental Tobacco Smoke (TES) and the Risk of Lung Cancer — How Convincing is the Evidence?” The Institute described the report’s author, Katzenstein, as a graduate of MIT and “a consultant in technical analysis and communication.” The report concluded, “Based on the evidence to date, the concern about the risk of lung cancer for nonsmoking Americans appears to be overstated and unsupported.”

Katzenstein then embarked on a nationwide media tour, giving scores of interviews to local newspapers, TV, and radio to deny that smoking on airplanes endangered non-smokers. You can watch him do a TV appearance in Milwaukee, telling a reporter, “There’s no credible evidence — no convincing evidence  that your health is in jeopardy because people are smoking around you.” He’s described in the TV report as “a consultant to the Tobacco Institute” who had “reviewed all the studies” on second-hand smoke. At a stop in Greenville, SC, Katzenstein went as far as to claim that second-hand smoke was good for you: “an early warning signal that ventilation is inadequate.” The Greenville TV reporter referred to Katzenstein as a “scientist.”

All of this was nonsense. The scientific evidence was clear, and only became clearer, that second-hand smoke contributes to health problems including asthma, respiratory infections, sudden infant death syndrome, heart disease, and, yes, lung cancer.  Undeterred, by 1990, Katzenstein was preparing to deliver a paper ”on environmental tobacco smoke” at a conference sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute; corporate-funded Cato offered a $1000 honorarium.

Again, fortunately, the truth about smoking and health won out, and common sense protections against second-hand smoke have advanced to this day. But Katzenstein’s campaign of denial and delay may have contributed to smoke-related health problems for large numbers of people in the meantime.

Undeterred, Katzenstein at last turned his denial skills to an even more powerful global menace — climate change. In 1994, the Journal published a letter to the editor from Katzenstein asserting that there “are increasing doubts among scientists that global warming is a real threat to our planet” and also questioning whether fossil fuels were contributing to the planet’s hotter temperatures. The letter, as published, listed no affiliation for Katzenstein, and it’s unclear whether he was still working for Edison or another industry client, auditioning for new work, or simply determined as a matter of compulsion to deny every serious threat facing humanity.

I would have loved to pursue all these issues by speaking with Alan Katzenstein, but it turns out he died in 1997.  He left quite a legacy, though — one that supporters of public health and safety must learn how to counter, before even more harm is done. For starters, when you hear a politician like Marco Rubio say that the scientific evidence about global warming is inconclusive, but that the economic dangers of addressing the problem are manifest, go find the real facts.

This article also appears on Huffington Post.

Will Mitch Daniels tell the heads of predatory for-profit colleges that they’re doing a great job?

Last year, the annual convention of owners and executives of for-profit colleges (University of Phoenix, The Art Institutes, Kaplan, etc.), held in Las Vegas, featured paid speakers George W. Bush and Michelle Rhee, and, for entertainment, a fake knockoff version of Creedence Clearwater Revival. After a year in which the truth about their shoddy practices finally sent many for-profit colleges into a tailspin, they will gather again in June in Orlando. This year’s meeting of their trade association, APSCU, will feature: former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R); retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen; and … Kool and the Gang.  Or, really, Kool, and his brother; most of the old Gang, including lead singer J.T. Taylor, who sang your hits “Ladies Night” and “Celebration,” are long gone.

Last year, after I questioned Reformer Rhee’s decision to speak to the cynical barons of for-profit education — owners of the kinds of underperforming schools I thought she stood against — she pledged to deliver a tough message in her APSCU talk. But having been barred from attending the conference, we smuggled out a tape revealing that Rhee instead delivered a kinder, gentler message that barely even alluded to criticism of her hosts.

This year, we should again challenge APSCU’s keynote speakers — Governor Daniels and Admiral Mullen — to actually tell the blunt truth to APSCU’s members: that many in their industry, including most of the biggest players, have been doing a disservice to our country by peddling high-priced, low-quality programs that leave many students deep in debt and fleece the taxpayers who finance federal financial aid.

As an advocate of small government and fiscal austerity, Governor Daniels, who is now president of Purdue University, should question how an industry that has been receiving as much as $33 billion a year from taxpayers can continue to fight against federal reforms that would hold it accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse. Governor Daniels should understand that this is not a free market program but a government program — the biggest for-profit colleges receive about 86 percent of their revenue from taxpayers.

The industry continues to spend millions of those dollars on lobbying, advertising, lawyering, and campaign contributions to block common sense rules that would cut off federal aid to schools that consistently abuse their students. Daniels should tell the APSCU members that they should curb their arrogant lobbying campaign, improve their programs, and halt their misconduct.

Admiral Mullen has been a a strong advocate for higher education for service members and veterans. He has championed America’s community colleges; he even made an unexpected appearance at President Obama’s community college summit in 2010 to tout the achievements of those institutions.  Community colleges provide many of the same kinds of programs as for-profit colleges, often with higher quality classes and almost always at a much lower price for students.

Last year, in remarks at Fort Stewart, Georgia, President Obama warned our military service members that some for-profit colleges “aren’t interested in helping you…. They are interested in getting the money.” He called the schools’ conduct “disgraceful” and told the troops that these schools are “trying to swindle and hoodwink you.”  Holly Petraeus, who directs service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has said that predatory for-profit colleges “see service members as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform.” Senator Tom Harkin has issued an extensive report documenting how for-profit colleges use deceptive and coercive recruiting tactics to lure our troops and veterans into costly programs that provide worthless credits or degrees — and huge student loan burdens.

APSCU’s website makes plain why they want Mullen to appear on their stage; APSCU boasts that Mullen’s appearance at the convention “will be a truly extraordinary moment for private sector education, bringing increased visibility and respect to the sector.”

But Mullen, who recently joined the board of General Motors, should tell the for-profit colleges that if they don’t start fairly competing for students by offering better value for the money, rather than by using high-pressure boiler room tactics, that they can expect to be driven off military bases and towns, and that they can expect our troops and vets to get the message and stop enrolling.

Both Governor Daniels and Admiral Mullen should consider whether they are prepared to deliver tough messages to the wealthy APSCU barons who have caused so much harm. If they aren’t, then for the sake of their own reputations, the cause of fiscal sanity, and the welfare of America’s students, they should just stay home.

 This article also appears on Huffington Post. 

Trent Lott trained in the ways of Washington on your dime. Now he uses that knowledge as a paid lobbyist for dirty energy companies. while also posing as a wise statesman.

Far too often in Washington, policy decisions are influenced by big money — wealthy corporations spend millions on lobbying, public relations, and campaign contributions to get their way. Big money helps explain why your cell phone and cable TV bills are so expensive, why small investors are still unprotected from Wall Street abuses, why taxpayers subsidize incomprehensible waste, like the $33 billion a year we spend on for-profit colleges that often ruin students’ lives.

But one of the worst affronts to our democracy, and one of the worst dangers to our world, is the way that dirty energy companies — oil, gas, coal — have mercilessly lobbied and spread misinformation to prevent action on climate change. It’s bad because it’s obvious that extreme weather is already producing the hottest years on record and wrecking communities and killing people in violent storms. It’s bad because there is overwhelming agreement among scientists that the burning of fossil fuels is helping to cause this global warming, yet little is being done to change our ways. To add insult to injury, though, consider this: Some of the most powerful lobbyists working to deny these problems and block solutions were trained and equipped to be lobbyists on the taxpayers’ dime.

What I mean is that Members of Congress, congressional staff members, and other federal officials are increasingly using their tenures as paid public servants to qualify themselves to be lobbyists for corporations, including dirty energy firms. They learn the policy issues, the legislative process, the art of back room deals while receiving government salaries. They build ties in the government office suites, the government dining room, and the government gym, with the poor saps who decide to stay behind in government jobs. Then they turn around and reward the taxpayers who financed their training by walking through the revolving door — by selling themselves to corporations that often trash the public interest.  Even worse, they sometimes appear in public forums as wise public statesmen, such as on energy issues, without disclosing relevant conflicts of interests, such as that they are paid advocates for oil, gas, and coal companies.

Exhibit A: Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Republican of Mississipi, who gained his Washington skills and status over 40 years on the federal payroll — essentially, you built him — and now lobbies for companies that are generally part of the problem, not the solution, on energy and climate change.     

Lott is a master at getting paid to represent dirty energy companies in private offices while posing in public as an energy expert seeking sensible bipartisan solutions. Yesterday Lott took that effort to a new level by sponsoring a purported blue ribbon commission report that reads more like an energy industry strategy document.

After working five years as a congressional staff member in Washington, Lott served 35 years in Congress, 16 in the House and 19 in the Senate. He became the Republican leader in 1996 but stepped down under pressure in 2002 after praising Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist run for the White House.

Lott abruptly resigned from the Senate in December 2007, less than two years into his fourth Senate term. Some pundits speculated that Lott chose that moment to resign because of a looming deadline — Senators still around after the start of 2008 would be covered by a new ethics law that prohibits former Members of Congress from lobbying for two years after leaving office. Lott responded that the new law ”didn’t have a big role in that decision.” OK, not a big role.

Within 20 days of his resignation, Lott had formed the Breaux Lott Leadership Group with former Democratic Senator John Breaux (LA).  The firm has represented a large number of energy companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Entergy, General Electric, National Propane Gas Association, Plains Exploration, Shell Oil, and America’s Natural Gas Alliance. In 2010, Breaux Lott sold itself to mega-lobbying firm Patton Boggs, which itself also represents energy companies including ATP Oil & Gas and Total.

Breaux Lott also brings in millions lobbying for clients in the telecommunications, pharmaceutical, defense, aerospace, and other industries — AT&T, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, FedeEx, etc. In addition, Lott is a resolute paid advocate for the aforementioned toxic for-profit college industry; although his public excuses for the industry aren’t very persuasive, Republic Report has him on camera explaining how he charms his former Senate colleagues one by one into backing his clients.

At the Breaux Lott Leadership Group, “leadership” is the euphemism for lobbying and influence-peddling. Its website explains that the firm ”has policy expertise in all energy issue areas – ranging from oil and gas exploration to working with high-level officials of the Administration, Department of Energy and Mineral Management Service.  Our access to energy policy makers in Congress is one of our strongest attributes…. Senators Breaux’s and Lott’s unmatched network in the area of energy related matters.”  Translation: These guys made a lot of friends when they were Senators. Now their friends can be your friends, for a fee.

Lott has leveraged not just his congressional relationships but also his congressional cash. He has drawn from the $1.3 million left over in his Senate campaign coffers to make contributions to current Members of Congress, even while he’s sought to influence Congress as a lobbyist.

But while he touts his insider access in selling his services to attract energy industry clients, Lott also puts himself forward as a wise leader ready to solve America’s energy challenges. He has appeared jointly to discuss energy policy issues with his business partner, Senator Breaux, on Fox News and on MSNBC, where Lott called for “more drilling.” In neither case did the former Senators, or the networks presenting them, disclose that both men are paid lobbyists for energy companies.

Lott is also the co-chair, with former Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), of the Energy Project Board at a Washington think tank called the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). Last year the National Journal reported that the former Senators “are working together on a blueprint for energy legislation” and that “their effort could gain traction: Both are held in high regard by their former colleagues, and the BPC is a serious player in the energy debate.”

In touting this initiative, Lott told the National Journal that he now drives a Mini Cooper and claimed to have cut his utility bill by making his “old house” more energy efficient. He also seemed to acknowledge that climate change is real. But he counseled for caution and consensus on addressing the problem, rather than the kind of determined effort suitable to an urgent challenge. Lott’s advice to President Obama? “He needs to do it without throwing out there things that are controversial at the gate. Don’t be putting out markers saying, ‘We need this, that, or the other.’” But when it comes to producing energy, Lott takes a more insistent approach; in a TV appearance with Dorgan, Lott said, “I want produce more of everything. I want more oil, more gas, more coal, more hydro, more nuclear. I’m willing to look at alternative fuels and all that….”

BPC released the Lott-Dorgan energy report at an event on Wednesday. It finds that “climate change is a significant issue” — but then does nothing with that insight. Instead, this bipartisan report calls for acceleration of oil drilling offshore and on federal lands, as well as implementing new standards to allow expansion of the hazardous practice of underground hydrofracking for natural gas. The report includes no recommendation to cap or tax the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

That the Lott-Dorgan-BPC energy report is tilted toward the dirty energy industries, and expresses no urgency regarding climate change, should not come as a surprise. Like Lott, Democrat Dorgan is an energy lobbyist, the co-chair of Government Relations at the firm Arent Fox, where he represents oil companies including Denbury Resources and Noble Energy. And the Bipartisan Policy Center seems to make a specialty of presenting politicians-turned-corporate-lobbyists as advocates for sensible, moderate solutions to policy issues.

Lott’s fealty to his paid corporate clients goes so far that he has even incensed his fellow conservatives. As a Senator, Lott aggressively opposed the Law of the Sea Treaty, which addresses the rights and obligations of countries in the world’s oceans. Senator Lott claimed that the treaty would undermine U.S. sovereignty and hurt the U.S. economy. But lobbyist Lott was hired by Shell Oil to push for Senate ratification of the treaty, a reversal that drew a rebuke from the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

In short, it appears that Trent Lott sells his influence, his reputation, his principles, and, sometimes, his responsibility, including to address the urgent climate change issue.  And who built this lobbyist? We did.

This article also appears on Huffington Post.

Harkin and his congressional colleagues, some Republicans as well as Democrats, have introduced a series of bills aimed at protecting servicemembers from for-profit college abuses. Troops and vets, as well as other potential students, are getting the message that these schools may be hazardous to their futures; enrollment is down, and the industry is in a tailspin.

The for-profit colleges lobbying group, APSCU, has responded by assembling a “Blue Ribbon Taskforce for Military and Veteran Education.” The task force plans to release its findings to the public next week, but APSCU circulated them to members last night, and Republic Report can share them with you now — a report and a separate brochure.

The task force mostly consisted of executives at various for-profit colleges, plus, as “special advisers,” officials from the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Student Veterans of America (SVA). SVA has sometimes been critical of misconduct by APSCU members.

The recommendations are nice enough, saying that for-profit colleges “should … provide accurate and complete information to prospective students,” but the report appears to exist on another planet, since it fails to acknowledge the widespread abuses by the sector that have been documented by Senator Harkin, the news media, and many others.

The real test will be whether these schools decide to change their ways and actually live up to higher standards. Steve Gunderson, APSCU’s CEO, told Stars and Stripes yesterday that he expects APSCU members to be evaluated “not by what we say we’ll do, but by our conduct.” According to Stars and Stripes, Gunderson “said many of the new guidelines will require some cultural changes for the schools in how they approach and cater to veterans, and represent more than a rubber stamp on existing programs.” If the APSCU schools really mean that, it would be good news. But several decades of misconduct by these for-profit colleges requires the public to watch carefully, and also requires Congress and the Administration to implement serious reforms that ensure that our troops and vets — and all our students — have real opportunities to build careers through higher education.

This article also appears on Huffington Post.

Several years of public scrutiny have exposed that many of America’s for-profit colleges are playing a cruel joke on students and taxpayers — high-priced, low-quality programs, sold through deceptive recruiting practices, that often leave students without good jobs and deep in debt. This scam has cost taxpayers as much as $33 billion in a single year. Worse, it has ruined the lives of students — veterans, single mothers, and others struggling to build a better future. For-profit colleges have 12 percent of U.S. college students but a shocking 47 percent of student loan defaults.

When the Obama Administration sought to implement common sense reforms to halt the worst abuses, the for-profit college companies – owned by Goldman Sachs, the Washington Post Company, and private equity firms, among others –unleashed a lobbying and public relations blitz – backed by campaign contributions to Capitol Hill. But if they managed to get irresponsible Members of Congress to stymie progress in Washington, they couldn’t conceal the hard truths about their cynical industry. Many potential students are now wary of their come ons, and the brakes have been applied to their shameless joy ride. Enrollments are way down, as are stock prices, and companies are closing campuses or shutting down entirely.

Instead of taking this opportunity to reform, to consider whether they could save their businesses by moving to a model that actually helps students train for good jobs, the industry’s big players appear to be digging in, and continuing to use their revenues — about 86 percent of which come from taxpayers — to engage in lobbying and propaganda aimed at convincing the public that everything is fine, that their schools are paragons of free-market innovation and upward mobility.

The latest and perhaps inevitable step in this expensive persuasion campaign is, of course, a movie. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, Michael E. Platt, CEO of a marketing company that helps find recruits for  for-profit colleges, has produced Reconstructing the Dream, a documentary purportedly about the need for colleges to get better at training students for careers.

But the trailers for the documentary reveal what appears to be an incendiary propaganda film, complete with stirring, emotional music, aimed at obscuring the facts about for-profit college abuses. ”Many politicians continue to manipulate the truth and serve the interests of the unions in order to keep the private sector from serving adult learners, creating a virtual, permanent underclass,” says the narrator in one clip — which was removed after a reporter for the Chronicle asked about it.

Platt told the Chronicle he took advice on shaping the film’s message from Steve Gunderson, president of the for-profit colleges’ main trade association, APSCU.