On Friday a Missouri jury awarded $13 million in punitive damages to a single mother who had been deceived by for-profit Vatterott College. Vatterott, which has a long record of abusing students and leaving them deep in debt, is owned by TA Associates, a private equity firm financially tied to Mitt Romney’s own private equity firm and to the 2012 Romney presidential campaign.
Jennifer Kerr of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, saw Vatterott’s TV ads and visited the campus in 2009 to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse. A Vatterott recruiter told Kerr that the school didn’t have a nursing …
The main trade association of for-profit colleges, APSCU, seems to exist for the purpose of protecting the worst, most abusive, most predatory conduct by its member companies. Why else would the association, once again last week, attack the U.S. Department of Education for seeking to implement a law that simply requires career colleges that receive federal aid to actually train students to earn a living? Why else would it send its CEO to offer wholly incredible comments before a Senate committee? And what was General Wesley Clark doing speaking at APSCU’s annual convention?
APSCU and members of the for-profit college …
Under a federal law enacted in 2010, taxpayers now fund efforts by presidential nominees to begin their White House transition efforts even before the election, by providing federal services and facilities to the transition operation. Mitt Romney was the first recipient of this sensible reform aimed at ensuring a stronger start for a new president. Unfortunately, it appears that Romney has now turned those taxpayer resources into yet another opportunity to make money. This week we learned that the report of the Romney Readiness Project has been released. But instead of posting the document on the Internet …
The U.S. Department of Education is now engaged in a series of public hearings on higher education issues, including reforms to curb the abuses of predatory for-profit colleges. It is also accepting written comments from the public. I attended the opening hearing last week in Washington, DC, and I tweeted (May 21) about the powerful presentations of reform advocates and the stonewalling strategy of for-profit colleges. For several years I have been in touch with numerous former students and staff of for-profit colleges. Some have filed with the Department harrowing accounts of deceptive and abusive practices by these …
The U.S. Department of Education announced this morning that it will conduct new hearings and rulemaking proceedings on a range of higher education issues, including the contested “gainful employment” rule, which is aimed at curbing the abuses of predatory for-profit colleges.
Last month, a federal judge delivered his second blow in less than a year to the gainful employment rule. Judge Rudolph Contreras, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, upheld the Administration’s power to enact the rule, but, in a lawsuit brought by expensive lawyers hired by the powerful for-profit college …Continue Reading »
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 …
Eight U.S. Senators today sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calling on him to investigate tactics used by some major for-profit colleges to circumvent rules aimed at reducing student loan defaults. A report issued in July by Senator Tom Harkin’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee documented that several big for-profit colleges were misleading and harassing students to convince them to place their loans in “forbearance” or “deferment” status so that the schools would not have to report their student loans as in default. Federal law takes away a school’s eligibility for student financial …
The controversial for-profit college industry, threatened by the Obama’s Administration’s efforts to hold it accountable for a torrent of waste, fraud, and abuse at the expense of students and taxpayers, bet heavily on a Romney and GOP victory in 2012. The industry, which gets $32 billion a year from taxpayers and whose biggest players get 86 percent of their revenues from federal funds, gave millions of that money to Republican candidates and Super PACs. This was on top of the tens of millions the industry has spent on lobbying, lawyering, and advertising to defeat the Obama reforms.
So, having bet …
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