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 …
You can fault the for-profit college trade association APSCU for many things, but not for loyalty. APSCU sticks by its members.
In May, the FBI raided FastTrain College amid allegations of fraudulent marketing practices. In June, 20 state attorneys general forced marketing company QuinStreet to shut down GIBill.com, a website that deceived countless veterans into believing they were on a government site that offered unbiased education advice, when in fact the site shilled for for-profit colleges. Both FastTrain and QuinStreet were and remain members of APSCU.
Now the Justice Department has filed a 47-page civil complaint in federal …
Yesterday at Sen. Tom Harkin’s press conference on the release of his new report on the predatory nature of the for-profit college industry, one of the most illuminating testimonies came not from the senator or his colleagues, but from a former active and knowing participant in the abusive system. Laura Brozek worked for ITT Technical Institute for over seven years as a recruiter in southern California. She started as an entry-level recruiter, enticing prospective students, including parolees and those with felony records who were interested in criminal justice jobs they likely could never obtain, to enroll at …
The nation’s major for-profit colleges show no sign that they are ready to accept the inevitable: that in a time of enormous budget pressures, they cannot continue to siphon off 32 billion dollars a year in federal student aid for high-priced, low-quality programs that often leave students without jobs and deep in debt. They show no sign of agreeing to reasonable rules that would bar deceptive marketing and recruiting and cut off aid to college programs that are failing students. Instead, the for-profit colleges continue to reserve a big chunk of their profits to relentless lobbying and lawyering …
In May, Republic Report approached Virginia Democratic Party chairman Brian Moran and asked him if there was a conflict of interest between his role in the party — advancing the goals of President Barack Obama — and his job as a for-profit college lobbyist for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), which has specialized in battling Obama’s attempts to hold the industry accountable to students and taxpayers.
He blew us off, saying that our reporting was “totally unfair” and that there was “absolutely not” any conflict between being chair of the Democratic Party and being a corporate …
Over the weekend, a federal trial judge in Washington, DC, upheld the power of the federal government to issue its “gainful employment” rule, a provision aimed at channeling federal financial aid away from college and career training programs that leave students deep in debt. But the judge, Rudolph Contreras, held that the U.S. Department of Education failed to provide a reasoned explanation for one of the three tests imposed by its rule, and he therefore sent the rule back to the Department for further explanation.
The decision came in a lawsuit brought by APSCU, the largest trade association of for-profit colleges, and …
She promised a bang, but delivered a whimper.
Republic Report was the first to report that Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging former chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools, would be addressing the Las Vegas annual convention of APSCU, the largest trade association for the controversial for-profit college industry. Not everyone is a fan of Rhee’s approach to education reform, but she is a prominent figure, and we expressed concern that, unless Rhee used the opportunity to sharply criticize her hosts, her appearance would look like an endorsement of an industry where many schools offer a toxic mix of deceptive …
Brian Moran, the chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, has been taking heat over the fact that he also serves as a lobbyist for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), a trade group representing for-profit colleges. APSCU is engaged in an ongoing battle against President Obama’s efforts to hold its member schools accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse with taxpayer dollars. With Virginia a critical swing state in this fall’s presidential election, it is remarkable that the state Democratic party chair holds a day job as a corporate lobbyist focused on opposing key parts of President Obama’s …
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