Many of America’s big for-profit colleges spend more on advertising and high-pressure recruiting than they do on educating students — a key reason why so many of their students drop out and end up with insurmountable debt. If you have a TV or a computer — and you do — then you are probably bombarded with ads for these colleges and training academies.
Today a friend who worked at the now-defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers noticed a particularly fine-crafted ad, stating “ATTN: Lehman Bros employees! Explore online degrees. Your tuition fees could be covered!” Illustrating this proposition is a …
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 …
Beneath the raw offensiveness of Mitt Romney’s statement to his donors that President Obama won by providing “gifts” to African-Americans, Latinos, and young people, is a layer of remarkable hypocrisy: It was actually Romney who was promising big giveaways of taxpayer money during the campaign. But instead of offering his gifts to actual people, Romney pledged to reward his favorite kinds of virtual people — corporations and banks.
I can offer two blatant examples, from the education field, where I do some work. Given Romney’s strong orientation toward crony capitalism – businesses that get rich off government programs – I’ll bet you …
Since last week’s election, the Fox News Channel has featured several corporate executives complaining about the results. But it’s likely that few are as upset as CEOs of the troubled for-profit college industry. This sector, which is deeply dependent on the federal government, bet heavily on a Republican victory.
Mitt Romney, who has a financial stake in the industry, went out of his way to praise for-profit colleges, and he pledged to undo Obama reforms aimed at holding these companies accountable for fraudulent practices and poor quality schools. Sparked by Romney’s apparent eagerness to let them off the …
Todd Nelson resigned as chief executive of Apollo Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix, in 2006, in the wake of two controversies that ended up in court. In the first case, Apollo, the nation’s largest for-profit college business, paid $9.8 million in 2004 to settle a U.S. Department of Education complaint that it had engaged in systematic violations of rules regulating aggressive recruiting of students. The second, less well known, was a case brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), several months after Nelson left, charging that for years the University of Phoenix had discriminated against employees …
Is Mitt Romney “severely conservative,” as he put it during the primary season, or is he instead the semi-compassionate moderate he has portrayed since the first debate? It’s the question pundits keep asking, and of course it’s important to his political strategy and the outcome of the election. But to understand how Romney would actually govern as president, this dichotomy obscures a critical point.
If you look beyond Romney’s stump remarks – dig beneath the Etch A Sketch — to the structure of his campaign and the details of his policy proposals, it appears that Romney’s true ideology is not small-government conservatism, or …
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a venerable publication read by college faculty and administrators nationwide, has been sending invitations all over Washington, inviting policy experts, Capitol Hill staffers, media, and others to an October 19 panel discussion entitled “Student Loan Default Aversion: Forum on Research and Best Practices.” According to the invitation, the “lively discussion” will address the question, “How can students reap the benefits of higher education without the fear of financial devastation in the event of a default?” It’s a sensible, important, and indeed an urgent question, given America’s mounting student debt crisis.
But the invitation asks us …
Help follow the money
tips@republicreport.org
Bad Behavior has blocked 567 access attempts in the last 7 days.
