Developments are happening at lightning speed on for-profit college issues. This morning: 1. The Department of Veterans affairs launched a new website, the GI Bill Comparison Tool, allowing vets, and to some extent other students, to compare college options. The initiative is part of action on President Obama’s 2012 executive order to protect vets and current service
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Last week, the political news website Real Clear Politics hosted a Washington DC event (video) targeted at an elite media and policy audience. Held at the gleaming Newseum, site of many such events, it was entitled, “U.S. Energy Policy: The Road Ahead,” and appeared to be a genuine policy discussion. It was, in fact, an infomercial.
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In the wake of the April 2103 West, Texas, chemical plant explosion, which killed 15 people and injured 160 more, President Obama issued an executive order directing federal agencies to improve the safety of our industrial chemical plants.  Right now, a working group of federal officials is conducting “listening sessions” around the country to hear
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Twenty-term California Democratic Congressman George Miller informed his staff today that he is retiring.  Miller deserves credit for a long record of public service.  Among many other things, this development could have implications for the long struggle by the Obama Administration to hold the for-profit college industry accountable for deceit and abuse of students and
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The Daily Caller, a conservative web publication, devoted much space in recent years to attacks on critics of America’s for-profit colleges, echoing claims made by for-profit college owners at a time when that controversial industry has been seeking to avoid accountability for its well-documented abuses of students and taxpayers. Yet now the Tucker Carlson-edited website
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Thirty House Democrats ended up signing a letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that was organized at the behest of the for-profit college industry. The prime movers of the letter, Representatives Alcee Hastings (FL) and Rob Andrews (NJ), both are regular recipients of campaign cash from this industry.  But the industry did not get
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In the past five years Americans have become increasingly aware that many for-profit colleges — the career training schools that advertise all over TV, the Internet, and city buses — are engaged in systematic fraud. These schools have been caught luring students with false promises about the cost of programs and the value of degrees
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This morning the U.S. Department of Education convenes what may finally be the last session of its negotiated rulemaking on a proposed “gainful employment” rule, a measure aimed at cutting off federal aid to career college programs that fail to train students to earn a decent living.  The latest draft regulation from the Department would
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