The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today filed a lawsuit against one of the largest for-profit colleges, DeVry University, for allegedly misleading students about job placement rates and salaries for the school’s graduates.  The FTC complaint, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, alleges, “Through the use of English and Spanish-language advertisements and other marketing materials,
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Last week, on the day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record, the energy industry’s chief lobbyists gathered in a downtown Washington ballroom to tell each other that the real problem was not global warming, but rather efforts by the Obama Administration — and Pope
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A federal whistleblower lawsuit against troubled ITT Tech, unsealed last week, reads like a greatest hits of abuses by America’s predatory for-profit colleges.  The suit alleges that ITT has repeatedly defrauded taxpayers by taking billions of dollars in federal student aid while systematically deceiving students and violating federal regulations. The complaint, first described today by MarketWatch,
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The unprecedented Powerball jackpot is supposed to bestow extraordinary riches upon the long-awaited winners. But did you know that each of the three winners will receive less over a 29-year payout than ten U.S. for-profit college companies receive from your tax dollars every single year?  Worse, seven of those ten colleges have been under investigation in recent
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Rohit Chopra, whose principled and determined leadership helped make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a strong force in addressing the abuses of predatory for-profit colleges, has joined the U.S. Department of Education as a senior adviser. Chopra is working directly for Under Secretary Ted Mitchell, focusing on protections for students, analysis of financial capacity and
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With Donald Graham yielding to his son-in-law the CEO spot at his company, which owns for-profit Kaplan University, and with and the University of Phoenix this week putting itself up for sale, perhaps to private equity investors closely tied to President Obama (see below), where is the stability in the leadership of America’s large predatory for-profit colleges?
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The Republican ex-congressman who now works as the chief lobbyist for the troubled for-profit college industry has ushered in the new year with an email asking for-profit college owners to finance a legal brief aimed at limiting the legal risk of companies in fraud cases.  The amount that Steve Gunderson, CEO of the industry trade
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Last week, at a critical point in the Paris negotiations on global climate change, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the United States would commit $800 million annually to help developing nations adapt to a warming climate and move to cleaner energy.  $800 million doubled the prior U.S. pledge, and the announcement may have
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