A year ago, if you were Jack Massimino, CEO of  Corinthian Colleges, you might have been feeling pretty good.  Despite extensive evidence from congressional and media investigations that Corinthian, along with other big for-profit colleges, has been abusing students — luring them with deceptive recruiting, offering high-priced, low quality programs, and often leaving them without
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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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Federal agencies have this morning launched a new online complaint system where veterans, service members, and their families can report on problems with colleges and universities receiving federal education aid. As numerous investigations have revealed and President Obama has noted, for-profit colleges have engaged in widespread abuses of vets and military families. The new complaint
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In tomorrow’s State of the Union address, President Obama will likely revisit his plans to hold America’s colleges and universities more accountable for helping U.S. students train for real careers.  But while a stalemated Congress still blocks progress in many areas, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general just took a major step to help
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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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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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It’s a busy time for APSCU, the trade association of America’s for-profit colleges.  The group spends its time trying to block reasonable measures to hold the worst actors in its industry responsible for their systematic abuses of students and taxpayers, as if the industry is permanently entitled to the enormous amounts of federal taxpayer money
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The Wall Street Journal today published an op-ed by former Senator Bob Kerrey and private equity man Jeffrey Leeds attacking the U.S. Department of Education’s new “gainful employment” rule, which is aimed at reducing taxpayer aid to career colleges that consistently leave students with insurmountable debt. The piece is riddled with misleading arguments about for-profit
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