The Obama Administration is scheduled to issue, within the next few weeks, a regulation called the gainful employment rule, aimed at cutting off federal student aid to college-level career training programs that consistently leave their students drowning in debt. Lobbyists for the for-profit college industry are pressing the White House hard to weaken the rule or
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A federal grand jury has indicted the former owner-CEO and three other ex-staff of Miami-based FastTrain College, a for-profit school that had ties to Florida Members of Congress before the FBI raided its campuses in 2012. The South Florida Business Journal reported late this afternoon that the former CEO, Alejandro Amor, 56, (pictured above), was arrested and appeared
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At an event in Washington DC this morning, speaking alongside Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), financial guru Suze Orman at first seemed to deny what is a documented fact: that she teaches a personal finance course at the nation’s biggest for-profit college, the University of Phoenix.  Then Orman admitted it, but offered a wholly unconvincing explanation.
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For a couple of years now, I’ve argued that Corinthian Colleges might be the worst predator of all the big for-profit college companies, a remorseless giant engaged in endless abuses of students who needed career help, not more problems. But now that Corinthian, which was taking in as much as $1.4 billion a year in taxpayer
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In a single week, two of America’s best comedic truth-tellers — John Oliver and Bill Maher — hit hard against the predatory for-profit colleges that rip off taxpayers and ruin students’ lives. On his HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver attacked these profit-making colleges for their sky-high prices, meager spending on instruction, and deceptive and coercive
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The main lobbying group for America’s for-profit colleges, APSCU, proposed last year to stock the Department of Education’s 28-member negotiated rule-making panel on the crucial “gainful employment” rule with 11 nominees, nine of whom were executives at APSCU-member for-profit college companies, including multiple companies now under investigation by law enforcement. Correspondence obtained from the education department by Republic
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In this guest post, Raul Valdes Pages addresses his colleagues in the for-profit college industry. Raul Valdes Pages was the founder and CEO of Denver Technical College, a for-profit school offering associate, bachelor and master’s programs. He also has served as CEO of Sextant Education and marketing manager and vice president at DeVry. He is
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‘Lifestyles of the Rich Environmentalists,’ produced by a group called the Institute for Energy Research, is a slick web video campaign designed to lampoon Leonardo Dicaprio and will.i.am as hypocrites for supporting action on climate change. The claim is that wealthy celebrities who oppose industrial-scale pollution supposedly shouldn’t fly in airplanes that use fossil fuels. The group, along with its subsidiary, the American
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