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
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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
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  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
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In July, then-Republic Report bloggers Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani taped an interview with Congressman Heath Shuler, Democrat of North Carolina. Shuler had announced he would retire from Congress at the end of the current session. Concerned about the revolving door culture and its corruption of our politics, our reporters asked Shuler whether he was
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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
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  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
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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
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Greenpeace has posted these stark images of the destruction Sandy brought to the New Jersey shore. The devastation on the ground is heartbreaking, and Americans are grateful for the courage and determination of people responding to the crisis. At the same time, it’s imperative that we start asking why we have seen so much extreme
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