Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley says she’s expanded her investigation of whether for-profit colleges have deceived students in her state about their prices, graduation rates, and job placement records. “The more we look, the more we see it as a real problem,” Coakley told the Boston Globe. Coakley identified one school she’s probing — American Career Institute (ACI),
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  This article was written by David Halperin and Carl Malamud.   Malamud is founder and president of PublicResource.Org, based in Sebastopol, CA. David Halperin, a Washington DC lawyer, advises the organization. A longer discussion of these issues, and links to the world’s hidden laws, are here.  “The rule of law,” Aristotle wrote, “is preferable to
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A for-profit college suddenly shut down all its campuses last week, leaving Massachusetts and Maryland students out in the cold.  The owner of the company, American Career Institute (ACI), told me today that the business is closed for good, because its lenders forced it to shut.  Although we don’t know all the facts yet, ACI’s abrupt
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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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