In recent weeks, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) — whose members are financial aid professionals from colleges and universities across the country — has lent its prestige to supporting policy positions similar to views being pushed by the for-profit college industry, a higher education sector where many schools offer a toxic
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Within the Build Back Better social spending bill on Capitol Hill is a provision that increases the maximum annual federal Pell grant for college students, currently $6,495, by $550. The measure excludes for-profit colleges from that modest increase. A decade of government and media investigations have shown that many for-profit colleges have offered a toxic
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The Biden Administration is urging a federal judge to keep in effect, for now, a rule, issued by Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos, that weakened the power of the U.S. Department of Education to curb abuses by for-profit colleges. The 2019 DeVos rule was basically a one-line cancellation of a 2014 Obama administration rule called
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California’s attorney general this week began presenting evidence in his office’s long-awaited fraud trial against for-profit Ashford University. In the case, filed in 2017, the state alleges that Ashford engaged in unfair and fraudulent business practices, with school recruiters fueled by a “boiler room” culture that demanded they meet enrollment quotas. The recruiters, in turn,
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The U.S. Department of Education announced this morning that it is delaying a decision on renewing approval of the Accrediting Commission on Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC), one of the outside accrediting bodies charged with evaluating the educational quality of colleges. Department recognition is crucial for accreditors, because without it, schools accredited by an agency
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Some critics of wealthy, politically-connected for-profit college baron Arthur Keiser made and sent me this video laying out concerns about Keiser’s record — predatory practices, law enforcement troubles, conflicts of interest  (which we have written about here before). The video questions whether Keiser should remain the chair of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Advisory
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This week, American Public University System (APUS), whose name obscures the fact that it is a for-profit college, announced it had signed an agreement with the chancellor’s office of the California Community Colleges (CCC) system that will enable graduates of these community colleges “to seamlessly transfer to APUS as a junior – with no loss
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When a for-profit college chain abruptly closes, locking out its students and leaving their futures in doubt, the industry is often quick to disavow the dead school as a wayward abuser, an outlier. In reality, though, many of the surviving for-profit college chains use the same predatory playbook as the collapsed ones, and leaders of
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