Around March 31, a non-profit organization called Consumer Action for a Strong Economy (CASE), which has regularly attacked regulators and opponents of controversial corporations, posted a website making false attacks on critics, including me, of predatory for-profit colleges. The website’s phony claims centered on a false and long-ago-debunked charge that Obama administration officials and advocates
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The New York Times recently had a good round-up of podcasts covering American scams, businesses built on deceiving people — a category in the U.S. that accounts for billions in annual profits, and millions of victims. I’ve been listening to these series about pyramid schemes and other cons, and they are both fascinating and disturbing.
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Seeking to avoid being questioned under oath by lawyers for defrauded for-profit college students, Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos has filed an unusual emergency petition with a federal appeals court. On Thursday, DeVos’s lawyer, former top Trump administration lawyer Jesse Panuccio, now with the Ft. Lauderdale office of famed litigator David Boies’s law firm, filed
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At this morning’s confirmation hearing for Biden nominee James Kvaal to be Under Secretary of Education, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, renewed false, thoroughly debunked charges that Obama administration officials engaged in improper collusion with Wall Street short sellers who were betting against companies
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CECU, the trade association of for-profit colleges, announced to its members today that lifestyle entrepreneur Martha Stewart will be the keynote speaker for its annual conference, to be held in person in Grapevine, Texas, in June. Stewart, the omnipresent author and television host, recently hailed in Fortune as American’s first female self-made billionaire, was convicted
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Earlier this month, 15 national organizations, including the American Federation of Teachers, Center for American Progress, and the National Consumer Law Center, plus me, sent a letter to the new U.S. Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, urging the education department to move promptly to provide the public with much better access to critical information about
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Perdoceo Education Corp., operator of for-profit colleges that have repeatedly faced law enforcement actions for deceiving and abusing low-income students, announced today that Alan Wheat, a former Democratic congressman representing Missouri, has joined the company’s board of directors. Wheat, a senior policy advisor in the DC office of the law firm Polsinelli, will receive $80,000
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  The Center for Excellence in Higher Education, which runs online Independence University, CollegeAmerica, and other schools, received a devastating $3 million judgment last summer from a Colorado judge who presided over the trial of a case brought by the state’s attorney general. Now, while CEHE appeals that decision and seeks to fend off an
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