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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Today the Department of Education’s advisory committee on higher education, NACIQI, is considering for the second time in five years whether the Department should eliminate the accrediting body ACICS as a gatekeeper for colleges’ access to federal student grants and loans. It was a dramatic development in 2016 when the same committee — consisting of
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The Biden Department of Education has hired two lawyers who recently worked at the DC-mega law firm WilmerHale, amid other signs of that firm’s increasing influence over matters in the new administration. The deep penetration of the Biden-Harris administration by WilmerHale, which has repeatedly represented, among many other special interests, predatory for-profit colleges, comes as
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  Joe Biden, who pledged to get tough on predatory for-profit colleges, has just hired another person for a high-level job — at least the third so far — who previously worked for terrible, abusive for-profit schools. Alicia O’Brien, as the American Prospect reported today, has been named senior counsel and special assistant to the
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Republic Report has obtained the second annual report of the lawyer hired to monitor the compliance of giant for-profit college company Perdoceo with its January 2019 $494 million settlement with 48  state attorneys general, plus the District of Columbia. The AGs alleged that the company engaged in widespread deceptive practices against students. For the second
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