Just before Christmas, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, which operates CollegeAmerica, Stevens-Henager College, and Independence University, dismissed its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, which had, in the final year of the Obama administration, refused to recognize the company’s schools as non-profit for purposes of federal regulations; the Department under Obama had
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As Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education works this morning to outsource more and more taxpayer-funded student aid to predatory for-profit online education companies, Wall Street investors see a new gold rush. Seeking to avoid the stigma and regulatory requirements of openly running a for-profit college, they are finding willing partners in another taxpayer-funded sector: state
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Senators Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) today introduced the Preventing Risky Operations from Threatening the Education and Career Trajectories of Students (PROTECT Students) Act of 2019, a bill that would enshrine in law many key reforms sought by advocates for veterans and other students in order to prevent predatory practices by for-profit colleges.
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In October 2016, candidate Donald Trump unveiled a package of government ethics reforms that he said would “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC; it included a ban on former federal employees lobbying the government for five years and stricter rules on what constitutes lobbying. He seemed to be promising to undermine the power of special
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Michael Cohen chose to conclude his dramatic Capitol Hill testimony today with a pointed warning about President Trump. “I fear,” Cohen said, “that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” In other words, Cohen raised the concern that Trump would refuse to leave the White
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While Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos and her lieutenants have worked to free the worst-behaving predatory colleges from all meaningful accountability rules, they also have spectacularly mismanaged the affairs of schools that have faltered. Exhibit A, in court right now, are the three chains of schools — the Art Institutes, Argosy University, and South University
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While some predatory college chain operations, like Dream Center/EDMC, Education Corp. of America, and Vatterott, have been collapsing under the weight of abuses and mismanagement, other for-profits are now bragging to Wall Street investors that boom times are back. Two of the most prominent examples — Grand Canyon University and Career Education Corp. — have
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The Trump-DeVos Department of Education is holding another round of meetings this week on a proposed set of regulations governing higher education. The proposals span a ridiculously wide range of issues, but the overriding theme is clear: Just about anyone or anything that wants to call itself a school, or a “provider” to a school, can run just about
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