Alejandro Amor (pictured just above), the former owner-CEO of for-profit FastTrain College, is scheduled to face a jury trial in Miami Wednesday morning. Amor and his co-defendant, former FastTrain admissions staffer Anthony Mincey, face criminal charges of defrauding the federal government to obtain about $6.5 million in student aid — Pell grants and Direct Loans. Two other FastTrain employees charged
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Professional climate change denier Christopher Horner offered some interesting responses to the Wall Street Journal when it asked about a court filing indicating that Horner had received $18,600 this year from coal company Alpha Natural Resources before it filed for bankruptcy in August. Initially, yesterday’s Journal story stated that Horner did not respond to a request
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Today, the day after the New York Times ran a blockbuster front-page lead story describing some of the worst ongoing abuses of big for-profit colleges, one of the nation’s leading higher education philanthropies kicked off a major conference in Washington with a panel giving its place of honor to the retired former chairman of the House of
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The non-profit group No Labels held an unusual candidate forum this morning in New Hampshire. The “No Labels Problem Solver Convention” featured five Republicans plus three Democrats — including Donald Trump, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley — all at the same event. No Labels has been organizing on the ground in primary states,
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The for-profit college’s trade association, APSCU, was once mighty but is now hobbled, discredited, and depleted. Yet the group, and its industry, still have the money — most it from taxpayer-funded student aid to its schools —  to lobby, give campaign contributions to politicians, and hire lawyers to fight its biggest piece of Kryptonite: the
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Yesterday, Birmingham, Alabama-based for-profit college company Education Corporation of America (ECA) announced the new name for the campuses, until now called Kaplan College, that it recently bought from Graham Holdings Company. The schools will henceforth be known as “Brightwood College.” Are the schools to be named after New England education pioneer Jebediah Brightwood?  Nope. It appears that there
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An investigative report released this morning documents how some for-profit college owners have converted their companies into non-profit schools in a way that allows them to evade the regulatory obligations and deservedly bad reputation of for-profits while continuing to reap enormous financial benefits.  These operators have done so, the report finds, by subverting the rules governing non-profit schools, while the
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A group of Democratic members of the House of Representatives are sending a letter this morning calling on the Department of Education to “automatically discharge the debt” of all students who attended campuses run by now-bankrupt Corinthian Colleges, one of the worst actors in the scandalized for-profit college sector. The letter, spearheaded by Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN)
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