Last year, the annual convention of owners and executives of for-profit colleges (University of Phoenix, The Art Institutes, Kaplan, etc.), held in Las Vegas, featured paid speakers George W. Bush and Michelle Rhee, and, for entertainment, a fake knockoff version of Creedence Clearwater Revival. After a year in which the truth about their shoddy practices finally sent
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Last year, President Obama warned our military servicemembers that some for-profit colleges “aren’t interested in helping you…. They are interested in getting the money.” He called the schools’ conduct “disgraceful” and told the troops that these schools are “trying to swindle and hoodwink you.”  Holly Petraeus, who directs service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection
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Several years of public scrutiny have exposed that many of America’s for-profit colleges are playing a cruel joke on students and taxpayers — high-priced, low-quality programs, sold through deceptive recruiting practices, that often leave students without good jobs and deep in debt. This scam has cost taxpayers as much as $33 billion in a single year. Worse, it
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In the past two years, as the public has come to recognize that many for-profit colleges have been ripping off taxpayers and ruining students’ lives, enrollments have declined, and the once-mighty industry has gone into a tailspin. A number of schools, such as American Career Institute and ATI have abruptly shut down many or all of their campuses,
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Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) yesterday paraphrased a well-known quote about the Holocaust to describe the Obama Administration’s regulation of for-profit colleges. Foxx, who has staunchly defended the for-profit college industry despite its blatant record of abusing students and ripping off taxpayers, apparently didn’t mention in her remarks that she is one of Congress’s biggest recipients
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Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley says she’s expanded her investigation of whether for-profit colleges have deceived students in her state about their prices, graduation rates, and job placement records. “The more we look, the more we see it as a real problem,” Coakley told the Boston Globe. Coakley identified one school she’s probing — American Career Institute (ACI),
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Many of America’s big for-profit colleges spend more on advertising and high-pressure recruiting than they do on educating students — a key reason why so many of their students drop out and end up with insurmountable debt. If you have a TV or a computer — and you do — then you are probably bombarded
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Eight U.S. Senators today sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calling on him to investigate tactics used by some major for-profit colleges to circumvent rules aimed at reducing student loan defaults.  A report issued in July by Senator Tom Harkin’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee documented that several big for-profit
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