Bushco created the conditions for an expanded and increasingly predatory for profit college industry
I read a thread earlier today about one of the "debt-strike" students. There were not many comments, but those that were commenting seemed to have little beyond passing familiarity with the crisis created at an escalating rate by predatory for profit schools. I am posting the following to explain my interest - and then to pass on some good resources and recent work around the issue of for profit/scam education.
For the past decade plus I have worked in urban education - and particularly in the space of expanding preparation and opportunities advancing from secondary to post secondary education. I am currently taking a little time off to write. In this time I have been reading more and more about this industry and am appalled by what I read. If you aren't familiar with the noxious industry below are some good introductory reads. If you are familiar, these are still interesting pieces.
The primary targets of these miseducation-for-extreme-indebtedness schools are low income/impoverished individuals living in communities of poverty (urban and rural). The sales pitches are overwhelming, and use psychological stress-inducing teases. Once on the sales rotation, people indicate they get multiple calls a day for weeks on end. I read one fraud report on the Better Business Bureau (of Indiana - HQ to ITT Tech) in which someone who had gone to an informational session was talked into filling out information for a loan so that the recruiter could "see how much aide" the student qualified for. The student decided against enrolling. But, the "estimate" paperwork had been submitted and he was on the hook for one term's tuition in loans and signed up for classes.
If there is interest here in the forum, as I run across contemporaneous items I will share them in the GD forum.
The linked article discusses work from journalist Kai Wright and Cornell Professor Noliwe Rooks.
http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2015/01/17/education-with-a-debt-sentence-for-profit-colleges-as-american-dream-crushers-and-factories-of-debt/
Here are a few excerpts that explain dimensions of the exploitation and crisis.
Imagine corporations that intentionally target low-income single mothers as ideal customers. Imagine that these same companies claim to sell tickets to the American dream—gainful employment and the chance for a middle-class life. Imagine that the fine print on these tickets, once purchased, reveals them to be little more than debt contracts, profitable to the corporation’s investors, but disastrous for its customers. And imagine that these corporations receive tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to do this dirty work. Now, know that these corporations actually exist and are universities.
As Cornell professor Noliwe Rooks and journalist Kai Wright have reported, black college enrollment has increased at nearly twice the rate of white enrollment in recent years, but a disproportionate number of those African-American students end up at for-profit schools. In 2011, two of those institutions, the University of Phoenix (with physical campuses in thirty-nine states and massive online programs) and the online-only Ashford University, produced more black graduates than any other institute of higher education in the country. Unfortunately, a recent survey by economist Rajeev Darolia shows that for-profit graduates fare little better on the job market than job seekers with high school degrees; their diplomas, that is, are a net loss, offering essentially the same grim job prospects as if they had never gone to college, plus a lifetime debt sentence.
Much of the American public does not understand the difference between for-profit, public, and private non-profit institutions of higher learning. All three are concerned with generating revenue, but only the for-profit model exists primarily to enrich its owners. The largest of these institutions are often publicly traded, nationally franchised corporations legally beholden to maximize profit for their shareholders before maximizing education for their students. While commercial vocational programs have existed since the nineteenth century, for-profit colleges in their current form are a relatively new phenomenon that began to boom with a series of initial public offerings in the 1990s, followed quickly by deregulation of the sector as the millennium approached. The Bush administration legislation then weakened government oversight of such schools, while expanding their access to federal financial aid, making the industry irresistible to Wall Street investors.
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As it happens, recruiters for such schools are manipulating more than statistics. They are mining the intersections of class, race, gender, inequality, insecurity, and shame to hook students. “Create a sense of urgency. Push their hot button. Don’t let the student off the phone. Dial, dial, dial,” a director of admissions at Argosy University, which operates in twenty- three states and online, told his enrollment counselors in an internal email.
Read more at link.
I support the Debt-Strike students efforts to get the realities about not just Corinthian Colleges, but scads of other for-profit colleges that have been found to use excessively deceptive recruitment processes, even after being warned school (chains) such as ITT Tech, Devry Institute, Art Institutes of America, Strayer University, so on and so on. I am not terribly optimistic that the legal fight will be fruitful. However, if the public keeps getting more aware of the hideous and exploitative work of these institutions - perhaps pressure will mount to support the current Fed lawsuits (PC), and eventually either lead to the death of the industry re: can't run for profit education if consumers aren't signing the dotted line.
One author I have started following who has done a lot of work in the field is David Halpern. In the past year he released the following book: http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Americas-Future-For-Profit-Taxpayers-ebook/dp/B00JAJGIIK
(I highly recommend it), and he follows and reports on The Republic Report - the following is an article from last week; http://www.republicreport.org/2015/video-durbin-corinthian-buyer-ecmc-is-breaking-its-promises/
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