Even dependent students borrowing the minimum amount for four years at a public college will be borrowing 19000.00. If they start in a low paying job, say 23000.00 the cap on payments per year will be 153.33 per month. The federal standard repayment for this amount is approximately 210.00 per month. IT negatively affects everyone.

Now, if this affects only proprietary institutions, Then I see it as discrimination punishing all proprietary schools for the misdeeds of only some of the schools. Not only for profit schools have high default rates, and not all for profits fit into this category.

this regulation qualifies as a "really bad idea."

As a faculty member of a for-profit institution, I was a bit disturbed by the findings of the frontline documentary. But, I do know what I and my colleagues do in the classroom changes the lives of our students for the better. I can't do much about the bad apples except to make sure that I am not one of them. I think that all of my colleagues would agree with this sentiment.

Frankly, my position has always been and will continue to be that the regulatory agencies are not our enemies. Leaders like Secretary Duncan are smart, progressive thinkers who really do have the student's best interests at heart. My belief now, after studying these situations carefully for the last year, is lobbyists are stirring up more problems.

The non-profit and for-profit members of the Academe really think the same and act the same. The funding sources are different... traditional schools get their funding from donations and state funding...for-profits, rather market-funded schools, get their money from investors...the education is the same.

The regional accreditation is a wonderful system of peer governance that needs to preserved by the Department of Education...I hope Secretary Duncan will help propel this precious self governance structure into the future with the injection of best practices, with technology, including those from the leading for-profit institutions. Sharing these winning strategies will only enhance the future of our country's knowledge power. Everybody can learn from each other. The future is in private/public partnerships.

The days of faculty protecting their turf are quickly coming to an end...I see this everyday as a new younger generation of enthusiastic faculty come into their own...At 56 years old, I am an Emigrant to the Internet while these younger leaders are Inhabitants of it...they grew up multi-processing...they live half in the Cloud and half in the Real World...

Leaders like Dr. Manning of HLC need to be encouraged, supported and commended as she is the ball-bearing between the old and the new...she is in a tough position navigating all of the stakeholders, which I believe she is doing fairly with integrity.

And, I think Frontline did a great job...they got us talking!

Let's collectively keep the bad apples out of our barrel so we can collectively help our students get the dreams they hope for...as Rodney King so aptly stated, "Can't we all just get along!"

Michael K. Clifford
Chairman
SignificantFederation

I feel that most for-profits are doing great harm to the most vulnerable students. Fortunately, these abuses are coming to light and the reign of these "Universities" and "colleges" are coming to an end. When the Education Department puts a cap on loan payments at 8 percent of graduates' expected earnings, that will destroy the only source of income for these abusive entities.

To spowell's inane remarks, you need to clarify "great harm." Frankly, you have no clue.

For profits d a great servce to it's students and their futures. Are there bad actors in our business? Yes indeed. Do we try to weed them out? Yes.

Are there bad colleges and community coleges? Yes. Does anyone do anything to keep them in check? Yes.

The difference is that the taxpayers are force to pay for community college students with little to no accountability for placements and careers. For the most part, no one gives a damn.

Be careful which glass house you throw stones at.

Dear director19

Quoting you regarding bad colleges & community colleges "Does anyone do anything to keep them in check? Yes."
What I want to see is someone doing the same for the For-Profit schools, especially None RA accredited ones.
Traditional schools have nothing to prove, but profit schools do. I agree that not all for-profit schools are the same, but this sector needs a major house cleaning.

Considering college entry qualifications, for any given level of entry qualification, you can describe a probablity of success. The higher the qualification, the higher the probablity of success. Therefore standards established for the Federal Loan program will have implications for the probability of success that a school can risk. What level of risk should be accepted? If a given level of qualification could produce a 50/50 chance of success, should you keep the 50% who would succeed out, in order to avoid the 50% who would not succeed? What about 30/70? Would the success of the 30% be worth the failure of the 70%? Getting more people to graduate from college will require digging deeper into the talent pool, which is likely to ultimately require accepting higher rates of failure ... unless institutions can fundamentally change in some way to increase the probability of success.

Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net

director19: You and others harp on the taxpayers paying for community colleges, and they're not being held accountable. Yet many for-profits, including the big guns, receive 80%, 85%, even 90% of their revenue from Title IV funds coming from -- yes -- the taxpayers. So let's get away from this distinction about who's subsidized by taxpayers or not. Every sector of higher education receives large taxpayer subsidies, some bigger than others.

"Those colleges, he said, are critical to helping the nation achieve President Obama's goal of making the United States the nation with the highest portion of college graduates by 2020."

Why doesn't the Obama Administration just give everyone a tax rebate so we can *buy* a degree? Problem solved.

Quantity does *not* equal quality, Mr. President.

Students receive Title IV, not schools. Students vote with their feet, choosing the college they want to attend, and fund their education with federal aid programs that don't discriminate, but rather provide students with the freedom to choose. The assumption that students and their families are too foolish to make careful choices, and the generalization that for-profits 'prey' on those least able to successfully complete school are are nonsense. These students could easily spend the same dollars at a traditional college, but opt for more focused education with much higher documented rates of graduation and job placement.

Until traditional education decides to truly make room at the table for the millions of non-traditional students out there, for-profits will continue to grow. The demand speaks for itself -

Having worked for both government-funded and for-profit colleges as a teacher and administrator, my judgement is that this debate about for-profit education is healthy and yet profoundly off-point.

Public and private institutions of higher education suffer equally from inadequate preparation of students in the primary and secondary schools. The failures of some graduates to find jobs, I suggest, has much less to do with the quality of their training in the college and more to do with the quality of their training in grade schol, middle school and high school.

A graduate may fully grasp the core concepts in an undergraduate or graduate degree program, for instance, but if that graduate cannot write or speak a gramatically correct sentence, that graduate will have a tougher time finding employment than the person with stronger language skills. Indeed, should that person have been awarded a degree without proving her or his language competencies?

Rather than destroy the entire barrel of for-profit education because of a few bad apples, let's turn our attention to the real villians in this situation -- the primary and secondary education policies and methods that leave too many students ill-prepared for using a college education to create a genuinely successful life.

Here, as with the Frontline piece last week, there appears to be excessive reliance on the type of corporate charter (IRS status) of an institution in discussing unrelated but important issues. The result is potential confusion in relation to problems and solutions.

The evidence is compelling that all three IRS types (publics, independents, and for-profits) have important shortcomings that need to be addressed. (I have excluded corporate universities, etc. which provide some of the nation's best and most efficient higher education.) Of the three, the evidence is strong that the publics are the most inefficient and most wasteful of taxpayers' monies and, therefore, are most in need of reform. http://www.intered.com/higheredbriefing/2010/1/26/an-alternative-to-begging-how-our-state-universities-can-do.html

Setting aside the IRS status, higher education consists of: (a) regionally accredited institutions which, for the most part, confer bachelors through doctorates (some associates) in virtually all formal disciplines, practical or not, job-focused or not, (b) nationally accredited career schools which, for the most part, confer certificates and associates degrees in entry level job-focused professions and trades; e.g., allied health, HVAC, and (c) community colleges which, by this typology, are straddlers of a sort. Regionally accredited, and offering mostly certificates and associate degrees, community colleges divide their market between lower division education for individuals eventually bound for schools in the 'a' group and certificate and associate degrees in the job-focused market served by the 'b' group (career schools). All three IRS types are represented in the 'a' group. For-profits dominate the 'b' group. Publics dominate the 'c' group. Yes, there is a little messiness from overlap and migration but description is essentially valid for the following points.

No objective and deeply knowledgeable person in this industry believes that whatever problems reside with for-profit masters and doctoral institutions (Capella being one example but there are for-profits that are exclusively masters and above) have much in common --genesis or solution-- with the problems residing in for-profits serving the career market with certificates and associates degrees that prepare them for highly specific, often regulated, jobs. Moreover, most of the problems that reside in the for-profit career schools are shared by the public community colleges when they serve these same markets. The difference is that the for-profit's services cost the student more and the public's services cost the taxpayer more, although much less visibly to the novice analyst. (The analyses are difficult and tediously complex; we did it for several years.)

The economic truth is that taxpayers pay the most when someone elects to earn a credit hour at a public institution, less at an independent institution, virtually nothing, perhaps even making a dollar or so, at a for-profit. These figures include loan default costs by institutional type. The student perspective, however, is different. It can be devastating to face a $50,000 loan if the job you secure does not project an affordable ROI. Many but not all degrees offered by career schools return a decent ROI, especially in the allied health professions. Some of the worst job ROI profiles are delivered by the independents where one can easily pay north of $125,000 for a BA in elementary education. Public institutions do a little better because the taxpayers, not the student, foot the majority of the bill. Even there, however, the public's run on degrees in women's studies, gender issues, and diversity studies produced a lot of student loans that didn't result in education-relevant jobs that would fail the Department of Education's proposed eight percent test.

There is much more to say, factually and interpretively. The only points I hope to make here are: (a) the criterion 'for-profit' is being used, as it was in this article, to obscure and sometimes to cause ire in illogical ways and (b) the entire nexus of issues related to gainful employment, student loans, loan defaults, taxpayer costs, productivity, waste, fraud, efficiency, and more has yet to see intelligent, fully informed analysis. http://www.intered.com/higheredbriefing/2010/5/6/behind-the-frontline.html

The current state of discourse is too ill-informed to result in long-term, across the board improvement.

Robert W Tucker
President
InterEd, Inc.

Intered: If people are so ill-informed
Could you please translate for us why:

1) corporate shills are pushing for privatized education
2) public officials who are funded by private interests are too
3) consumers who have to navigate these informational asymmetries have been largely left out of the dialogue, an externality

anyone here trained to examine the histories of: economic, familial, cultural, and educational systems in country? Or is just quarterly profit or demographic information that is important

anyone here believe that all our needs and services should be dominated by for profit interests... (health, education, armies)

anyone here ask themselves why financial reform will not include a separate independent agency (CFPA)in charge of regulation...

anyone here see the final vestiges of dismantling of social safety (accelerate in times of crisis)... reframing entitlements as bankrupting america.... instead of admitting that cheap and unregulated credit was dumped into our economy for two decades driving up stock prices, fostering dependence via debt, and creating a bubble economies and mass fraud perpetrations....

anyone see the movie the corporation: "A few bad apples" ... Arne Duncan is the free market education secretary in charge of recruiting millions into a for profit system... kind of like healthcare mandate, but with a gutted out educational system

Do not blame women's studies or history departments for this... Private industry is dictating policy here; let's call it what it is: corporate hi-jacking of higher education and most other structures to suck the profits from it and then leave the decay behind like in: Detroit, Birmingham, Cleveland etc....

@trendisnotdestiny,

Your questions and prescriptions seem more like an uninformed diatribe than a rational contribution to discourse. You seem to find support for the for-profits in my comments, when I have offered none. You seem to have an a priori unquestioned belief in the publics when all I have said (and documented extensively in other contexts) is that the publics are most in need of reform and that their reform will return the greatest good, including ensuring that the for-profits behave more responsibly. (I say "seem" in these cases because, in addition to ranting, you are not clear.)

You seem to have a lot of pent up political rage. I guess we all do at this juncture in our history. As well-educated individuals, however, I believe we have an obligation to inform ourselves broadly and accurately, and to exhibit leadership where possible. Your comments display neither. Anyone can rant. As I pointed out with evidence, this is a very complex issue. Do you even understand taxpayer costs under various models? Do you know anything at all about changes in productivity and effectiveness? Do you understand the full diversity represented by today's higher education markets and the challenges they present to our antiquated guild-like systems? Are you aware of the relevant shifts in market share and the demographics they serve?

It seems pretty clear that you hold pretty uninformed on this topic. I hope you do not teach it. The same can be said of me with respect to many of CHE's articles; however, I don't offer my uninformed opinion on them as if I were knowledgeable. 'trendisnotdestiny', how about informing yourself, first, and then giving us the benefit of your informed suggestions.

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typo 20 years should be 10 years

As a faculty member of a for-profit, I can say that for the most part the students do not receive fair value for the money paid. Even businesses do not accept the degrees as valid, or as good as onsite state universities.

The online college is a sham in that most students do not realize it is for-profit, most would never graduate from a state university, many do not realize that the programs in many cases are not accredited, i.e. medical billing programs. The Feds have enabled this industry to grow through special finance programs and lax attendance requirements. In a way it is another form of affirmative action for minorities or the "non-traditional" student.

Obama's agenda is to count degrees not insure that there is an education that went in to achieving it. It is sort of like "now I be one", a college graduate.