All eyes will be on the for-profit-education industry Thursday as the U.S. Senate convenes the first in a series of hearings examining federal spending on proprietary colleges. If you care about online education, it’s worth paying attention because for-profits are gobbling up a growing share of the e-learning market.
Here’s how you can follow along and join in the conversation online:
The hearing kicks off at 10 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, and will be Webcast here. I’ll be reporting live from the event on Twitter (@marcparry). If you’re on Twitter, you can contribute to our coverage by using the hashtag “#4profit.” All tweets with that tag will be published in a box on The Chronicle‘s home page.
A key witness testifying will be Steven Eisman, a hedge-fund manager who predicted the housing bubble and is now issuing similar warnings about for-profit higher education. He played a part in Michael Lewis’s best-selling book, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.”
For more on the issues at play Thursday, check out this morning’s story by Chronicle reporter Paul Basken: “New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education.” And come back our Web site later Thursday for a full report on the hearing.
4 Responses to Senate Grilling of For-Profits: Join the Conversation Online
cwinton - June 24, 2010 at 11:36 am
The For-Profits are obviously totally dependent on the student loan system being underwritten by the American taxpayer given the reported 90% of their income deriving from student loans. We have made a college degree a shibboleth with promise of a bright future, however that degree might be acquired. Given the number of worthless “degrees” now being awarded, it is indeed a bubble that is likely to burst, with huge numbers of the population trying to start a career while saddled with an enormous debt load and a credential not worth the paper it is written on. The compensation level of For-Profit execs alone speaks volumes as to what the agenda is for this group. The time for restructuring liability for student loan defaults (the institution involved should bear part of the cost) and imposing far tighter regulations on the For-Profits and any other institution living off of student loans is long overdue.
theprez - June 24, 2010 at 12:41 pm
And the publics are obviously totally dependent on the state taxpayers who subsidize a larger percentage of the tuition of students and the American taxpayers who subsidize the rest–albeit a smaller portion because of the state contribution–when those students also take out loans and see grants. Think about the travesty of college athletics and please spare me the rhetoric about the misuse of public funds. Prove to me that the quality of education provided in the traditional sector, across the board, is more effective for the population served. You can’t because the publics do a worse job of assessing student learning than the for-profits. Demonstrate that the english, psychology, and communication majors (the largest groups of graduates from our traditional institutions) are providing a better return on the investment of taxpayer funds. Lots of cab drivers would beg to differ. How about tighter regulations on all institutions.
dld18 - June 26, 2010 at 9:51 am
I am so tired of reading comments about the horrors of for-profit institutions. As someone who has read extensively on this topic, I can point to several helpful facts:1. University of Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Tech, Strayer and others are NOT representative of the for-profit sector. In fact, UoP and it’s ilk are considered outliers.2. There are several small, family-owned FPs that look very much like small, private colleges: residence halls, dining service, athletics (in a few cases, NCAA!), community service expectations, etc.3. The FPs have been in existance since the 1700s, first as correspondence schools and later as trade schools. These institutions are not new. What is new is that they are now capitalizing on a niche that other institutions have neglected.4. The FPs serve a population that most traditional not-for-profit institutions ignore, or at best overlook.Are there problems with some FPs? Absolutely. But the same can be said of some NFP institutions.
rmgosselin - June 29, 2010 at 11:43 am
While the large FPs do indeed enroll students that traditional institutions do not, saying that they “serve” those populations is like saying Pay Day Loan companies “serve” the communities in which they set up shop. As someone who taught at a Corinthian school for several years, I can tell you that the pressure to admit and retain students is enormous. In fact, it’s exploitative. (“Capitalizing” is absolutely the correct word here.) Corinthian and UP like to champion the number of people they can push through their programs, but I have yet to find statistics on actual job placement and income improvement for people who are already at or near the bottom of the economic ladder. These corporations are drilling deep wells into untapped sources of profit–the urban poor and Title IV funding–and they will continue to draw on them until the whole thing collapses (which will be in about 3 years, I expect). It’s the Subprime debacle all over again.