I received an email this morning (thanks for the tip) from a new fan of the Voxitatis Blog. She’s on staff at Top10onlineuniversities.org. She had some good advice for students heading to college in the next few weeks about some of the essential things to keep in a backpack:
The schools on her organization’s short list are for-profit colleges, which have been taking a beating in the press and from the US Education Department. In fact, an article published just this morning in South Carolina’s State paper said, “The debate over for-profit colleges that has had members of Congress arguing for months may now be seeping into the presidential race.”
These colleges are creating such a stir recently because of a report by Senate Democrats, detailed in this New York Times article, which said eight of the top 10 colleges receiving post-9/11 GI Bill money from the Department of Veterans Affairs were for-profit institutions. That means veterans, especially those from Iraq and Afghanistan who are returning to resume their education, favor these institutions. Plus, the 15 biggest for-profit colleges got 86% of their total revenue from federal student aid programs.
And that means your tax dollars are supporting these schools in a big way. Getting our citizens the education they deserve is what tax dollars are for, so this fact alone is neither good nor bad, but if the money is being squandered on things that have nothing to do with increasing people’s education, that’s going to be a problem. This is where the debate picks up a bit.
[Veterans] “are really preyed upon by some of these schools,” The State quoted Marine Col. Robert Songer, the former director of lifelong learning and education services at Camp Lejeune, N.C., as saying. “The schools sign them up for a Pell Grant (and) one, sometimes two student loans, and the student has no idea of this.”The main objections to for-profit colleges are things like many of them featuring “exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
For its part, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities said the report was “the result of a flawed process that has unfairly targeted private-sector schools and their students.” The organization released a “background sheet” (PDF) that responds to specific claims in the Senate committee’s report. A statement published on their website said the report sacrificed reality for ideology and did little to help students for whom for-profit colleges meet a growing need:
[S]tudents—particularly working adults, parents and veterans—are independently selecting to attend our schools because of flexible course scheduling, career-specific instruction and a pathway to employment in high-demand occupations.
