These For-Profit Schools Are ‘Like a Prison’

Teenagers at Paramount Academy sometimes came home with mysterious injuries.

An alternative school for sixth- through 12th-graders with behavioral or academic problems, Paramount occupied a low-slung, brick and concrete building on a dead-end road in hard-luck Reading, Pennsylvania, a city whose streets are littered with signs advertising bail bondsmen, pay-day lenders, and pawn shops. Camelot Education, the for-profit company that ran Paramount under a contract with the Reading school district, maintained a set of strict protocols: No jewelry, book bags, or using the water fountain or bathroom without permission. Just as it still does at dozens of schools, the company deployed a small platoon of "behavioral specialists" and "team leaders": typically large men whose job was partly to enforce the rules.

Universities Run Into Problems When They Hire Presidents From The Business World

Mount St. Mary’s University, a private, liberal arts Catholic university in Maryland, has recently been plagued with controversy thanks to comments from the university president that made an alarming comparison between students and bunnies.

After a career in the financial industry, president Simon Newman vowed to make sweeping changes in both finances and academics at Mount St. Mary’s. But some faculty were taken aback by his communication style, one that may have gone unnoticed in private equity, especially when he talked about encouraging struggling students to leave the university earlier in the semester for a better federally reported retention rate.

Despite Low Grad Rates at For-Profit Colleges, One Accreditor Keeps Billions in Tax Dollars Flowing

For-profit universities have had another rough year, with big players facing federal scrutiny for everything from predatory loans to outright fraud.

Now attention is turning to the schools’ accreditors.

Accreditors are supposed to make sure that schools provide students with a quality education. They are not government agencies, but wield enormous power: Schools need accreditors’ stamps of approval to maintain access to the government’s annual $170 billion in federal student aid.

Neoliberalism steamrolling public education in B.C.

Public education in British Columbia is struggling against a thickening neoliberal framework.

The deterioration of public education is not unique to the region, but to use it as a model paints a rather bleak picture.

In 2014, the British Columbia Teacher's Federation clashed with the B.C. Liberals who had twice appealed a Supreme Court ruling on class size regulation, and would not provisionally fund education while their second appeal was being completed. The school year began three weeks late.

How A Right-Wing Political Machine Is Dismantling Higher Education in North Carolina

On a Monday afternoon in April, a few dozen people gathered in a windowless room in Raleigh, North Carolina, to discuss the crisis in higher education. As they dug into plates of Tex-Mex, the featured speaker, Jay Schalin, ascended the podium and adjusted his notes. The crisis isn’t cost or access, he informed the room. “The main problem has to do with the ideas that are being discussed and promoted,” Schalin explained, those being “multiculturalism, collectivism, left-wing post-modernism.”

How a corporate cult captures and destroys our best graduates

To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here.

Those who graduate from the leading universities have more opportunity than most to find such purpose. So why do so many end up in pointless and destructive jobs? Finance, management consultancy, advertising, public relations, lobbying: these and other useless occupations consume thousands of the brightest students. To take such jobs at graduation, as many will in the next few weeks, is to amputate life close to its base.

NY State Official Raises Alarm on Charter Schools — And Gets Ignored

Add another voice to those warning about the lack of financial oversight for charter schools. One of New York state’s top fiscal monitors told ProPublica that audits by his office have found “practices that are questionable at best, illegal at worst” at some charter schools.

Pete Grannis, New York State’s First Deputy Comptroller, contacted ProPublica after reading our story last week about how some charter schools have turned over nearly all their public funds and significant control to private, often for-profit firms that handle their day-to-day operations. The arrangements can limit the ability of auditors and charter-school regulators to follow how public money is spent – especially when the firms refuse to divulge financial details when asked.

Banks Urge Investors To Buy For-Profit College Stocks Now That The GOP Is Taking Back Congress

The Republican resurgence on Capitol Hill makes for-profit education company stock a hot commodity, according to industry analysts who expect a GOP-controlled Congress to loosen oversight of both student lending firms and for-profit colleges.

Investment advisers from both Credit Suisse and BMO Capital Markets issued research notes this week connecting the Republican victories on Tuesday to an improved outlook for education companies. The analyses were based primarily on future legislative predictions. The Higher Education Act needs to be renewed, and BMO’s Jeffrey Silberargued that a Republican Senate will produce a bill that is much friendlier to the companies that run for-profit schools, according to Buzzfeed. Credit Suisse wrote in Barron’s that the “diminished regulatory risk characteristics of a Republican-controlled electorate” makes student lending company stocks likely to rise in value because “Republicans have historically fought detrimental legislation originating from Congressional Democrats.”

Obama Administration Backs Down On For-Profit College Regulations

The Obama administration has released a final version of regulations targeting for-profit colleges that is significantly weaker than the initial rules proposed earlier this year, caving to complaints and legal threats from industry lobbyists. The regulations could still shut down 1,400 programs at for-profit colleges, which collectively enroll about 840,000 students.

The administration has made reining in the for-profit college industry a key component of its education agenda. For-profit college companies, like Apollo, which owns the University of Phoenix, and DeVry Education Group, receive billions of dollars of taxpayer money each year in the form of federal financial aid, drawing as much as 90% of their revenue from the federal government. Many of the biggest for-profits are mired in lawsuits from organizations like the Justice Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and dozens of state attorneys general, which allege a raft of violations, from misleading enrollment claims to predatory lending schemes.

Free Market Forces Will Not Save US Education -- They Will Destroy It

Fans of market forces for education simply don't understand how market forces actually work.

What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.

Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Betamax was actually technically superior to VHS, but VHS had a better marketing plan.

The Remarkable Idiocy of 'Economically-Driven Education'

On October 2, 2014, I will be speaking in Indiana to an audience chiefly comprised of university students who have a passing understanding of the intentions of monied interests to usurp control of public education.

Why Don’t We Have Real Data on Charter Schools?

In several cities throughout the country, there is a fierce conflict raging over the direction of education reform. At the center of this increasingly acrimonious debate is the question of whether or not charter schools—publicly funded schools that operate outside the rules (and often the control) of traditional public-school systems—should be allowed to proliferate. Given their steady growth (from no more than a handful twenty years ago to over 6,000 today), charter schools and their advocates appear to have the upper hand. A new bipartisan bill—the Expanding Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Act, sponsored by Republican senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Mark Kirk of Illinois, and Democratic senators Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Michael Bennet of Colorado—would provide new funds to launch, replicate and expand charter schools nationwide.

For-Profit College Grads Have The Same Shot At A Job Interview As People Who Never Went To College

In their television ads, for-profit colleges promise to deliver credentials that will jump-start students’ careers. The people lured in by that marketing end up deeper in debt than community college students but fare no better with hiring managers, according to a new study. In fact, for-profit graduates don’t even gain a job hunting advantage over applicants with no college experience at all.

The study results are based on a simple experiment that the authors believe is the first of its kind performed on for-profit schools. Researchers sent nearly 9,000 fake resumes in response to job postings in six different categories of work and compared the response rates their fake applicants got to see if a for-profit college degree would be worth more in the job market than an equivalent community college certification. Some of the fictional resumes listed no education beyond high school in order to evaluate the claim from for-profit supporters that the industry “draws some students into postsecondary schooling who otherwise would not have attended college at all” and should therefore be viewed as a useful bridge to economic mobility.

Were Charter Teachers and Students Pressured to Rally for Charter Schools in Albany?

On the first Tuesday in March, thousands of students, parents and teachers rallied at the New York state capitol in Albany to protest what the media quickly dubbed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “war” on charter schools and minority students. Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy charter network and one of the mayor’s fiercest critics, closed all twenty-two of her schools so that students and staff could participate in what she called “the largest civic field trip in history.”

But it wasn’t merely a field trip; the rally was a political event, in protest of de Blasio’s decision not to approve plans for three Success Academies to co-locate with traditional public schools, and more broadly his proposal to charge rent to charters occupying city school buildings. (The mayor approved forty-five other co-location proposals, five of them put forward by Success Academy.) Moskowitz has been the most vocal opponent of the new mayor’s education policies, though few have been enacted. As the debate intensifies, staff and students at Success Academy are being increasingly drawn into the political battle—or pushed into it, according to several employees who spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity.

Universities Are Cutting Tenured Faculty While They Load Up on 'Non-Academic' Administrators

As the cost of college remains exorbitant, recent trends indicate schools in the United States are trading tenured professors for non-academic administrative staff. It's pretty clear where American colleges have their priorities, and it's not in academics. Students are paying more to attend schools that are spending less to teach them, and instead spending that tuition money on administration.

Screw U: How For-Profit Colleges Rip You Off

The folks who walked through Tressie McMillan Cottom's door at an ITT Technical Institute campus in North Carolina were desperate. They had graduated from struggling high schools in low-income neighborhoods. They'd worked crappy jobs. Many were single mothers determined to make better lives for their children. "We blocked off a corner, and that's where we would put the car seats and the strollers," she recalls. "They would bring their babies with them and we'd encourage them to do so, because this is about building motivation and urgency."

How A For-Profit College Created Fake Jobs To Get Taxpayer Money

Eric Parms enrolled at an Everest College campus in the suburbs of Atlanta in large part because recruiters promised he would have little trouble securing a job.

He'd seen the for-profit school's television commercials touting its sterling rates of job placement, and he'd heard the pledges of admissions staff who assured him that the campus career services office would help him find work in his field.

But after completing a nine-month program in heating and air conditioning repair in the summer of 2011 -- graduating with straight As and $17,000 in student debt -- Parms began to doubt the veracity of the pitch. Career services set him up with a temporary contract position laying electrical wires. After less than two months, he and several other Everest graduates also working on the job were laid off and denied further help finding work, he says.

How For-Profit Colleges Stay In Business Despite Terrible Track Record

By every available indication, Corinthian Colleges Inc., one of the country's largest chains of for-profit colleges, stands out as an institution whose students face especially long odds of success.

At nearly half of Corinthian's schools, more than 30 percent of students default on their federal loans within three years of leaving campus, according to the most recent federal data. California last year cited excessively high default rates in denying access to state tuition grants at 23 of the company's campuses. Over the last three years, attorneys general in eight states and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have probed Corinthian's recruitment claims and financial aid practices, raising the prospect of lawsuits.

Juan González: Growing Charter School Chain Suspends Special Needs Kids in Bid to Raise Test Scores

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his reports for the New York Daily News about how one of the New York City’s fastest-growing chains of charter schools, Success Academy, has far higher suspension rates than other public elementary schools. "More than two dozen parents have come to me complaining about their children — who are special needs, special education children, or children with behavior problems," González reports, "that they feel are being pushed out or forced out by the charter school in an effort to to improve the test scores." Success Academy uses its high test scores to attract funding, and just secured a $5 million grant it will use to expand from 20 to 100 schools. González obtained a copy of secretly recorded meetings in which school administrators pressed one parent to transfer her special education kindergarten student back into the public school system.

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Source: democracynow.org
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Career Education Corp. Reaches $10 Million Settlement In Investigation Of Bogus Job Placements

One of the largest U.S. for-profit college corporations agreed to pay more than $10 million Monday to settle the state of New York's claim that the company systematically deceived students by advertising bogus job placement rates at its career-oriented schools.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a $10.25 million settlement agreement with Career Education Corp., which includes a $1 million penalty and assurances that the school will establish a $9.25 million restitution fund for students who were misled from the 2009-2010 school year to 2011-2012. The company admitted no wrongdoing.