The industry that has been the most effective in buying protection in D.C, for its predatory practices is the for-profit college industry. It has hired the top lobbyist in both parties. It makes generous campaign contributions. It collects billions from taxpayers to underwrite its behavior. All of this money is used to enrich the industry leaders. Need I add that these institutions are known for predatory practices and for supplying a lousy education.
This article, written by David Halperin and published in The Nation, lays bare the power of this industry and how well it has used its resources to avoid scrutiny of it. The article appeared nearly one year ago.
Now Halperin has published a new article, predicting the end of the predatory colleges. He cites the bankruptcy of mega-chain Corinthian Colleges as a hopeful sign. He thinks that Washington is ready to take them on. Count me cynical. I will believe it when it happens.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately, the students will carry the debt load for life. If they don’t or can’t pay it they can anticipate judgments and then wage garnishment.
Everybody worries about them not being able to buy a house or car on credit with all that debt, but it’s actually much worse than that. They can’t even contemplate those sorts of purchases because their wages get eaten up- the money they have to live on, never mind planning for anything in the future.
Lawmakers could do a lot to help them. They could carve out an exception for schools that engaged in fraud and maybe turn the issue over to bankruptcy courts to decide- those courts are the best-positioned to understand debt issues and they’d do a good, fair job- it’s all they do so they’re experts. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any political will to help them.
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$$$$$$ talks. This country has a few monopolistic corps. run by people in positions of power where the saying is: “It’s ONLY business” reigns. Schools are NOT businesses. It’s all backwards and an excuse for raping our public schools and FOR PROFIT, no less. SIC.
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We’ve always had them, though, “career institutes”- truck driving, barber, etc. People do need special licenses for those trades and it was one route to get one.
What turned them into a giant, federally-subsidized rip-off was the capacity to offer classes online along with purchasing lawmakers.
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“What’s happened in our economy is that those who are doing better and better… are withdrawing from sort of the commons,” Obama said. “Kids start going to private schools; kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks. An anti-government ideology then disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together. And that, in part, contributes to the fact that there’s less opportunity for our kids, all of our kids.”
Someone should introduce President Obama to President Obama’s policy preferences. Maybe they could reach an agreement 🙂
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Someone who so brazenly ignores the gap between their words and their actions is either deluded or has contempt for the intelligence of their audience.
I don’t think Obama is deluded.
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His article is cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/The-Perfect-Lobby-How-One-in-Best_Web_OpEds-College_Debt_INDUSTRY_Money-150514-325.html#comment544902
with comments having embedded links to here.
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Reblogged this on ohyesjulesdid.
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Education and the Industrial Imagination
Prof. Ravitch and followers of her blog are of course right to underscore the fact that for-profit colleges and universities must be understood in the broader context of an increasingly dominant business or industrial model of education. It is helpful to spell out that model more precisely, so that our criticisms can be more clearly and forcefully targeted. Let me take a stab at that here.
On the industrial model, educating whole persons for lifelong growth is replaced by education as just another industrial sector, on a par with any other sector. Education’s job is to manufacture skilled labor for the market in a way that is maximally efficient. Knowledge on this model is a market commodity, teachers are delivery vehicles for knowledge content, and students are either consumers or manufactured products. Educational institutions on the industrial model are marketplaces for delivering and acquiring content, tuition is the fair price for accessing that content, and the high-to-low grade differential is the means for incentivizing competition. It is not clear where growth, community, and democracy come into the picture.
A school may train more students with fewer teachers, and an industrial sector may produce more clothes, cars, or animal protein to meet market demands with lower overhead costs. These products can then be used, or put to work to produce more things. The industrial imagination stops here, with efficient production. This is arguably useful, but what else has been unintentionally made, to which industrial thinking is oblivious? Have we made narrower lives? Have we embittered and disabled? Have we anesthetized moral and ecological sensitivity? Have we, in John Dewey’s words, made life more “congested, hurried, confused and extravagant”? If the answer is a qualified yes, then these are questions that should be central to public deliberation about education. It would be a tragedy that trivializes all of our successes if we continue unchecked down a cultural path in which schools—or industries—gain efficiency and increase productivity by frustrating human fulfillment.
Steven Fesmire, author of Dewey (Routledge, 2015)
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