In just their latest failed effort to peel away supporters from one of the Democratic Party's most reliable constituencies, Republicans in 2012 still lost among Jewish voters by over a 2-1 margin. The reasons for the GOP's consistently dismal performance are no mystery. Survey data show that Jewish Americans overwhelmingly reject the Republicans' reactionary social policies and mockery of education and science. Worse still, many of the right's hardline supporters of Israel see God's chosen people as biblical cannon fodder needed to fulfill End Times prophecy. And then, as Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) showed this week, Republicans routinely compare Democratic positions on guns, education, health, taxes, the debt--and almost everything else--to the Holocaust.

During a speech Tuesday to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the North Carolina Republican appropriated the famous Holocaust maxim to protest federal regulation of for-profit colleges. As Inside Higher Ed reported, Foxx complained that private institutions should have joined in their defense:

"'They came for the for-profits, and I didn't speak up'...Nobody really spoke up like they should have."

For her part, Foxx was only following in the footsteps of her GOP colleague, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland (video above). Federal student loans, he cautioned last fall, weren't merely unconstitutional, but the first step to the gas chambers:

"If you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad...The Holocaust that occurred in Germany -- how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope."

Virginia Foxx's previous claim to fame was her high-profile role in propagating the "death panels" slander of the Affordable Care Act that became Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year. Democratic health care reform, she warned, will "put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."

And that, some Republicans suggest, makes Obamacare little different from the Holocaust. State exchanges helping to enable 30 million people in the United States to obtain insurance, Idaho state senator Sheryl Nuxoll darkly warned last week, are the equivalent of a final solution for health care:

"The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange."

As it turns out, she's far from alone in crying Holocaust over health care reform. In Maryland, the Republican Women of Anne Arundel County explained four years ago that "Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common." Last summer, Maine Republican Governor Paul LePage reacted to the Supreme Court's ruling upholding Obamacare:

"We the people have been told there is no choice. You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo -- the IRS."

LePage was not the first Republican to compare the Internal Revenue Service to the Hitler's henchman. During the GOP's successful crusade to gut the agency in the late 1990's, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott decried the IRS' "Gestapo-like tactics" while Alaska's Frank Murkowski protested, "You don't need to send in armed personnel in flak jackets."

Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee couldn't agree more.

Continue reading »

Heh. This Washington Post story has to walk such a thin line, considering that their Kaplan division made so much more money for them than their newspaper holdings. Almost always, there is little a for-profit college offers that you can't get at community college for a lot less money. As someone who was a recruiter at one of these money mills, take my word for it: The for-profit college that's worth the enormous amount of money you'll owe is the exception, not the rule:

A Senate committee that successfully pressed for tighter regulation of the for-profit higher education sector published a report Sunday that said the business had put shareholders before students.

As of 2009, the report said, three-quarters of students in for-profit colleges attended institutions owned either by publicly traded companies or private equity firms. It said the schools excelled at recruiting students, but not necessarily at retaining them: More than half of students at for-profit schools who enrolled in the 2008-09 academic year left without a degree, the report found. Half of all non-finishers ended their studies within four months.

The findings are in line with concerns voiced last year when the Department of Education imposed stricter rules on for-profit schools that benefit from federal student loans.

The new report is titled “For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success.” It concludes a two-year investigation by Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Including appendices, the document totals about 800 pages.

Investigators studied operations at 30 for-profit higher education companies, including industry leaders Apollo Group, Education Management Corp., DeVry and Kaplan. Kaplan is owned by the Washington Post Co.

“We uncovered two very big problems in for-profit higher education,” Harkin said in a statement. “One, billions of taxpayer dollars are being squandered. And two, many for-profit schools are doing real, lasting harm to the students they enroll.”

If there's one thing everyone should understand about ALEC and its relationship to corporations, it's this: ALEC exists to enable these corporations to thrive, profit, and steal from the pockets of government and individuals alike. The organization is a machine that first creates a crisis and then purports to solve it. Here's a perfect example of how they work, via Republic Report:

Republic Report has obtained a list of members of the ALEC Education Task Force as of July 2011, and it includes some of the largest players in the for-profit college industry:

• Washington Post Company-owned Kaplan, which is under investigation by at least four state Attorneys General, where 68 percent of college students drop out before graduating (the worst overall dropout rate of the top ten recipients of post-9/11 G.I. bill benefits), and whose previous CEO received a $76 million compensation package when he left.
• Bridgepoint Education, which is under investigation by at least six state Attorneys General, and which in 2009 spent more than $2000 per student on recruiting and only $700 per student on instruction. Of every 100 associate degree students who enrolled in Bridgepoint in 2008-09, 84 had dropped out by September 2010.
• Corinthian Colleges, which is under investigation by at least six state Attorneys General, where 66.5 percent of associate degree students drop out, and where 36 percent of students default on their loans within three years – the highest default rate of all publicly traded for-profit education companies.
• APSCU, the for-profit schools trade association, which hires expensive lobbyists like former Senator Trent Lott to pressure Congress, and works hand-in-hand with the House Republican leadership on bills to prevent bad actors in the industry from being held accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse. APSCU members include DeVry, ITT, ATI, Education Management Corp., Career Education Corp., and Mitt Romney favorite Full Sail University, as well as Kaplan, Bridgepoint, and Corinthian.

These affiliations between for-profit colleges and ALEC raise some serious questions.

You should read the entire article, but think about what these corporations do. They advertise themselves as a solution to the problem for people who need college degrees and do not have them. They sprung up and have thrived as more and more public colleges and universities are starved for funds and either have to reduce enrollments or cut back classes. Much of what DeVry and ITT do, for example, is provide a technical trade school education in tech and service areas, which were more widely available to community college students than they are today.

Continue reading »

From the Republic Report, a real eye-opener. Listen to these consultants (Democratic and Republican) talk about how important pro-private sector politics is as they talk to members of the for-profit education industry about how to manipulate members of Congress. Truly just as cynical as you'll always suspected, and illustrative of what's happening in every major industry, not just this one. But the for-profit colleges have, pardon the pun, done their homework, managing to salt members of both parties throughout their supporters, making it a truly bipartisan affair.

As we head into an election year, we’re going to increasingly hear that Democrats and Republicans fight like cats and dogs, that there is a civil war in Washington. This describes the state of play on some issues, but on others there is bipartisan agreement to do the wrong thing: Both parties do what the money tells them to do. How this works is subtle and often kept secret, done in rooms meant to shield policy-making while the public is distracted with electoral hoopla. Fortunately for Republic Report readers, I got access to one of these rooms, and I can explain how the money guides policy-making.

It starts with high level party functionaries paid by a rich industry, which uses the talents and connections of those party functionaries to extract government concessions. In this case, it’s the for-profit college industry, which perpetually leaves students with astronomical debt while providing poor quality education. The functionaries were former Bill Clinton advisor Doug Sosnik and Republican consultant Sara Fagen. Rather than fighting like cats and dogs, these two showed a keen sense of bipartisanship as they told leaders of these for-profit education companies how they can use their power to manipulate Congress into handing them more money.

The for-profit colleges, multi-billion dollar companies that rely on Federal grants, have collected themselves into the super-boring sounding association known as the Association for Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU). Today, they held a closed-to-the-public but open-to-the-media meeting in Washington, D.C. to plot how to keep Congress from approving stricter regulations on the billions of taxpayer dollars that their corporations receive through federal student loans and grants.

The first session of the day featured a presentation by Democratic consultant Sosnik and Republican consultant Fagen. Before Sosnik and Fagen spoke, an ASPCU representative noted that Sosnik most recently worked for the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) on its legislative campaigns. The MPAA was last seen trying to undermine freedom on the internet through similar political connections and campaign contributions.

Continue reading »

Watch Educating Sergeant Pantzke Preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

To this day, I am deeply ashamed of the six months I spent as a salesperson -- excuse me, admissions counselor -- at a for-profit college. (I am, however, proud that I was fired for refusing to sign up anyone with a pulse.) It wasn't until after I left that I finally learned most of their business practices were not only illegal, they'd already been cited for them and were operating under a compliance order at the time they were charged again. (As far as I can tell, those charges went nowhere. I'm sure it's a coincidence that the CEO was a big-time Bush fundraiser.)

Now we're finding out that these for-profit colleges are taking tuition money from many veterans who are not good risks for completing these programs:

Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) just released new Defense Department data showing that the troubled for-profit college sector — which has left many American deep in debt — received half of all military Tuition Assistance dollars last year — $280 million out of $563 million for college grants for active duty military.

During their decade of explosive growth, for-profit education companies have sent armies of high-pressure recruiters to military bases and set up makeshift campuses right nearby. More recently, they have sent armies of lobbyists to convince the Obama Administration and Congress that they should not be held accountable.Among Senator Harkin’s conclusions based on the Pentagon data:

• Six of the largest recipients of Tuition Assistance are for-profits, and they get 41 percent of all TA dollars. A review of four of those schools by Sen. Harkin’s staff revealed that 60 percent of their students drop out within a year.
• One of the schools, Bridgepoint, employs 1,700 recruiters but just one job placement counselor.
• For-profit colleges are getting more than 60 percent of the tuition assistance available to military spouses.

Continue reading »

I was so disappointed that the administration caved on this. I guess because no one the Villagers know would have children attending a for-profit school, so it wasn't all that important to them. Most people can't imagine just how cynical these places are. I know - I was an "admissions counselor" (aka sales rep) for one of the biggest names. They wanted me to sign up anyone with a pulse, and I refused to do it. It was the longest six months of my life.

WASHINGTON — Last year, the Obama administration vowed to stop for-profit colleges from luring students with false promises. In an opening volley that shook the $30 billion industry, officials proposed new restrictions to cut off the huge flow of federal aid to unfit programs.

But after a ferocious response that administration officials called one of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact as it goes into effect next year.

The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.

Anita Dunn, a close friend of President Obama and his former White House communications director, worked with Kaplan University, one of the embattled school networks. Jamie Rubin, a major fund-raising bundler for the president’s re-election campaign, met with administration officials about ATI, a college network based in Dallas, in which Mr. Rubin’s private-equity firm has a stake.

A who’s who of Democratic lobbyists — including Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader; John Breaux, the former Louisiana senator; and Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, ran Mr. Obama’s transition team — were hired to buttonhole officials.

And politically well-connected investors, including Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Company, which owns Kaplan, and John Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix and a longtime friend of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, made impassioned appeals.

In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington.

The result was a plan, completed in June, that imposes new regulations on for-profit schools to ensure they adequately train their students for work, but does so on a much less ambitious scale than the administration first intended, relaxing the initial standards for determining which schools would be stripped of federal financing.