Marc Bousquet, who blogs for The Chronicle of Higher Education, worries in his latest post that the harsh federal spotlight currently illuminating the excesses of for-profit colleges is missing similar problems at nonprofit institutions.
Especially alarming were the numbers for two-year and for-profit colleges, with 40 percent of students who borrowed loans to attend for-profit institutions defaulting since 1995. This data comes just when for-profit colleges are being subjected to federal scrutiny in part because of the amount of federal financial aid they draw and the amount they spend on expenses other than teaching. “While for-profits educate less than 10 percent of students, those colleges’ students received close to a quarter of Pell Grant and federal-student-loan dollars in 2008,” according to the Chronicle article.
Mildred Elley, a two-year proprietary college that opened its doors in Albany, N.Y., in 1917, prides itself on helping people get back to work. But Faith A. Takes, the college's owner and president, fears that a new federal proposal that would evaluate for-profit colleges by comparing their students' borrowing to their graduates' earnings will jeopardize her college's high-demand nursing, medical-assisting, and information-technology programs at the very time more adults are turning to the institution for training.
PBS broadcast a documentary on for-profit higher education last week, titled College, Inc. It begins with the slightly ridiculous figure of Michael Clifford, a former cocaine abuser turned born-again Christian who never went to college, yet makes a living padding around the lawn of his oceanside home wearing sandals and loose-fitting print shirts, buying up distressed non-profit colleges and turning them into for-profit money machines.
One of the world's largest owners of for-profit colleges has bought East San Jose's National Hispanic University, throwing the idealistic but struggling campus into the growing and controversial world of corporate education.