Woodbury-based Globe University must pay a former dean almost $400,000 in damages, a jury in her Washington County District Court whistleblower trial found Thursday.
It has been a busy time for the education sector in the Brazilian stock market. In less than a week, two large groups of private universities have filed for initial public offerings, or IPOs, which together could raise as much as R$1.6 billion (US$740 million). This year, three mergers and acquisitions of major education companies also shook up the sector, which is making big bets on online distance learning, writes Patricia Gomes for edSurge.
Just over a year ago, Senator Tom Harkin released a report detailing the predatory nature of many for-profit colleges. According to the report, these schools are often incredibly expensive, leave students with huge debts, have poor graduation rates, employ aggressive and unethical recruiting tactics, and receive billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Typically, for-profit colleges rely on federal grants and student loan money to cover the cost of high tuition prices of what often amount to worthless degrees.
A few months ago I was in Chile, where I was invited to lecture on issues in higher education. The moment I arrived, I was struck by how important the subject is in Chile, where it has a pervasive presence in everyday life.
The lobbying group of for-profit colleges, APSCU, today released a report, "Best Practices in Recruitment and Admissions." State and federal authorities, and private lawyers, have been investigating for-profit colleges, and winning settlements, arbitrations, and jury verdicts in cases where recruiters used coercive tactics and made false promises to prospective students about college costs, job placement rates, and other critical matters.
If the Obama administration gets its way, for-profit colleges will soon face tighter, tougher regulations based on how much debt their graduates carry.
Some students in the Inland Empire have complained in recent years that the education and degrees they receive from some area for-profit colleges leave them unemployable in their fields of interest and facing mounds of student loan debt.
At a time when you might have expected to hear the youth of Brazil chanting about the nation’s football team, they called out “Vem pra rua” – “Come to the street” – an invitation to protest against corruption, police aggression and poor public services.
With students enjoying their first weeks on campus and President Obama's call to bring more accountability to colleges still reverberating, for-profit schools are gearing up for what could be another round of battles over government efforts to tighten regulation of their operations.