A huge student loan scam
With the help of Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., for-profit colleges are massively ripping off U.S. taxpayers
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/a_huge_student_loan_scam/singleton/
Additional proof (as if any were needed) that the Tea Party anti-government crusade is nothing more than racist anti-feminine blather and not about the excesses of government. This whole for-profit higher education system is 100% scam from beginning to end, left to right, top to bottom. It is nothing more than a wholesale transfer of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the 1%. There is no way that the majority of people can pay back these loans and they loans are all backed by our ‘great’ government. Then, to add a bitch-slap to the insult added to the injury, these for-profit schools don’t even award a degree for all the (tax payer) money spent! Of course, I am quite certain that the degree would be worthless anyway, but at least they would have the illusion of having earned something.
I looked into on-line education a number of years ago as I thought it would be an interesting way to dramatically reduce the cost of education. Imagine my surprise when I found that the tuition was as high or even higher than public Universities! All that AND a degree worth far less than the equivalent from a decent public University. But, you say, public Universities are subsidized, so the true cost isn’t being reflected in the tuition. Yes, but keep in mind that a public University has a huge campus to maintain, something nonexistent in the on-line world of for-profit schools. The cost for on-line education should be very modest in comparison.
A wee bit of personal experience… Several years ago (heck I guess now it was probably over 7 years) I was interested in a brand new PhD program in information security (the school shall remain nameless to avoid any potential for a lawsuit, but a trivial amount of research will reveal the name to anyone interested) in a brand new ‘University’ just being created. The program started out in Northern Virginia and seemed like a perfect fit with my intentions at the time. It would have been a bit of a stretch economically, but I felt the payoff would be worth the investment. I met with a recruiter there who also seemed to share my idea that I would be a perfect fit with the program: I had a strong interest in infosec, a strong background in computers and several thesis ideas already percolating. However the owner of the program (notice how I said ‘owner’; as a private, for-profit organization it is no different from the local sub shop in that regard) decided that I was a lousy fit for their program because he was actually looking for people who, for all intents and purposes, would get no benefit whatsoever from having the degree. What I mean is that the owner wanted students who already had jobs in the infosec ‘biz and were indeed quite senior in that regard, thus would enable him to brag in his marketing material that his program had graduated ‘top people’ in the field. Of course, they would already have been top in their field, so the degree, to them, would be nothing more than vanity (meaning it wouldn’t help them get jobs or get them more money). That was when I started to see the whole for-profit education system for the scam that it is. This is not to say that our current not-for-profit (public or private) education system isn’t without some serious defects (regular reader(s) here will know I have a very jaundiced view of the status quo), just to say that the for-profit arm of our education system is nothing more than legalized theft from the taxpayer.
