USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: Don’t fail students by advancing for-profit colleges
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to make life a lot easier for predatory for-profit colleges and a lot tougher for students lured by overblown promises of jobs that never materialize.
For years, some for-profit colleges have left devastated students in their wake — often veterans and struggling workers who take on enormous student debt only to face poor job prospects. The upshot? Some in the industry get rich. Students get suckered. And taxpayers get stuck holding the bag for millions of dollars in defaulted loans spent on worthless programs.
The Obama administration came down hard on the industry to make career programs more accountable.
What has the Trump administration done? Last week, DeVos took the first step toward dumping an Obama rule and removing potential punishment that even the industry acknowledges has forced some schools to shut down and others to clean up their acts.
The rule requires colleges with career programs to report graduates’ student debt compared with their incomes to ensure that the debt isn’t out of proportion to what they earn. The rule makes sense. Programs that repeatedly fail to meet the modest government standard, that a typical student’s loan payments not exceed 12% of his yearly earnings, lose their eligibility for three years for student loans and grants.
Last year, when the Obama Education Department released its first set of statistics, nine out of 10 colleges, including public, private and for-profit institutions, had no failing programs.
Of the more than 800 programs that failed, most were at for-profit schools while a sprinkling were at non-profits. One of them was Harvard University’s A.R.T. Institute, a graduate theater training program, where the median student debt was $78,000 while graduates earned, on average, a meager $36,000 a year. It’s a perfect illustration of what Obama was trying to stop.
DeVos wants to replace the rule with information posted on the department’s college information website, College Scorecard, on the median debt and median earnings of graduates.
Sounds good, as far as it goes. The more information prospective students have, the better. But it is not a substitute for government accountability.
Steve Gunderson, president of the for-profits’ trade association, says the for-profit sector has improved so much that critics “should declare victory and go home.” But after over 800 training programs failed the government test last year, it’s too soon to call it quits.
The industry and its allies like to frame the for-profit issue as a fight waged by Democrats against business. That rewrites history.
For-profit colleges caused so much damage in the 1980s that President Ronald Reagan’s Education secretary, called them “an outrage perpetrated not only on the American taxpayer but, most tragically, upon some of the most disadvantaged and most vulnerable members of society.”
As long as that’s true for even some schools today, the government — whether run by Democrats or Republicans — should be on the case.