Quota Sales U
This is an interesting article about for-profit schools. The author is precisely correct that students that attend these schools are looked down upon by their peers. But that has to do with the way our increasingly-Ayn Rand-ian country has demonized poverty. Students born of privilege look down their noses at their academic competitors of a lower economic class because that’s what they’ve been trained to do by their parents.However, this fact does not mean that for-profit schools are not predatory. The author of this piece points to an interview subject of hers, "J.J.", a military veteran, who wrote to her an impressive defense of his education via a for-profit school, ITT Technical Institute. This is noble, and his passion is persuasive. But exactly like the health care industry, it’s imperative that the social investment industry of higher education never operate with a financial mission.
America’s early experience with for-profit schools bears this out completely. Institutions bound to private ownership or shareholders are contacting potential students through phone and television promising a college degree “without leaving your living room,” but what steps are they taking to make sure students are advancing and graduating after the school has cashed the funds from the student's need-based federal Stafford loans? Almost to a school, these for-profit outfits are churning out student loan default rates at more than double the national average among their former students.
“J.J.” is correct is his assertion that there is tremendous administrative waste at the top of most public universities and private non-profit schools, but he’s wrong to be impressed that his for-profit school “pays taxes.” I guarantee you that ITT is paying taxes back to the U.S. Treasury at a tiny fraction of the amount they’re extracting from it.
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What I dread about growing older: The widening gap between me and my age compatriots in our general opinion about the relative state of the world and particularly that of “young people today.” I used to visit my grandparents in Texas in a retirement park. They aged very well in this respect, but I remember their friends coming to the house and sharing their rather sour concerns. I’m 38 years old and I’m already starting to detect my age mates trying to pull me down into the morass of perceived “cultural decay.” I can deal with getting old, but dealing with old people, I don’t know.
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We now know that the NSA has broken the law thousands of times with their surveillance activities. An internal audit in May of 2012 tallied 2,776 incidents in the previous 12 months alone of unauthorized access, storage, distribution, or collection. How bad has it gotten when the agency is defying even the judgments of its rubber-stamp secret court (FISA)?
posted by CM @ 2:51 PM
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