Lo-o-o-ong article about the cynical online for-profits in the New York Times. The writer can’t say enough bad about them.
The beauty of this money-maker is that you can “use education as a source of government-financed business, much as military contractors have capitalized on Pentagon spending.” You can be pious as hell about education, about how you’re educating young people, even as you’re taking all the money for yourself and leaving your heavily recruited marks ignorant and in debt. You pay your underqualified cyberteachers shit and give them virtual classrooms of two hundred students. You keep students enrolled even if they never even log in, because each of those students comes trailing federal funds for you and your partners. Nobody learns anything, but your investors make millions.