A question we’ve asked for lo these many years on this blog.

… and he can’t remember when he puts a loaded gun in his work bag. But the US House of Representatives has been relying on Jeffrey Allsbrooks to be its Logistics Manager. Your tax dollars at work, mes petites.

It little profits a for-profit thing

To make investments that incur a loss.

Match’d with clueless suckers, we mete and dole

Almost nothing, much-blessed by Ms DeVos.

The Clintons were just as willing to enrich themselves via the scummy tax-syphons as many Republicans were and are. Bill’s bogus chancellorship at a for-profit school paid him many millions to jet around the world now and then making inspirational speeches. UD is obviously a strong Hillary supporter, but the Clintons are paying now for what they did, and I’m afraid they deserve to.

Go to my Click-Thru U category for years of incredulity and anger that this should-be-criminal enterprise continues to thrive.

All the way down (and I mean way down) the line, Noah Feldman’s defense of basically accepting any applicant for law school follows the talking points of the scummy for-profit colleges.

Law school has always had a shaky time thinking of itself as flying at a similar altitude to med school, but as the profession downsizes, and schools like UD‘s own George Washington University, for instance, start stealing students from American University, while Georgetown University steals students from GW, things are really moving toward the death spiral.

Feldman’s argument against the “infantilization” of people who want to assume $200,000 in debt to law school (even though their scores and grades make it obvious they won’t be good students and will either drop out with lots of debt or will fail to get a job that will allow them to repay the debt) is just as inspiring as Corinthian College’s spokespeople who for all the years it was in existence (it was recently forced to shut down its federal-tax-syphon operation) remonstrated against us for the same thing: How dare you, in an America founded on personal liberty and Horatio Alger etc etc etc how DARE you keep every person who fantasizes that she can be a lawyer from going to law school and sticking the American taxpayer with their loans? Our law schools are heroically reaching down into non-traditional places (the for-profits, for instance, hang out at homeless shelters and sign people up) and finding the inspiring social activists of this country’s future…

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Feldman argues that “A standardized test score, taken alone, shouldn’t determine your future.” Hell yeah!

But no school accepts students merely on the basis of their scores… Jordan Weissmann is even unpleasant enough here to suggest that Feldman’s “very much arguing against a straw man” throughout his essay…

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Feldman teaches at Harvard and is very worried that schools like his will be “accused of elitism and denial of opportunity” if they don’t override the conspiratorial pope-like “infallible admissions process” with its oligarchical buttressing of this country’s evil “technocratic elite.”

Thank God this doesn’t come anywhere near describing the Harvard of today, and thank God Feldman’s right there to make sure nothing like that happens in the future.

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UPDATE: Paul Campos, a friend of this blog, adds this:

[Feldman] ignores the rules under which law schools are actually required to operate. ABA-accredited law schools have something close to a complete monopoly on qualifying American students to sit for state bar exams (California is the major exception), and in order to be an ABA law school, you at least in theory have to abide by the organization’s rules of accreditation, which both forbid schools from admitting students who don’t appear capable of passing the bar, and threaten with de-accreditation schools that have insufficiently high bar passage rates.

… Bar exams, ABA rules, and indeed law schools themselves are all designed as barriers to entry. This is especially true of law schools, which require people to invest three years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct and opportunity costs after acquiring an undergraduate degree, before their graduates even have the right to try to take the bar exam. Now the public-regarding justification for these barriers is, not surprisingly, to protect the public from incompetent and/or crooked lawyers. Nowhere in his piece does Feldman even allude to this core regulatory function.

Nice sentence. Packs a lot in.

… (insignia here) keeps getting its siphoning system disrupted. In the good old days, government-money-funneling enabled its academic officers to make salaries in the tens of millions, but now – after destroying the lives of scores of dupes – the well is drying up. Things will be fine again once President Trump (himself a university president) takes office; but for now, Phoenix is enduring an “endless stream of bad news” (UD thanks Wendy for the link) in the form of business practice investigations, new rules about how you can’t take student money and say thanks fuck off, etc.

And that’s Phoenix. That’s the classiest of the for-profit ed tax-siphon lot. You can imagine how the rats are deserting at, say, DeVry, where, for instance, after collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for trading on his reputable past, the disgraced Harold Shapiro got his ass out while the getting was good.

Ah. With each clause, UD’s smile widens.

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Very good brief backgrounder here.

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The next big change, they say, came in 2006, when Congress passed legislation backed by the Bush administration that erased a requirement that colleges deliver at least half their courses on a campus.
The top regulator on higher education at the Education Department during this time was Sally Stroup, now general counsel for the for-profit’s chief lobbying arm, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities.

“That’s when these guys took off,” said Tom Harkin, a former Democratic senator from Iowa who led a 2012 investigation into the for-profit industry. He said moving everything online made it easier for private investors to snap up failing schools and hide from regulators. Meanwhile, the schools invested heavily in lobbyists and making political connections that guaranteed access to federal student aid would be protected, he said.

“These schools went out and ran wild with government money,” Harkin said.

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A fed’ral official named Stroup
Did the ol’ gov-to-biz loop de loop:
She made our schools trash
And sucked in the cash
But now it is time to regroup.

… their ex-employees can always find work in Pakistan.

Well. Now that the tax syphons have syphoned up our taxes and subjected a population used to exploitation to yet more exploitation, what’s next? Goldman Sachs has made its money on the for-profit ed scam and will no doubt soon be getting the hell out while the getting’s good. Goldman Sachs stands at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the exploited masses. Goldman Sachs knows what’s what, and is unhampered by morality.

As for the suckers left holding the bag (you, me, and the students of for-profit schools): I’m sure Lloyd Blankfein has a little lecture to give us all on how markets operate.

Good and totally predictable news. But meanwhile a lot of people got hurt (those paying back pointless loans continue to get hurt), and a lot of taxpayers got taken.

Of course the industry continues to take our taxes and put suckers in debt. But it’s definitely, finally, going south.

Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit online school that has been under scrutiny for what Mr. Miller, the Iowa attorney general, called “unconscionable sales practices,” turned to [a lobbying firm] to set up meetings with [Florida Attorney General Pam] Bondi’s staff, to urge her not to join in the inquiries underway in several states. Again, her office decided not to take up the matter, citing the small number of complaints about Bridgepoint it has received.

You do not want to know what goes into it.

Predatory, odious, our next president, and currently dealing with his namesake university being dragged through the mud, first by the New York Attorney General, and now by a judge:

This week, a judge found Donald Trump liable for operating a get-rich-quick school, the erstwhile Trump University, without a license. The case was originally brought against Trump by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office, which, according to the Daily News, alleged that Trump University had “ripped off 5,000 students nationwide by promising to make them rich when instead they were steered into costly and mostly useless seminars.”

While he’s already been held liable for the university’s operation, Trump will now go to trial to see if he’s also liable for defrauding the students.

Can’t wait for the trial.

… a grand new American tradition.

… Dean Shirley Mays allegedly described as ‘building a better mousetrap.'”

Wow. If true, Dean Mays certainly has a way with words.