Steven Salzberg, a University of Maryland bioinformatics professor, writes with admirable frankness about the for-profits in Forbes:

… [For-profit universities] offer low-quality, almost worthless degrees. They have virtually no academic standards. They will accept anyone who can pay, and they seem to care primarily about the bottom line. They also haven’t addressed (and virtually never mention) the elephant in the room: many online students are probably cheating to pass their courses, which aren’t very demanding in the first place…

[We should] immediately stop offering government-funded student loans to FPUs. If they really have a better model for higher education, then let them prove it in the free market, without subsidies.

… in the medical profession.

… the for-profit college scandal. (Scroll down.)

… readers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log, a group blog dedicated to cognitive science.

If you’ve come here to scan UD‘s comments on the Marc Hauser story, here they are.

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UD has opinions about everything else, too, so feel free to poke around.

As ever, Barmak Nassirian says it best. Here his subject is the recent exposure of systemic corruption among for-profit universities; and Jennifer Epstein, reporter for Inside Higher Ed, rightly concludes her long piece updating the for-profit story with his remark:

“If [for-profits] really wanted to seriously enforce any kind of a code of ethics, the whole business model would be upended because the business model here is consumer fraud,” he said. “The margins involved can only be produced if you can shortchange people on the substance of what you purportedly sell, which is education.”

In other words, if they stop lying to hordes of clueless applicants in order to get them to enroll in their school — at which point investors and management at the schools enrich themselves via the federal education loans that attach to said people — if they stop doing this, their very industry collapses. I’ve just described, as Nassirian says, the for-profit business model.

UD loves the way the industry has been, throughout this inevitable congressional exposure, desperately pressing every button in the populist cockpit, hoping to get enough lift not to crash. Here’s a representative of an industry trade group back in June, before the shit hit the fan:

“Elitist Wall Street stock manipulators, rather than higher education experts, have been driving hyperbolic media coverage, creating the impression that outliers are the norm, and insulting millions of hardworking students and graduates in the process. We have every expectation that the GAO, using facts and figures, will provide a full and fair review.”

UD’s been covering the industry for years and she can’t tell you how much of this crap she’s read. Ooh that elitist Harvard with its elitist president — whose salary, around $800,000, compares curiously with the typical salaries of her for-profit peers — from five to ten million dollars a year…

But they’re working hard for the hardworking real people! Why can’t ordinary hardworking American ever catch a break? It’s not insulting for CEO’s to make millions of dollars at the expense of misinformed people who want to better themselves; it’s insulting for the media to cover the story.

… these farcically conflicted groups receive money from the entities they’re supposed to oversee.

Which is why accreditors accredit almost everything, corporate boards at places as outrageous as Goldman Sachs do nothing, and auditors rarely meet a Ponzi scheme putrid enough to catch their eye.

Here are excerpts from conversations between US senators and a representative of the accreditors who accredit all those for-profit colleges you’ve been reading about. (Lynn O’Shaughnessy, CBS: “Until the industry is cleaned up — if it ever is — I’d stay away from these schools. You can start by avoiding any school that advertises on television.”)

“Do you think maybe your rigorous standards aren’t rigorous enough?”

“I believe the standards themselves are rigorous…”

I’m sure they are, honey, I’m sure they are. But you are not a standards-writing organization. You are an accrediting organization.

… “If your process doesn’t detect readily apparent fraud, who is protecting students and taxpayers?… We rely on accreditation.”

Mr. McComis replied that it that was up to state and federal regulators, “the other parts of the triad,” to root out fraud.

“Accreditation is designed to evaluate the quality of education, not to detect fraud,” he said, adding, “Certainly, if we find fraud in the process, we’re going to act on it.”

“But your on-site evaluations didn’t detect it,” Senator Harkin said. “It seems like you accept the schools’ word on what they’re doing.”

Quality involves not merely how well taught courses are (and there’s reams of evidence that many courses are taught poorly at these schools); quality involves institutional controls, hiring and recruiting practices, etc. — Things accreditors are supposed to review and approve.

Mr. Harkin said he planned to “look into” the financing structure of the accrediting system, saying it “seems to be a situation that is rife with conflict.”

That plan has implications for nonprofit colleges as well, since all accreditors are financed by the institutions they accredit…

Yes. Which is why vanishingly few schools fail to be accredited. They may get warnings, yadda yadda. But everyone outside of obvious diploma mills (and they’re still fooling lots of people by using their own bogus accrediting jobbies) gets to operate.

… the ever-quotable Barmak Nassirian speaks.

… “This is now a sector in which the vast majority of participants are actually engaged in what I view as counterfeiting of degrees and consumer fraud,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Consumer fraud defined as over-advertised, over-promised, overcharged and under-delivered.

“For a group that reports to be market-based,” he went on to a room of education insiders at the New America Foundation, “what is a better measure of market failure than apparently nobody but the idiot federal government puts their money into these institutions? That is the single best indication that the product has no intrinsic value. People who spend their own money don’t spend it there.” …

… about a remarkable diploma mill, fake credentials, and ghostwriting scandal there.

A prominent businessperson in China has done it all: Bought a bogus degree, claimed legitimate degrees he didn’t earn, and farmed his autobiography out to a ghostwriter.

Of course plenty of people put their names on autobiographies they haven’t written, but this guy didn’t even bother reading the thing. Plus he gave the ghost all the bogus university degree stuff, which the ghost duly wrote down…

So now the guy blames the ghostwriter for the false information and sues the researcher who revealed the diploma mill and the fake credentials…

In short, a prince of a guy.

… and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

John Smalls, the guy in charge of finance at South Carolina State University, a public institution, says the school “can definitely account” for it… The 25 million dollars from a federal grant (the entire grant was 50 million) they got over a decade ago to start a transportation research center (nothing’s been done). “The problem is how much detail do you want to see.”‘

How much detail do I, the American taxpayer, want to see?

Well, let’s do it this way. This

is an enormous pile of money.
Imagine, John, that this pile of
money is the 25 million dollars
I and my fellow Americans gave
your school.

I want you to take every single
bill in this pile, hold it aloft, and
say out loud what you did with it.

UD thanks Corey, a reader, for sending her this important article from a writer we’ve already seen at University Diaries — Sergio Sismondo. With Mathieu Doucet, Sismondo broadens his attack on the repellent and dangerous practice of ghostwriting among university professors of medicine.

Here’s their abstract:

Link to the full article.

This one in Canada. All because agencies tasked with defending the welfare of children can’t be bothered to check the legitimacy of professional degrees.

From the Toronto Star:

… [Gregory] Carter has been charged by Durham Regional Police with fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice…

Andrea Maenza, a spokesperson for Durham [Children’s Aid Society], says that the agency ended its relationship with Carter in early 2009 when it learned that “he did his Ph.D. but the school was bogus.” [Weird formulation. Should be “He didn’t do his PhD. because the school is bogus.”]

Carter says he has a doctorate from Pacific Western University, which was investigated by the U.S. government in 2004 and found to be a diploma mill.

“We accepted his community reputation. In retrospect, we should have questioned it,” Maenza says, noting that Carter was called a “doctor” by lawyers and judges and relied upon in cases as an expert witness. [Everybody called him a doctor. That was good enough for us.]

He did more than 300 assessments for the agency, which has already conducted a preliminary review into them…

Meanwhile, the case against Steven Feldman (scroll down) proceeds.

Steven Eisman, a hedge-fund manager known for having anticipated the housing market crash… [says that] [w]ithout tighter government regulation, … students at for-profit colleges will default on $275 billion of student loans over the next decade.

The New York Times explains why the federal government is now proposing new rules under which “for-profit colleges would not be eligible to receive federal student aid if their graduates’ debt load was too high to be repaid, over 10 years, with 8 percent of their starting salary.”

“These programs overpromise, underdeliver and load vulnerable students up with way too much debt,” said Chris Lindstrom, higher education program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, part of a coalition of education, consumer, student and public interest groups supporting the regulations.

In 2007, coalition members said, students at for-profit colleges made up only 7 percent of those in higher education but 44 percent of those defaulting on federal student loans.

Socially destructive? Morally bankrupt? The industry will tell you it’s taking the poorest Americans and giving them livelihoods. What the for-profits do is really more of a charitable vocation than a bottom-line business. Who else is going to care enough to drag homeless people off the streets and load them up with debt?

A surprising number of the people enrolled by these companies are homeless. According to Bloomberg, homeless people account for almost 5% of the students in the Newark, N.J., branch of Drake College of Business, a trainer of medical and dental assistants. In late 2008, Drake started offering $350 every two weeks to students who showed up for 80% of classes and held onto a C average. Carmella Hutson, a case manager at the Goodwill Rescue Mission in Newark told Bloomberg, “It’s basically known in the community: If you’re homeless, and you need some money, go to Drake.”

As someone once employed by one of these schools says, “The level of deception is disgusting — and wrong. When someone who can barely afford to live and feed kids as it is, and doesn’t even have the time or education to be able to email [enrolls], they drop out. Then what? Add $20,000 of debt to their problems — what are they gonna do now. They are officially screwed. We know most of these people will drop out, but again, we have quotas and we have no choice.”

And not only that, but almost all the money the companies pass on to these people as personal debt comes from us! It’s our taxes helping these people add tens of thousands of debt to their burdens!

A win-win situation…

… used to chronicle the antics of a university unit he called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds.

As UD‘s said on this blog before, no one absorbs federal funds — and pockets them — better than for-profit colleges. They’re absolutely brilliant at taking tax money and then failing to educate and graduate students.

It’s an amazing enormous con, and you’d think the government would do something about it, and it will do something about it as soon as it can … I dunno… pull itself together to do something about it.

One thing our mainly clueless Education Department has noticed is that university accrediting bodies (federal money doesn’t start flowing to your investors until you get accredited) are jokes. If I paid them enough, accreditors would accredit my ass.

Robert Shireman, deputy under secretary for education, said in an April 28 speech to higher education regulators that he feared accreditors don’t have the “analytical firepower” they need to fairly assess the schools they oversee.

Likening the accreditors to credit rating agencies that gave top marks to underperforming securities in the financial crisis, Shireman said the school agencies have an “inherent conflict of interest,” as they are funded by the institutions they are meant to critique.

Fees to join [one such group], for example, start at $17,500, according to the group’s website. Annual dues include a $2,500 base, 50 cents per full-time-equivalent student and $75 per degree site.

In a recent letter, the Office of Inspector General

blasted [a large regional accreditor] for approving Career Education Corp.’s (CECO) American Intercontinental University despite expressing serious concerns about its credit hour structure. The letter, which echoes a December preliminary report, says the accreditor’s failure to define a credit hour–the basic measure of a class’s rigor–allows schools to inflate a course’s value, improperly designate full-time student status and over-award federal student loans. Two other regional accreditors were criticized on similar grounds last year, including the group that previously accredited American Intercontinental.

Analytical firepower. LOL.

Desert me…

We’re just like that. We deceive each other. This Wheeler whippersnapper, this latest Great Deceiver … So in love with him was Harvard…

Harvard’s just like everybody else. It has its idealizations, and if you can simulate them…

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I’m going to remind you, in this post, of some of Harvard’s Great Deceivers — students, professors, overseers. Just some of the people University Diaries has covered over the few years of this blog’s life.

Nothing special about Harvard, mind you. All universities, all over the world, are taunted, hurt, and deceived. I’m using Harvard as an example.

A particularly strong example, actually, because Harvard has immensities of money and power, and therefore as an institution it should be better equipped than others to protect itself against deception.

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But look at the Wheeler thing. He was about to graduate. He almost made it all the way through. He got this close to totally lying his way to a Harvard University degree.

Blair Hornstine was another matter. She was admitted to Harvard, and then, before she arrived, Harvard revoked the offer. She had cheated her way to valedictorian of her high school, plagiarized articles she claimed to have written in her local newspaper…

Hornstine was solidly on the Wheeler track to success, in other words, but a lawsuit she filed against a competing candidate for valedictorian was so disgusting that it hit all the papers, and Harvard began looking more closely at her.

Harvard kept Kaavya Viswanathan, even though by the time she was a sophomore she was a world-famous plagiarist.

Faculty deceivers? Charles Ogletree, Laurence Tribe. Alan Dershowitz (he has denied it). Most of the faculty plagiarists come from the law school. Lee Simon came from the medical school.

Overseers? Doris Kearns Goodwin.

So many. And others, you have to figure, who won’t get caught.

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Words of wisdom, UD?

Only a few.

First, since we’re always hurting and deceiving each other, and since, given the potential rewards, you can expect idealization simulators to be particularly active at places like Harvard (as Jayson Blair was active at the New York Times), those places in particular have to be vigilant. Where were the people entrusted with Harvard’s integrity while Wheeler was doing his thing?

Second, since Harvard doesn’t punish faculty and overseer deceivers (in a couple of cases it announced it was going to do something or other to them, but it didn’t tell us what, so that doesn’t count), it shouldn’t be surprised to find deceivers among its students. The Crimson rightly points out that if you’re known to be an oligarchy that protects its own, you can expect to attract the malsain, or at the very least to predispose your students toward cynicism.

For the public face of Harvard and for internal relations as well, it is crucial that the university maintain more consistent disciplinary rules for instances of academic dishonesty. Until then, the glaring double standard set by Harvard stands as an inadequate precedent for future disappointments.

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He isn’t true, he beats me too, what can I do?

You can examine your idealizations. You can stop using double standards.

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UPDATE: Another list. And what about that guy… that Iranian-American…? Hold on.

Name’s Nemazee. (Scroll down.)

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UPDATE AGAIN: The Harvard Crimson interviews a guy who knows a lot about admissions procedures. How did Wheeler slip through?

Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said that Harvard could not be wholly blamed for Wheeler’s ability to slip through the admission process.

“There is not any institution in this country that can afford to or does verify everything people submit. It’s just not a practical possibility,” Nassirian said. “You can’t really fault Harvard for not calling every high school and obtaining a duplicate copy of every transcript and every recommendation people submit.”

True. But here’s something you can blame Harvard for. In order to get their cherished, lowest-in-the-world admit number each year (6.9% is the 2010 figure), Harvard sends out tens of thousands of You-oughta-apply-to-Harvard letters every year. Harvard knows perfectly well that almost none of the people it sends these letters to will get in; it also knows how astonished and flattered these same people will be to get such a letter… How likely they will be, in their youthful naivete, their cluelessness as to how Ivy League schools select students, to indeed apply…

These pawns, these soon to be heartbroken pawns, are crucial to Harvard’s ever-escalating number of applicants. Rejecting this enormous crowd makes for a hell of an admit number.

If these useful rejects were smart, they’d agree to apply only if Harvard guaranteed them, say, a one hundred dollar payment for doing so. They are a crucial part of Harvard’s maintenance of its market position, and should be rewarded as such.

Anyway… My point, in connection with the Wheeler fiasco, involves the impossibility of Harvard maintaining much control over the application process, given how many people they’ve told to apply.

Madonna Constantine (here are all my Constantine posts; scroll down) has lost her wrongful dismissal suit against Columbia University.

Undaunted, she’ll press on with whatever else she can think of that’ll divert time and money from Columbia’s efforts to educate people. Specifically, she’ll see if she can’t make some money from one of these two remaining sources:

1.) A $200 million defamation suit.

2.) A federal discrimination case.