… comes out swinging on the Huffington Post, and then mixes it up with readers in his article’s comment thread. Very heady stuff.

His attack on for-profit universities is sharp and angry. He’s angry not only because these schools rip off students and taxpayers; he’s especially angry because their ethos has infected a lot of non-profit schools.

… Senator Harkin and the GAO’s work has exposed once and for all how utterly corrupt these for-profit “universities” and “colleges” really are.

At a time when the faculties of public colleges and universities are being told by their administrators how they should imitate the for-profits like the “University” of Phoenix because they represent some sort of idealized “private sector” efficiency model, Senator Harkin’s and the GAO’s revelations are all the more stunning. In California, the community college brass recently tried to ram through a transfer of credit deal with Kaplan as a way to stretch its budget. Luckily, the faculty senate refused to go along.

Sure, his sarcastic quotation marks should go; but his anger seems to UD justified. For years she’s chronicled the onlining and general cheapening of American university education, but there’s no stronger argument against the degradation of our degrees than a good look at the burgeoning, squalid for-profit sector. Aggressive recruitment of tons of students in order to make lots of money from them; overwhelmingly online offerings taught to people whose identity you cannot even verify; low standards of instruction and little expectation of serious work; not even an effort to offer face-to-face classroom instruction; the replacement of the higher thought implicit in the phrase higher education with information-bullets — we have seen the future, and it is us.