But with boosters like “Papa Doc” Bob Barr in their corner, they’ll be fine.
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Update: Nice and concise: “[T]he explosion in for-profit schools over the past two decades has created an environment in which schools whose primary purpose is to make money for their stock-holders sign students up for federal student loans, then turn huge profits while giving their students such a lousy education that when they graduate they can’t get a job and end up defaulting on the loans.”
February 4th, 2011 at 11:50AM
Ah, Bob Barr. He once mooched 75 cents from me when he was doing a reading/book signing at a Barnes and Noble where I used to work.
February 4th, 2011 at 12:10PM
Joe: We longtime Washingtonians do have some strange stories to tell…
February 4th, 2011 at 12:50PM
Indeed. It was too small an amount for me to refuse, or say “You’re the illustrious author. I’m the lowly part-time employee. You pay to feed your own meter.”
February 5th, 2011 at 7:08AM
I left a comment at Joanne Jacobs – they were talking about the fact that you can’t discharge student loans in bankruptcy – and I think it was good, so I am recycling it here. That is, I think the comment is good – I am more and more seeing the policy that student loans bind you for your miserable barista life as a bad one, which encourages bad behavior from lenders and heedlessness on the part of students.
“Actually, useta be you COULD discharge your student loans in bankruptcy. You had the spectacle of every newly minted doctor going bankrupt in his / her first year of residency, and starting again clean. Congress got huffy, and excluded student loans from bankruptcy. I think this was a bad decision -means that people who make loans to undergraduates for expensive majors ending in “…Studies” know they will be paid back even if the graduate has to spend fifteen years as a barista to do it. Some mechanism to put fear in lenders – while keeping some fear in the borrower! – has to come back, maybe you can discharge 80 per cent of the loan if you are not working at a job which is related to the degree and you aren’t making more than the national average wage?”
February 5th, 2011 at 7:12AM
I am not convinced that profit versus not-for-profit is the best way to look at this problem, the kid who graduates from Chico State with a degree in Womyn Studies and $100000 in debt and has foregone four or five years’ wages is in a big hole, too. The profit schools look more tawdry, but it’s the same problem.