← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

For-Profit Colleges Take Another …

… hit.

But with boosters like “Papa Doc” Bob Barr in their corner, they’ll be fine.

***************************

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.”

Margaret Soltan, February 4, 2011 11:02AM
Posted in: CLICK-THRU U.

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=29037

5 Responses to “For-Profit Colleges Take Another …”

  1. Joe Fruscione Says:

    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.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Joe: We longtime Washingtonians do have some strange stories to tell…

  3. Joe Fruscione Says:

    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.”

  4. dave.s. Says:

    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?”

  5. dave.s. Says:

    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.

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories