Among the many anxieties that the current Democrat administration has created for me, one of the most depressing is the deliberate, calculated and successful campaign to eliminate the most valuable part of higher education.
The Democrat Party is not solely to blame. The traditional non-profit academic world may be 95% made up of Democrat faculty and 100% dedicated to a Lefty anti-commerce ideology, but academia has strong claws into the Republican Party too.
First the Obama administration wiped out the for profit Corinthian Colleges, with about 80,000 students nationwide, recently it has gone after the for profit ITT University with 70,000 students and next on the list is for profit DeVry University with 45,000 students. ITT was 50 years old and DeVry is 75 years old.
Disclaimer: in 2006 I invested in three for-profit universities because I saw the enrollments top 500,000 while growing rapidly. I tripled my investment in less than a year.
These for-profit universities are directed at students who want technical training. The most common graduates are in the health field followed by mechanical repair and business related technology. Mostly middle-class blue collar jobs by our old definitions.
The Department of Education along with the Justice Department and a few states Attorney’s General have used the most disgraceful and odious legal strategy. They target the schools for enrolling students with federal college loans and attack the high rate of loan repayment failure as evidence of fraud.
The only defense the for profit universities have is to compare their loan repayment rates with the gigantic world of non-profit universities. The comparison is unfair because the for profits have a far higher proportion of minority, immigrant and low income students than the non-profits.
The for-profits include the University of Phoenix which is on the academic-government hate list. But the University of Phoenix enrolls a higher social class of students and is academic not trade oriented.
I recently looked at a school course catalog from the University of California at Santa Cruz while sitting in a VA medical office. Lo and behold. Santa Cruz now offers a full range of courses and certificates that were formerly offered by Corinthian and ITT universities.
Does our society need trade schools? Of course. Is this government pogrom a disgrace. Absolutely.
Should the government bureaucracy be used to destroy private businesses? I’ll let you answer that question.