We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

For-profit colleges can leave you dumb and broke

by Makaiya Brown from The Loop 21
A federal investigation  found that several for-profit colleges are involved in fraudulent acts and questionable marketing practices to attract students. The investigation unveiled that many of the colleges harass prospective students with repetitive recruiting phone calls after students request school information on websites. Several of the schools also encouraged students to falsify financial aid forms in order to get federal funds. By law up to 90 percent of the revenue of for-profit colleges can be derived from federal student aid. 

I know about this subject from my personal experience with a private school in San Francisco. I taught math courses to copier repair students in the late 1980s for about two months when I discovered what a scam they were running. They were aggressively recruiting anyone they could get off the streets to enroll and sign them up for Federal loans. Many had no aptitude whatsoever for this kind of work, and I was horrified at the amounts of the loans they were taking on.

This scam is strikingly similar to those run on many people to sign up for mortgages that caused the housing bubble in this past decade. But notice that this educational scam started in the late 80s and only now is the Federal Dept. of Education clamping down on them. 

These are illustrations of sociopathic behavior that the system of capitalism rewards and promotes; and as you can see, there is little enforcement or supervision of such activities by governmental authorities because the government is owned by this class of sociopaths.