For-profit colleges under scrutiny

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For-profit colleges draw attention from regulators and millions of students (Washington Post)

     A year ago, Joseph Carrillo Jr. had to fight to get into crowded classes here at the public American River College. He couldn't find a guidance counselor, and he felt lost. So he switched to the private University of Phoenix. There, everything fell into place – at 17 times the cost.
     Carrillo's move from the community college to the for-profit university shows the allure of a higher-education sector that is growing so fast the federal government wants to rein it in. The 24-year-old, who hopes to own a business someday, said he was impressed by the ease of course scheduling at his new school and unconcerned about future debt.
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     For-profit schools may be offering an educational alternative, but that choice often comes with crushing student debt, some observers say.
     New federal rules, expected to be formally proposed in coming days, would tighten oversight of the industry. One much-debated proposal would cut federal aid to for-profit schools in certain cases if graduates spend more than 8 percent of their starting salaries to repay loans. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) also plans this month to begin hearings on the industry, examining recruiting practices and student loan default rates.
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     Federal aid to for-profit colleges jumped to $26.5 billion in 2009, from $4.6 billion in 2000. Two-thirds of for-profit students receive federal Pell grants, which target low-income students and don't have to be repaid. Even so, more than half of bachelor-degree recipients in 2007 at for-profit schools fell into a "high debt" range of at least $30,000 in loans, a recent College Board study found.
     "These schools lay it all out for students with Pell grants and student loans," said Stan Jones, president of a nonprofit organization called Complete College America. Students, he said, "don't feel like they are paying for anything, but it's really just like a credit card for higher education."
     For-profit colleges rely more on federal aid than many other higher-education institutions. The aid helps offset tuition at for-profit schools, which averaged $14,174 in 2009, according to the College Board. The average for two-year state schools was $2,544.
     California is in the vanguard of a movement toward cooperation between overstretched community colleges and for-profit schools. Its community college system, with nearly 3 million students, has the nation's lowest tuition: $26 per credit. Carrillo's credits at an outlet of the University of Phoenix near here cost $450 apiece. But community colleges in this state are so crowded that officials don't discourage students from attending for-profit schools or enrolling in their online courses to satisfy degree requirements….

 California's Universities May Admit They Charge Tuition (LA Times)

     Official policy in California holds that the state provides public higher education without charging tuition, so required payments that in every other state are called "tuition" are instead called "fees" in California. But with fee levels rising – and with some federal benefits tied to tuition – there is some talk in California's higher education system of admitting that the universities actually have tuition, the Los Angeles Times reported....

The Very Angry Tea Party By [philosopher] J.M. BERNSTEIN (New York Times)

…My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.
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This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence. That is permanent.
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In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing. Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists. To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech — the last already to great and distorting effect. But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, “a fury of destruction”? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.