The New Republic

I haven't followed this debate closely, but one article I saw claimed the failed loans act mostly to offset the subsidy the government colleges get for every single student. In other words, the government schools don't have so many failed loans because the loans are smaller due to the subsidy those schools get. For proper accounting, one must count not only the loss of a loan at government schools, but also the loss the subsidy that didn't produce a graduate represents. How it would compare, I can't say. Regardless, the right should see the same problem plagues education as housing: the government insures loans without due diligence.

- karlwk

March 8, 2011 at 3:40pm

Of course, for profit colleges are only part of the story here. The for profit college industry exists primarily because their students aren't prepared for real college, a fault not of the public schools per se but the burden placed on the public schools to remedy the economic and social inequities that are pervasive and a level of funding that doesn't come close to what is needed to achieve it. I grew up in the segregated south and attended segregated schools, two school systems with separate facilities and teachers that definitely were not equal. The Court eliminated de jure segregation but it has been replaced with de facto segregation. And I am not just referring to the exodus to the suburbs and to private schools. Anybody remotely familiar with our public schools knows that in school districts that are not "homogeneous" (school administrators actually use that term because it sounds so much better than "segregated"), we now have two school systems in single facilities, one for those bound for "real" colleges and one for those bound for those for profit colleges that Chait writes about, the former mostly high achieving white children from middle to upper middle class stable families, the latter mostly at risk black children from lower class unstable families. And guess which system gets the best students, teachers, and equipment and supplies? Yet for many it's not enough that the exodus to the suburbs has created all those "homogeneous" school districts in the suburbs or that de facto segregation exists in the school districts that are not "homogeneous"; it's not enough that public schools are structured and funded to fail so many of our children; the final insult is to throw those children we have failed to the wolves at those for profit colleges with subsidies from the government.

- rayward

April 1, 2011 at 8:02am

This reminds me of the run-up to the CDO debacle, where all the financial institutions were singing the blues that "regulation is crippling us! If these CDO's are regulated, we'll go bankrupt!" -- so they weren't regulated, an unregulated Ponzi scheme was created, the quality of the loans went down and down, and eventually they bankrupted the institutions. They got bailed out though. So here we have an educational Ponzi scheme. Fly-by-night "colleges" recruiting naive students, get Government college loans, and put their students on the street without saleable educations. And the Republicans again are against regulating this?

- AllanL5

April 1, 2011 at 8:48am

"Amazingly?" Don't be ridiculous. The conservative movement exists to plunder government for the wealthy. It is all class warfare waged by the wealthy all the time. Forprofit colleges are a double dip because they loot the federal government and further immiserate the poor. What could be better?

- roidubouloi

April 1, 2011 at 9:21am

Perhaps, roi, but I fail to see a meaningful difference between a student who gets federal funds to learn a trade (and many do) at a for-profit, and a student who gets federal funds to get an art history degree at a "not for profit" (right) college. Speaking of putting students on the street without a saleable education. If you want to regulate these schools on the above grounds, why not regulate Duke and Florida as well? If we had a well-developed system of trade schools as in Germany this would be less of a problem.

- butchie b

April 1, 2011 at 9:57am

I agree about trade schools on the German model, but do you think that the students at Florida and Duke are draduating at very low rates, doing poorly in the job market in comparison to those without a college education, and defaulting on their loans at high rate? How many do you think regret their auctions there?

- roidubouloi

April 1, 2011 at 10:27am

"Regret their educations there." The auto spell thing on here is a nightmare because the default is accept.

- roidubouloi

April 1, 2011 at 10:29am

This is no surprise. It's part of the conservatives' relentless campaign to undermine public education at all levels through privatization, diverting taxpayer funds to for-profit entities.

- heppner52

April 1, 2011 at 10:56am

butchie: a useless trades degree (and I am assuming that the schools are not training at the level they should be training at) is materially different from an art history degree, even if you consider that an art history degree is instrinsically unsaleable. A liberal arts degree, at a minimum, produces more informed, more critical and therefore better citizens. There is no guarantee for this, of course, but that is the theory, and for the most part, it works. (Law schools do not ask what your first degree is in, but rather that you have one, precisely for that - better analytical and reasoning capacity - reason. And based on my own experience teaching these past twenty years, the only degree that seriously debilitates legal thinking is engineering.) Conservatives have no problem imposing harmonised educational standards - if I understand correctly, that is what "No Child Left Behind" was about. So the Republicans cannot be opposed to the fact of standardisation or regulation in the field of education. And if the same numbers were working in respect of federal loans for Ivy League "elite" schools, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Republican commentariat would be all over federal standardisation. So for me, it is not so much that the criticisms are assinine in the extreme from a pedagogical as well as a democratic citizenship perspective; they are, in addition, incoherent by their own ideological standards.

- icarusr

April 1, 2011 at 10:57am

Butchie: People who get history degrees from liberal arts colleges (typically) go through the experience being told that they're being prepared in a very general sense for "the real world." They learn how to write and learn how to learn. People who get criminal arts degrees from for-profit colleges (typically) go through the experience being told that finishing X curriculum with GPA Y will get them a diploma that will get them a higher-paying job at insitution Z. They are told to memorize a rote set of data, often barely relevant or badly outdated, and taught that doing so will lead to a specific payoff. There's a damn good reason that the current Director of the FBI got a B.A. in International Politics instead of Criminal Justice. He wasn't sold a bill of goods by a school set on making money off him and getting him out the door. He was educated by a school devoted to actually teaching.

- janus

April 1, 2011 at 11:04am

icarusr: "And based on my own experience teaching these past twenty years, the only degree that seriously debilitates legal thinking is engineering." Care to theorize why this might be?

- zardoz67

April 1, 2011 at 11:54am

Human beings are tribal and constantly dividing into "we" and "they" tribes and then going to war. At New Republic "we" are "liberals" and "they" are "conservatives." In 2011 it is no longer "cool" to consider "whites" as "we" and "blacks" as "they." It is definitely uncool to use the "n" word. In fact, people now want to bowdlerize Huck Finn. It is still and uphill battle to eradicate the "f" word (and similar) in describing sexual relationships.

- skahn

April 1, 2011 at 11:56am

However, although most of us avoid racist and sexist and sexual preference insults, class war insults are the new form of invective. This post is very subtle with "alternative universe of the conservative movement, you have recently learned that the Obama administration has singled out a new industry to crush beneath its jackboot" and I admit I smirk with agreement, but really, so such language necessary or helpful or even useful? Perhaps if Jonathan signs up for a private college course he can learn to communicate his ideas in a more "politically correct" way? For lack of a better term.

- skahn

April 1, 2011 at 12:01pm

janus; my 2 cents: I got a history degree from one of the University of California campuses and you are correct--the emphasis was on learning how to learn and learning how to become better at exchanging ideas. The toolkit is the key and was much more important to my career than anything I can tell you about 19th century American history/politics.

- elopez

April 1, 2011 at 12:02pm

Janus and elope: exactly. I would say that generally speaking, undergraduate liberal arts and science education - as opposed to applied sciences - has two principal objects: critical socialisation and analytical training. In the first, you learn how to relate to criticism (from the professors and from your peers) and how to improve through iterative processes, both your products and yourself - and in this sense, extracurricular activities form an essential part of the education. In respect of the second, you learn how to write, do research, analyse, etc. More important, you learn both horizontal and vertical analysis. I ever forget when I was teaching in Central Europe somewhere, and everytime I said something, a particular student would say, "but the text says the opposite". I finally had to tell the (older) smartass: "I know what the text says, but it is not the last word on the subject. The text presents a view, and I present another; and I also give you, through the bibliography and through my references, other instances and other points of view. My lectures do not duplicate your materials; rather, I present to you a dialogue. You do the synthesis." This is what you cannot get through simple reading and auto-didactic book learnin' of whatever subject matter. And so, we use whatever subject matter we teach, really as means of teaching the more basic skills and instilling the more fundamental habits of mind.

- icarusr

April 1, 2011 at 12:20pm

zardoz: I was being a bit flippant. But only a bit. Engineers deal with certainty; lawyer live in a gray zone. It's amazing to speak with my engineer friends about legal matters: for many, each question ought necessarily give rise to a binary solution. I mean, either a bolt bears the weight of the thing it is screwing into something else or it does not, the more computer science advances, the more you can quantify risks and apply them to your models or construction. No amount of computer power can, however, decipher the mind of Anthony Kennedy. For an engineer, this irreducible uncertainty delegitimises the purported objectivity of the law; to a lawyer, it just makes the subject more interesting.

- icarusr

April 1, 2011 at 12:28pm

I wouldn’t be surprised if “conservatives” would like to use the for profit college industry as a way of discrediting government financial support of all education. (Reaganites once wanted to bankrupt the government in order to cease interfering in “the private lives of its citizens” which to them meant extending welfare payments to poor people.) However I doubt that these conservatives today would have the foresight to come up with such an intricate plan. As the Chait expose shows the argument against these “colleges” is the low graduation rate and the lack of opportunity for the few who do manage to buy themselves a degree. An argument against traditional colleges (most of whom are also for profit institutions) is that those conservatives who support for profit colleges got their education there. If traditional liberal arts colleges are supposed to turn out better citizens as some assert how come they keep voting conservative Republicans into office? And where did most of the tea party members go to school? Certainly not in “for profit colleges.” There is a large problem with colleges that also needs to be addressed.

- arnon

April 1, 2011 at 12:37pm

Speaking from inside the engineering profession, I have to agree with your assessment, icarusr. Such binary thinking partly explains why so many engineers are conservative (though the anti-union indoctrination we get in school doesn't help). The smallest failure in any social policy, and they are ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater. ("It's failed once, so it will never work.") It also explains why they are drawn to politicians and religions that will pander to their need for absolute certainity in life. A right lot of proto-fascists we are. *glares at mr_rationale and seattleeng*

- zardoz67

April 1, 2011 at 1:08pm

Butchieb, somebody may have made this point--and if someone did my presumption is that their making it will be better than mine-- but your comparison between liberal arts degrees and for profit vocational degrees is disanalogous. The for profit premise, explicit and the for profit's essential pitch, is efficacious vocational result, an instrumental training. The premise of a liberal arts education is the virtue of learning for its own sake, a theory of education going back to Socrates. Other benefits obviously flow from a competent liberal arts education, as Icarusr notes, but you elide its very foundation, the self justifying virtue of learning of the world's great event and and what the greatest minds have thought and written, which makes your brief argument inherently flawed. I thought Chait's brief piece superb, by the way. What an excellent blogger he is.

- basman

April 1, 2011 at 1:27pm

There is no such thing as binary thinking. This is something some intellectuals conjured up in order to make themselves useful. So called binary thinking is just another way of saying that there is nor truth. Some intellectuals, like Paul DeMan, who said that they were trying to go beyond the “good and bad” dichotomy had a questionable past themselves. Others like Hubert Dreyfus come up with really silly solutions to so called “binarism” as the review of his latest book says http://www.tnr.com/book/review/all-things-shining-western-classics-secular-age

- TomLessing

April 1, 2011 at 1:30pm

Basman: and, of course, it should be added that there was a time not too long ago, and a place not too far away, when learning the classics, and the basics, was a conservative virtue. One might even say, pace Kenneth Clark and Jacques Barzun, that art history in particular is a foundational subject matter of a conservative educational program, insomuch as it is through the history of art that we learn about our civilisation, and the purpose of conservatism is to conserve, preserve, that which is sublime, and that which connects us to the sublime, in our civilisation. Ah Socrates ... beautiful football player; wonder whatever happened to him?

- icarusr

April 1, 2011 at 1:36pm

To begin with, the problem is the existence of student loans guaranteed by government. Given the existence of the loan programs and the rules established by Congress and bureaucrats, these "entrepreneurial" institutions of "higher education" use the system as it is designed to make a profit. It is legal but morally wrong for them to take the government money under such perhaps questionable pretenses. However, it is also morally wrong for the government to take my money and give it to someone else for any purpose other than to protect our lives, our liberty and our property. Instead, the government confiscates our property to spend on whatever they deem appropriate. There should be no guarantees of student loans for any institution of higher education, whether it is a for-profit diploma mill or Harvard or Stanford or Podunk State College.

- dalefogden

April 1, 2011 at 1:44pm

Lessing: "There is no such thing as binary thinking. This is something some intellectuals conjured up in order to make themselves useful. So called binary thinking is just another way of saying that there is nor truth." Er ... I ain't no intellectual, and I was not referring to "binary thinking" as an intellectual term, but as a means of distinguishing applied scientific thinking that requires certainty (at least in a Newtonian sense), as opposed to the different analytical methodologies that are used routinely in other fields. You can compute metal stress on a computer (which relies on binary logic to give you highly precise answers); you cannot "compute" the meaning of the Establishment clause no matter how strong your computer. And, of course, to go on about The Truth is, in itself, idiotic in a legal or social sciences context. Not even Scalia talks in those terms when discussing the Law, and there is no more "binary" thinker in law in the US today. "Some intellectuals, like Paul DeMan, who said that they were trying to go beyond the “good and bad” dichotomy had a questionable past themselves." Hard to respond to piffle like this. The questionable past of DeMan, whoever he is, is utterly irrelevant to the observation that in certain contexts, the "good/bad" dichotomy is not only analytically suspect, but positively dangerous. The example I give in my class is this: a terrorist with his finger on the trigger of a nuclear device under Houston, Tx, holds an infant hostage as protection. You have exactly ten seconds to stop a nuclear holocaust. The only way to get to the terrorist is to shot him through the infant. To say that there is an absolute good in shooting the terrorist unmitigated by any bad in shooting the infant is morally monstrous. To admit any sort of mitigation destroys the concept of an absolute good, even when you are averting a nuclear holocaust. Regardless of my or DeMan's questionable pasts, to talk of a good/bad dichotomy in this example is to be a psychopath. Try again.

- icarusr

April 1, 2011 at 1:51pm

Good point well made icarusr. Tom Lessing: binary thinking to my understanding consists of x and not x analysis in systems of thought where warranted. The usual criticism is that someone is being "too" or "overly" binary, which is another way of describing the logical fallacy of the excluded middle. The relation of binary thinking to truth is another matter. The denial of categories like good and evil is is an aspect of past modernism ( my nomenclature for post modernism) The argument is that good and evil, for example, are verbal sleights of hand covering up the formative tensions between unaddressed and underlying categories whether rooted in Marx or Freud or other purveyors of these unseen dialectical forces manifesting themselves in superstructures. By my lights, often and usually a cigar is just a.. , even as there are complex explanations for it and its relations to other things.

- basman

April 1, 2011 at 1:56pm

"However, it is also morally wrong for the government to take my money and give it to someone else for any purpose other than to protect our lives, our liberty and our property." Out of curiosity, could you point to a single moral construct outside the Republican Party that dictates collective spending? (In a democratic policy, the "government" is the Executive arms of the legislative, which in turn expresses the will of the people in allocation of resources. In this sense, all government spending duly approved by democratic institutions are merely collective spending on collective and social priorities.) Could you also give some indication of what is "moral" about the protection of property, and what do you mean by the protection of "our lives" and "our liberty"? Most liberals I know will have absolutely no problem with anything you say in the abstract; they just have a different conception of what is the nature of the life, liberty and property to be protected. In fact, in a truly conservative society, collective (government) spending on social goods, such as education, is the first priority of the state, with "liberty" a distant second. "Instead, the government confiscates our property to spend on whatever they deem appropriate." Some 70% of US Budget spending is on nondiscretionary matters, written into the law by Congress. The rest has to be voted on by Congress each year. There is no "deeming appropriate" by "them", those darned government-things.

- icarusr

April 1, 2011 at 2:04pm

“Er ... I ain't no intellectual, and I was not referring to "binary thinking" as an intellectual term, but as a means of distinguishing applied scientific thinking that requires certainty (at least in a Newtonian sense), as opposed to the different analytical methodologies that are used routinely in other fields.” Are you a scientist? Scientists I know don’t use binary thinking as primary view of the world.

- TomLessing

April 1, 2011 at 2:12pm

Now THAT is a really interesting discussion! Basically bile-free and apolitical. I really enjoyed it.

- RuthH

April 1, 2011 at 2:34pm

Lessing, you took a paragraph out of a complete explanation, and then make a statement that reflects a persona experience without actually elucidating the point raised in the paragraph or the rest of the post. Hard to answer to this sort of argument. But ... If an apple separates from a branch, it has two options: if can either fall to the ground, or not fall to the ground. It will fall to the ground because of gravity. Scientists observing phenomona in a Newtonian context are faced with a series of "decision" points such as this. And it because of these "binary" options that you can have complex scientific computer models. Moral, ethical and legal decisions do not, or do not easily, give rise to such binary models, which is why no one has even tried to model constitutional analysis by judges. And if you are telling me that engineers do not operate on "true/false" premises in building roads and bridges, and rely instead on inherently subjective balancing exercises that judges and moralists engage in, then I am not sure what to say, other than to think that perhaps your "scientist" friends are more akin to "intelligent design" scientists than to normal ones. I was careful to talk about Newtonian science - Quantum and Astro Physics rely a lot more on notions of uncertainty - we can have a discussion on what that entails and whether it is similar to legal uncertainty, but that is a separate issue.

- icarusr

April 1, 2011 at 3:03pm

Thought I'd stir the pot. Look, of course there are differences, large ones, between Duke and Devry. But why should federal funds go to one, no questions asked, and not to the other? Many traditional college students, regardless of degree, are unemployed today. In fact, it could be that someone with an "instrumental"degree may be more employable today, not less. What's the real complaint? That the for-profit kids graduate at lower rates? So what? That they experience unemployment after shelling out big $$ for school? So do Dukies and Gators. Is it about the "experience" of the liberal arts? Should engineering schools then be stripped out and made for profit? If the for profits had graduation rates that were close to traditional colleges, would that be enough? Or is it, dare we ask, profit that is the problem?? Oh, yeah, like Duke and Florida don't care about $$.

- butchie b

April 1, 2011 at 3:39pm

Perhaps conservatives would be less insistent on letting for-profit colleges get their share of federal student loans had the student loan business not been federalized. But since student loans are now a government giveaway every educational "entrepreneur" wants to get in on the act. Consider Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, which is the largest recipient of student loan aid in Virginia, ahead of UVA, George Mason, etc., according to the 3/27 Lynchburg News & Advance. The Federal Loans Database says it has secured $385 million in student loan funds, with most of its students partipating in online, not campus programs. Other federal grants push Liberty's total to $445 million, according to the Dept. of Education.

- rhuberty

April 1, 2011 at 3:59pm

butchie b isn't this, speaking very broadly, the answer and part of why Chait's piece is so good: ...Obviously, some students who go through for-profit colleges proceed to have successful careers. The trouble is the current business model, in which the schools can profit regardless of whether they help their students. The industry could be made to work if given a regulatory incentive to improve its students’ career prospects, rather than just shanghai as many warm bodies as possible....

- basman

April 1, 2011 at 4:02pm

I think when people talk about binary thinking they mean not thinking in terms of black and white. I don't think engineers are no more susceptible to this kind of thinking outside their field than anyone else. You also don't have to be a scientist to know how they think outside their own field, TL. I don’t know what this has to do with the diploma factory article.

- arnon

April 1, 2011 at 4:48pm

I am in favor of any law that will take foggedin's money, all of it, and distribute to anyone else. I can think of no more just purpose to be served by government nor a more appropriate purpose. What else is government for?

- roidubouloi

April 1, 2011 at 7:03pm

Government is for protecting honest citizens from predatory nonproductive bums and their leftist enablers from stealing their money.

- Packard

April 1, 2011 at 7:17pm

I want to steal your money. You don't deserve to have any. You should be given a small patch of earth, far, far away and live by subsistence farming, the fruits of your own labor and nothing but.

- roidubouloi

April 4, 2011 at 1:24pm

"Government is for protecting honest citizens from predatory nonproductive bums and their leftist enablers from stealing their money" Hmm...this snarky comment could be reversed to say "Government is protecting honest citizens from predatory nonproductive, for-profit "colleges" and their GOP plutocratic enablers from stealing the hard-earned money of low-wage citizens" I guess pillaging the poor is considered a worthy attribute by some people.

- singlspeed

April 4, 2011 at 1:51pm

My sister worked briefly as a recruiter for a technical nursing school in Phoenix, AZ and saw first hand the not-so-honest marketing and narrowed focus on specific demographics within the greater metropolitan area of Phoenix. Her boss, and I use the word lightly, was the Dean of Student Affairs. He also happened to be former car salesman. (You can see where this is going right?) This seemingly bland title of his obfuscated the real focus of the position which was to maximize the student enrollment for courses. This particular boss would needle, browbeat and cajole the recruiters into focusing their recruiting efforts on particular areas, high-schools, temporary work outlets and other places where the working poor or just, barely graduating, high school students (who otherwise would never go to college). The recruiters where paid on commission for every student they signed up, registered and financed (regardless of qualifications both on the education side and financial side). This boss would also use his position to hold applicants up brought in by his recruiters and then process them himself so he was seen as "bringing them in" and also getting his bonus check. The entire system of for-profit colleges is not to serve a higher-education purpose or teach a credible working trade to somebody but simply to make money off the students through ponzi-like tuition schemes and guaranteed loan defaults. Unlike a community college with mandates and standards set by the state in which they operate, the Phoenixs, Devrys, ITT Institutes of the world operate in a world that is half-way between the carny-barker build-up for the freakshow behind the curtain and the sleazy, hardsell tactics of a used car salesman. My sister, while initially taking the recruiting position, really believing that the school provided real educational benefit to the community it served, soon became disenchanted with the recruiting methods and practices of her boss and the school itself. Even many of the instructors there seem to get the shaft. Gone are the days of the apprenticeship for tradespeople or even the opportunity to learn a craft from masters because in many respects we've bought into the idea that the ability and skill to use your head and hands for tactile and tangible production is somehow less worthy than a guy who gets an MBA and works the trade floor on Wall Street.