For-profit colleges

LAS VEGAS -- The annual convention of the Career College Association was just gearing up for the day Thursday when word started circulating that the U.S. Senate's education committee planned to start a series of hearings this month into the increasing flow of federal student aid money into for-profit higher education.

WASHINGTON – Some people think they’re qualified to teach online courses because they know how to use e-mail, but there's a lot more instructors need to master to run a Web classroom, a longtime trainer of new instructors said Thursday in a presentation at the American Association of University Professors conference meeting here this week.

WASHINGTON -- The subject of a House of Representatives hearing Thursday seemed like an unusually obscure, in-the-weeds topic for a Congressional committee to spend its time on: an accrediting agency's standards for assessing a college's policies on academic credit hours.

WASHINGTON -- Two weeks ago, the hub of the federal government’s scrutiny of for-profit higher education was the U.S. Department of Education, where a team of staffers were putting the finishing touches on a set of proposed regulations aimed at reining in abuses of the federal financial aid program.

WASHINGTON -- Senate Democrats began their investigation of for-profit higher education here in earnest Thursday, holding the first in what they promise will be a series of hearings aimed at better understanding the sector’s value to students and taxpayers.

For three hours, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee heard testimony that, taken together, amounted to a largely scathing overview of the sector.

WASHINGTON -- Just as Congress ratchets up its scrutiny of for-profit higher education as a whole, the body’s investigative arm is calling on the U.S. Department of Education to begin examining some of the same issues of value and quality at foreign medical schools where Americans use federal student loans. The largest of such schools are for-profit institutions.

Critics of for-profit higher education have of late drawn attention to what they see as a pattern of "accreditation shopping" in which for-profit entities purchase financially struggling nonprofit colleges, and then hold on to the regional accreditation that the nonprofit colleges had for years, even as the new owners expand or radically change the institutions' missions.

It’s no secret that for-profit institutions lavishly outspend their public counterparts in marketing. Just look out for their billboards along busy roadways, commercials airing on cable television, or prominent ads on popular websites.

This tends to cause general consternation among community college leaders, many of whom believe their institutions could just as easily serve students looking elsewhere for career advancement or retraining. So why – amid ever-increasing advertising blitzes by for-profit institutions – are some community colleges slashing their marketing budgets?

The accreditor of Dana College wants the world to know that it didn't revoke recognition of the college or order its closure. At the same time, the accreditor is standing by a decision that critics say is tantamount to ordering such a closure. And in an unusual move, the accreditor on Friday issued a public defense of its decision.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Education today released its long-awaited proposed regulations to define “gainful employment,” the mechanism that makes non-liberal arts offerings at for-profit colleges eligible for federal financial aid.

Striking a middle ground between aggressively attacking for-profit higher education and backing down under the sector’s intense lobbying pressure, the rule creates multiple paths to eligibility and takes aim at only the most egregious of bad actors.