mid coast views

Pro-Walker Marquette poll grossly misweighted

2012-01-28T09:28:00.000-06:00

The recent Marquette University poll evaluating the Wisconsin electorate's opinions on Walker and potential Democratic Party candidates was inaccurate. It oversampled self-identified conservatives who support Walker and undersampled liberals and moderates who are likely to vote against him. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's article on the poll was prominently placed on its front page..

The critique of the polls methodology provides a more accurate and corrective snapshot of the upcoming election. Of course, events are unfolding rapidly as this week's disclosures that Walker's top aids were indicted for engaging in illegal campaign activity while working for Walker's re-election illustrates. The disclosures also revealed for the first time that Walker's top lieutenants set up a secret email system designed to evade the state's open records laws.

The blog critiquing the poll is posted here and below:

http://uppitywis.org/blogarticle/recent-pro-walker-poll-grossly-misweighted-when-properly-weighte

Gableman rebuked

2012-01-25T16:05:00.000-06:00

Supreme Court Justice Michael Galbleman is sternly rebuked by the New York Times editorial board today: It concludes: "To regain the public’s trust, the court must disqualify him (Gableman) if he does not face up to his impropriety and recuse himself."

The editorial is linked here.

For-profit colleges under attack for treatment of veterans

2012-01-25T07:37:00.000-06:00

Government agencies scrutinize companies for saddling students with significant debt and inadequate degrees

By Gregory Karp, Chicago Tribune reporter

7:00 PM CST, January 22, 2012

For-profit colleges are coming under attack again, this time for allegedly preying on military veterans.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D.-Ill., is scheduled to hold a forum on the issue in Chicago Monday and plans to introduce legislation later in the day that would eliminate the financial incentive for-profit colleges have to recruit veterans aggressively into pricey programs. It would also require schools to get more of their revenue from sources other than the federal government's educational aid programs.

Criticism of for-profit schools has heated up in recent weeks. Last week, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued Westwood College, claiming for-profit colleges mislead students enrolled in its criminal justice program, putting them deep in debt and saddling them with a nearly worthless degree for pursuing careers in Illinois law enforcement.

Earlier this month, shareholders sued Career Education Corp., a large for-profit college operator based in Schaumburg, claiming company officials misled investors about job placement rates for graduates, which led to a scandal and contributed to a lower stock price.

For-profit colleges are being scrutinized by Congress, the U.S. Department of Educationand the Justice Department for saddling students with crushing debt and questionable degrees that don't lead to jobs in their fields of study. Much of their revenue comes from federal grants and loans.

Military veterans are being aggressively recruited, critics claim, because of their lucrative forms of federal aid, such as GI Bill funds and Department of Defense tuition assistance benefits. That aid doesn't count toward the 90-10 rule, which bars for-profit colleges and universities from deriving more than 90 percent of their revenue from the Department of Education's federal student aid programs. The purpose of the rule is to ensure that for-profit schools, many of which are publicly held corporations, are not using taxpayer money as their sole source of revenue.

A Dec. 8 Senate committee report noted that educational benefits from the Veteran's Administration and the Department of Defense received by 20 for-profit education companies between 2006 and 2010 increased 683 percent, to more than a half-billion dollars.

Durbin will propose changing the rule to 85-15, meaning for-profit colleges would be limited to receiving 85 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid. Significantly, it would also count education aid for military personnel toward that 85 percent, eliminating the special incentive for career schools to recruit veterans.

Brian Moran, interim president of the Washington-based Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, which represents for-profits colleges, said in a statement that some legislators "have chosen to erect, rather than break down, the barriers to critical job-training and educational programs for veterans. Sen. Durbin's reported legislation on recruiting will only cut off access for thousands of veterans to the skill-intensive, hands-on programming and intensive job-placement support that veterans transitioning into the workplace need."

Those at American Military University, a provider of online education to active members of the military, contend schools like theirs are wrongfully lumped with schools using questionable tactics.

"No matter how well we're doing and how long we've been honorably serving the military, we get caught up in this because of the broad-brush strokes with this attack on the for-profit industry," said Jim Sweizer, vice president of military programs at American Military University, based in Charles Town, W.Va.

He added: "It's somewhat insulting that they don't give veterans the benefit of the doubt — these are intelligent people — and (they portray them as) being totally duped by a school."

Cuts at Wisconsin universities rank third in nation

2012-01-24T11:40:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin’s public universities experienced the third-largest budget cuts in the country this year, according to an annual survey of higher-education funding. These cuts, along with those to K-12 education, the highest per pupil cuts in the nation, will undermine the state's economy and its people's prosperity for years to come.

Public funding for Wisconsin’s public universities dropped 20.9% from $1.46 billion to $1.15 billion, according to the annual Grapevine study, conducted by Illinois State University’s Center for the Study of Higher Education and the State Higher Education Executive Officers.

Nationally, higher education budgets were trimmed 7.6%. New Hampshire had the largest cut, with a funding reduction of 41.3%. Arizona’s cut ranked second at 25.1% and Wisconsin at 20.9% was third.

The Grapevine figures include the $250 million budget cut for the UW System over two years that was part of the state budget approved last year. It does not include an additional $46.1 million cut announced in October by the Walker administration.

Forty-one states saw some kind of drop in their higher education funding this year. Only s third of states had reductions of 10% or more. An analysis Inside Higher Ed notes that Wisconsin is one of 29 states that’s providing less money to public higher education in the 2011-12 budget year than they did in 2006-07.

Walker's "tools" cost more jobs; austerity does not work

2012-01-20T08:34:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin lost 3,900 private sector jobs in December according to data released Thursday by the state Department of Workforce Development. In the same month, the United States gained an estimated 212,000 jobs.

In the public sector, government agencies at the state level shed jobs last month while city and county employers showed job gains. Losses in the private sector and changes in government staffing left the state with an estimated net loss of 1,700 non-farm jobs for December. .

Wisconsin has lost jobs for six consecutive months and has lost more jobs than any state in the nation since Governor Scott Walker's budget went into effect in July 2011. The graph by the Philadelphia Reserve Board below documents this.

Wisconsin is continuing to hemorrhage jobs because of Governor Walker's one-sided reliance on spending cuts to balance the state budget. That is because demand creates jobs. Consumers account for almost 70 % of the economy. Yet Walker's budget cuts have caused the demand for goods and services to decline in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin shed more state government jobs than any state in the nation in 2011. When workers lose their jobs, their incomes decline and they buy less. In addition, the disposable incomes of virtually all of Wisconsin's public workers declined as health care premiums increased and pension contributions increased to 5.8% of income. The result a decline in aggregate demand that has caused Wisconsin to shed jobs even as the national economy is adding them.

The lesson of Walker's first year is that you cannot cut your way to job growth and prosperity.

Austerity has been a failure where ever it has been tried.

In a recent paper for the International Monetary Fund, Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh and Prakash Loungani look at 173 episodes of fiscal austerity over the past 30 years—with the average deficit cut amounting to 1 percent of GDP. Their verdict? Austerity “lowers incomes in the short term, with wage-earners taking more of a hit than others; it also raises unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.”

Let's take a quick look at the unemployment rates in those nations that have responded to budget deficits with austerity. In Ireland the unemployment rate has soared to 14.3%. It would be even higher but tens of thousands have migrated abroad. England's unemployment rate is 8.4%, the highest in sixteen years and Spain's has soared to 22.9%.

As Reuter's reports: "Europe's worsening sovereign debt crisis and governments' tough cost-cutting response appear to be driving the 17-nation currency bloc back into recession following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, while the number of people out of work is rising."

Austerity does not promote growth or job creation. Walker's tools are not working. It is time for a new approach in Wisconsin.

Illinois sues for-profit college

2012-01-18T07:16:00.001-06:00

Among the complaints against the for-profit school are poor job-placement rates, high-pressure sales tactics, low graduation rates, excessive profit margins and the burdening of students with crushing debt

By Gregory Karp, Chicago Tribune reporter

12:19 a.m. CST, January 18, 2012

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0118-westwood-20120118,0,4418630,print.story

The Illinois attorney general's office is lashing out at Westwood College, which has four Chicago-area campuses, claiming the institution misleads students enrolled in its criminal justice program, putting them deep in debt and saddling them with a nearly worthless degree for pursuing careers in Illinois law enforcement.

Westwood, a career college owned by Alta College of Denver, is the latest for-profit school to come under scrutiny by regulators and consumer advocates, who claim some for-profit schools overpromise and underdeliver.

Among the complaints are poor job-placement rates, high-pressure sales tactics, low graduation rates, excessive profit margins and the burdening of students with crushing debt, often from taxpayer-backed loans on which students default. Schaumburg-basedCareer Education Corp., for example, is dealing with fallout from a scandal in which some of its schools misrepresented job-placement rates of its graduates.

Westwood has run afoul of regulators in several states, including Texas and Wisconsin.

Illinois is home to four of Westwood's 17 campuses. They are located in Chicago's Loop, nearO'Hare International Airport, Woodridge and Calumet City.

The office of Attorney General Lisa Madigan has been investigating Westwood and plans to file suit against the college Wednesday, sources said. A draft of the suit, obtained by the Tribune, claims students who want to be police officers in Illinois need a degree from a school that is "regionally" accredited. Westwood is not, although it is nationally accredited.

"Many Illinois students who tried to better themselves through a criminal justice education at Westwood now find themselves saddled with more than $50,000 in student loans, and no way to pursue a law enforcement job because their Westwood education was not regionally accredited and therefore was not recognized by other regionally accredited colleges or law enforcement employers, such as the Chicago Police Department, the Illinois State Police and many suburban police departments," the attorney general's office said in the draft of the lawsuit.

The draft suit says that Westwood, through its marketing, "made a variety of misrepresentations and false promises."

A Westwood spokesman issued a statement, saying, "We continue to cooperate with the Illinois (attorney general) to resolve any outstanding issues. We are proud of our legacy of helping students obtain their educational goals. We have hundreds of graduates working in the private and public criminal justice field throughout the state of Illinois."

The company also provided a Westwood College disclosure form that requires students to initial the following statement: "Westwood College is nationally accredited, not regionally accredited, which could have an impact on employment opportunities with some Chicago and surrounding area employers, including the City of Chicago."

Fifteen consumers filed complaints against Westwood with Madigan's office, the draft lawsuit states.

The attorney general's office also objects to the cost of a Westwood degree. Tuition to complete a degree in criminal justice totals $71,610, compared with $12,672 from the College of DuPage, which is regionally accredited and is located less than 10 miles from Westwood's DuPage campus, the suit says. It claims Westwood misled students "about the magnitude of the financial burden associated with obtaining their degrees, engaging in a pattern and practice of downplaying the burdens of student loans they advised students to take out."

The suit asks for, among other things, that all contracts between Westwood and Illinois consumers be rescinded and "that full restitution be made." It also seeks to revoke, forfeit or suspend Westwood's criminal justice program and assess a civil penalty of $50,000 per violation of the state's Consumer Fraud Act.

Westwood said it has more than 13,000 students enrolled in its degree programs, which include business, design, technology, industrial services, justice and health care.

Grothman and Republicans throw children under the bus to protect out of state lead paint companies

2012-01-17T06:32:00.000-06:00

Lead paint poisoning is a national public healthcatastrophe that hasirreparably harmed tens of thousands of children.

Lead paint manufacturers knew that lead pigment inpaints was a deadly poison as early as the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Theyeven marketed lead free paint to farmers who were concerned that paint withlead in it was poisoning their cows. Yet, the paint manufacturers continued to produceand market lead paint for residential use and refused to warn consumers aboutits dangers. As a result, tens of thousands of children have sufferedbrain damage and other cognitive disabilities.

Currently, 173 Wisconsin children, the victims oflead paint poisoning, are suing the producers of lead paint for the severe andpermanent injuries they suffered because of the paint companies’ negligence.

Last week, only 2 hours after the 7^thCircuit Court of Appeals in Chicago heard oral arguments about theConstitutionality of these cases, Lance Burri, Senator Glenn Grothman’s aide,directed the Legislative Reference Bureau to introduce legislation that wouldcircumvent the Courts and deny these children their day in court. Senator Scott Fitzgerald, one of fourSenators who is being recalled, is co-sponsoring the bill.

This legislative maneuver is an outrageous and overtattempt to change the law in midstream so that the six companies responsiblefor this public health catastrophe can walk away “scott” free while the taxpayers of Wisconsin pick-up the tab for cleaning up their mess - - hundreds ofmillions for special education, environmental inspections, higher rents andunaffordable housing caused by lead paint clean-up costs.

Glen Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald and the WisconsinRepublican Party have developed a disturbing pattern of simply changing lawsthat they find inconvenient. In thiscase, they are willing to throw the legal rights of 173 Wisconsin childrenunder the bus to protect six multi-billion dollar companies that do not evendeny they produced paint with white lead carbonate in it or that it is harmfulto children.

Who is Senator Grothman representing-the people ofWisconsin or multi-billion dollar out of state corporations like SherwinWilliams, DuPont, and BP-Amoco?

Do the citizens of Wisconsin really want out of statecorporations and their silk stocking attorneys writing and rewritingWisconsin’s laws?

The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearingon this bill on Wednesday.

Senator Pam Galloway, another Senator who is beingrecalled, is also a member of the Judiciary Committee. She is a physician who,like all physicians, has taken an oath to practicemedicine ethically.

Is Senator Galloway loyalty to her Party and out of statecorporations so strong that she will ignore the Hippocratic oath? Or will she vote against this unethical bill that sacrifices disabled children on the altar of corporate greed.

Please contact your legislators who serve on thiscommittee and tell them that you don’t want out of state corporations underminingthe rights of Wisconsin citizens.

Tell them the rights of the Wisconsin people are notfor sale.

Attacks on unions are political power play based on lies

2012-01-08T19:23:00.000-06:00

The New York Times has a strong editorial against Republican led efforts to eliminate unions and workers protections. It notes that the attack on public sector unions that has now spread to the private sector is based on cynical lies and that the objective of these attacks is to consolidate corporate and Republican control over the nation's economy and politics.

The editorial entitled the Continuing Assault on Unions is reprinted in full below:

Along with their shameful campaign to curb the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers in Wisconsin and Ohio last year, Republicans in statehouses around the country are taking aim at private sector unions.

Twenty-two states, mainly in the South and the West, have long had “right to work” laws forbidding contracts that require workers to pay union dues. After a decade in which business has ignored the issue,

Republicans in more than 10 states over the last year have begun pushing similar laws. Indiana’s Legislature is expected to approve the antiunion legislation as early as next month.

Many Republican leaders are adopting model legislation proposed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national corporate-financed conservative organization that is also assisting the Republican push to require voter identification cards to suppress the vote of minorities, young people and other constituencies that tend to favor the Democratic Party.

There is little doubt that politics is also behind the Republicans’ push for right-to-work laws: they see an opportunity to further weaken unions, which are far more likely to support Democrats — as well as health care reform and a higher minimum wage — by slashing their funding and their donating power.

The G.O.P. and its allies, like the Chamber of Commerce and brethren organizations, are trotting out the charge that unions reduce economic growth and jobs.

It stands to reason that a union will reduce a company’s profits somewhat, by obtaining a higher share for workers. But over the last three decades, economists have found that unionization has a minimal impact on growth and employment in an entire state or country. In fact, six of the 10 states with the highest unemployment have right-to-work laws. North Carolina, a right-to-work state, has a private sector unionization rate of 1.8 percent, the lowest in the nation. It also has the sixth highest unemployment rate: 10 percent.

Unionized workers earn more and get more generous benefits. In 2010, wages of workers in unionized manufacturing companies in Indiana were 16 percent higher than in nonunion plants. One study concluded that the decline in unionization since the 1970s is responsible for one-fifth to one-third of the growth in inequality in this country. Voters, unionized or not, should recognize the new “right to work” push for what it is: bad economics and cynical politics.

DA Asks Wis. Supreme Court to Reopen Union Lawsuit

2011-12-30T18:55:00.000-06:00

December 30, 2011

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A prosecutor asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday to reopen his lawsuit challenging Gov. Scott Walker's contentious collective bargaining law, contending a justice who voted to dismiss the suit earlier this year got free legal help from the firm defending the law.

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne argued in filings with the court that it should vacate its earlier decision, reconsider the case and disqualify Justice Michael Gableman from participating if he won't recuse himself.

Wisconsin's ethics code prohibits state officials from accepting free gifts, and the judicial ethics code bars judges from accepting gifts from anyone who is likely to appear before them.

"Reasonable, well-informed people would reasonably question Justice Gableman's ability to be impartial under the facts presented here," Ozanne wrote. "Respectfully, any litigant in any case deserves to have his case heard by a judge who has not secretly received a valuable gift from the other side's lawyer."

Gableman's attorney, Vin Dinh, didn't immediately return a message late Friday afternoon. He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this week that he doesn't believe the free legal services amounted to a gift.

Walker's spokesman, Cullen Werwie, issued a one-sentence response by email late Friday afternoon, saying only that "we are confident the Supreme Court got it right the first time."

Ozanne initially filed the lawsuit in March, alleging Republican lawmakers violated open meetings laws when they convened a committee to revise the collective bargaining measure without proper public notice. The meeting came during the height of massive around-the-clock protests at the Capitol against the legislation, which eliminated most public workers' union rights.

The Michael Best and Friedrich law firm and the state Justice Department defended the law. The case eventually landed in the Supreme Court. The court's four-justice conservative majority ultimately upheld the law, saying legislative rules trumped the open meetings law.

Gableman had retained the Michael Best and Friedrich firm to defend him in a 2008 ethics case stemming from one of his campaign ads. The ad accused his opponent, then-incumbent Justice Louis Butler, of finding a loophole for a sex offender who went on to molest another child. It didn't mention that Butler failed to get the offender out of prison early and that the offender committed the new crime after he had served his sentence.

Word surfaced earlier this month that Gableman signed a contingency agreement with the law firm that called for him to pay attorneys' fees only if he prevailed in the case, much like promises injury lawyers make to clients not to collect payment unless they win the case. The Supreme Court ultimately deadlocked 3-3 on whether the ad violated the ethics code, which meant he didn't lose or win the case and didn't have to pay the firm's attorneys for their services.

Public sector unions have filed three other, pending lawsuits challenging the collective bargaining law. Two are in federal court. The third is in Dane County Circuit Court.

Federal Reserve: Wisconsin leads nation in job loss

2011-12-15T18:27:00.000-06:00

Where are the jobs?

Not in Wisconsin, according to this map by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia which illustrates U.S. economic growth from July 1, 2011 when Governor Walker's austerity budget went into effect, to October 1, 2011.

The color code goes from dark green (high growth) to red (lowest growth.)

Guess which state has dropped to the bottom? That's right.......Walker's Wisconsin!

Wisconsin trails the national economy because the Wisconsin Republican Party's “cuts only” budget sucked billions of dollars of demand out of the state economy.

When workers are laid off or their incomes decline, they reduce their spending. And when consumers stop spending, businesses don't invest. Instead, they lay-off employees and reduce their own spending. A vicious downward cycle unfolds.

This is exactly what has happened in Wisconsin

Walker's budget reduced public employees' disposable incomes ($3,668 a year for the typical public employee making $40,000 a year), raised taxes on low- income people, and slashed state spending which led to lay-offs of teachers and local government employees further reducing spending. He also rejected $830 million in federal high speed rail stimulus funding.

Wisconsin's economy is struggling because of a lack of demand. The Republican Party's response has been to reduce public demand. The result - Wisconsin, which has lost jobs for the last 5 months, is dead last among 50 states in economic performance.

Where are the jobs? Not in Walker's Wisconsin.

Congress to investigate lavish CEO pay at for-profit colleges

2011-12-13T08:22:00.000-06:00

Chris Kirkham
Huffington Post

Over the past three years, lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform committee have investigated bonuses and executive pay at companies that benefited from billions in taxpayer dollars: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and others bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis.

Now, Democrats on the committee have turned their attention to another industry whose fortunes are closely tied to federal money: for-profit colleges.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member on the House oversight committee, has requested executive compensation information this week from 13 Wall Street corporations that own for-profit colleges. According to letters he sent to the companies' executives Monday, Cummings is seeking information on how what he termed "lavish" executive pay at college corporations is tied to the quality of education and student performance at such schools.

"When compared to public and non-profit schools, for-profit companies spend a smaller percentage of their funds on student education, reserving more for marketing, advertising, recruitment and other non education expenses," Cummings said. "Their student success rates are lower, and their students are more likely to default on loans. But their CEOs consistently make much more than their counterparts at public and non-profit schools."

Brian Moran, head of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a trade group representing for-profit colleges, called Cummings' announcement "more politics." He argued in a statement that the investigation "fails to acknowledge the important role private sector colleges and universities have in educating non-traditional students to compete for jobs in a very difficult economic environment."

"Rather than singling out one sector, we hope that Representative Cummings evaluates all areas of higher education so that the true beneficiary is the student," read the statement from Moran, interim chief executive and president of the group.

Including salary, bonuses and stock options, the majority of chief executive officers at the 13 companies received more than $3 million each in compensation, according to Cummings' office and securities filings from the companies. The top executives at DeVry Inc., ITT Educational Services Inc. and the Apollo Group Inc., which owns the University of Phoenix, all received more than $6 million, according to the most recent securities filings detailing executive pay.

By contrast, the president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, received a base pay of $714,000, and a total estimated compensation of $874,000, according to federal tax documents from the non-profit institution.

Several of the largest publicly-traded companies owning for-profit colleges receive more than 80 percent of their revenues from government student aid dollars such as Pell Grants and federal student loans. Over the past year, the Obama administration has stepped in with stricter accountability rules aimed at protecting billions of dollars in federal subsidies going to for-profit higher education.

Statistics from the Department of Education show that for-profit schools on average spend less than a third of what public universities spend on student instruction, despite high price tags for tuition. Students at for-profit colleges are responsible for an outsized share of student loan defaults: although about 12 percent of college students nationwide attend for-profit schools, the sector is responsible for more than 45 percent of federal loan defaults.

In letters to the 13 executives, Cummings wrote that he was requesting the agreements on corporate compensation "as part of an effort to determine whether your salary, bonuses and other compensation are appropriately tied to the performance of the students you educate, the vast majority of which pay for their education with federal tax dollars."

The Apollo Group noted in a filing Tuesday that a "substantial portion" of what Cummings requested was in public documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but said the company intends to "cooperate fully with Rep. Cummings to provide any necessary additional information."

A spokeswoman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House oversight committee, did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Cummings asked for the "full, unredacted copies of compensation agreements" by Dec. 23.

Last month the House oversight committee held a hearing on executive pay at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-governmental mortgage giants that were rescued by the government in 2008 as the housing market collapsed. In 2009, the committee also held hearings on executive pay at major firms that received government bailout money, including American International Group Inc., Citigroup, Bank of America, Chrysler and General Motors.

With Lobbying Blitz, For-Profit Colleges Diluted New Rules

2011-12-10T21:24:00.001-06:00

Last year the Obama administration vowed to regulate for-profit colleges and their unscrupulous practices that frequently left students with huge debts, non-transferable credits and dashed dreams .

In an opening volley that shook the $30 billion industry officials proposed new restrictions to cut off the huge flow of federal aid, the industries main source of funds and profits, to unfit programs. The gainful employment regulation was designed to deny federal funds to programs that did not result in employment with wages high enough to pay off student loans.

But the New York Times Eric Lichtblau reports that "...after a ferocious response that administration officials called one of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact as it goes into effect next year."

"The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.... "
.
"In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington.
The result was a plan, completed in June, that imposes new regulations on for-profit schools to ensure they adequately train their students for work, but does so on a much less ambitious scale than the administration first intended, relaxing the initial standards for determining which schools would be stripped of federal financing."

The losers, the thousands of students who are lured into attending for-profit colleges with promises of accredited degrees, jobs and increased income, but who end up with a lifetime of debt, with worthless credits, and without the jobs and income they were promised.

The joke in Washington, according to Lichtblau, is that the industry effort to defeat the regulations mainly ensured “gainful employment” for the capital’s Democratic lobbyists and political consultants.

The Times article is a disturbing case study in how corporate America and its lobbyists manipulate public policy to serve their interests.It is linked here.

Central Wisconsin not open for business

2011-12-10T03:51:00.000-06:00

Jim Rowen repoirts in his blog, The Political Environment:

More bad news for Marathon County:

Wausau Paper Corp. devasted the tiny Village of Brokaw this week with news that the paper mill there will shut down - - and the Wausau Daily Herald is pegging the job loss at 1,100 - - 450 jobs at the plant and another 650 as collateral damage elsewhere.

Unbelievably, a business making doors and windows said today it is closing in Mosinee - - where Wausau Paper is headquartered - - and the job impact, without the indirect effect, is put at 566.

Is Central Wisconsin open for business?

Nope: businesses are closing.

Superintendent of teacher featured in Walker ad says ad is a lie

2011-12-08T20:33:00.000-06:00

Scott Walker has a new ad featuring Jeff Knutson, a fourth grade teacher in the Monona Grove school district. Knudson claims:

"When the state budget passed in Madison, a lot of us thought we might lose our jobs. We figured if we didn't get laid off, our class sizes would become unmanageable. But that, didn't happen."

This, according to Knutson's boss, Monona Grove superintendent Craig Gerlach, is simply false. Like nearly all school districts in Wisconsin, Monona Grove has been forced to lay-off teachers and has experienced increases in class sizes:

"The numbers at Monona Grove clearly don't work. We struggled to put together a budget this year, we made significant cuts in terms of programs, laid-off teachers... we closed a building. Next year, quite frankly, will be brutal."

Robert Reich: Big money has occupied our democracy

2011-11-25T11:00:00.001-06:00

Wisconsin leads nation in job loss

2011-11-23T07:50:00.000-06:00

‎Ten months after Governor Walker's Special Legislative Session on jobs that resulted in more than 100 million in corporate tax breaks, Wisconsin lost more jobs than any state in the nation according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Tuesday.

The bureau said Wisconsin was the only state in the nation with a statistically significant decline in employment, dropping from 2,757,200 jobs in September to 2,747,500 jobs

Where are the jobs?

In Illinois, ridiculed by Walker for raising taxes, created the most jobs in the nation.

Governor Walker, Where are the jobs?

For-profit college CEO resigns over flawed placement rates

2011-11-22T07:28:00.000-06:00

The Career Education Corporation's CEO has resigned after an outside investigation found "improper" practices in the for-profit company's determination of job placement rates.

The Career Education Corporation operates over eighty campuses including Sanford-Brown University and Sanford Brown Institutes enrolling 116,000 students.

The company's third quarter report to investors to the Securities and Exchange Commission said that the review by an outside law firm the to investors disclosed that some of Career Education's health education and art and design schools failed to provide documentation to back up job placements, and that 13 of its 49 schools in those fields had failed to meet the placement rate requirements of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.

While a news release did not specifically say so, it appeared that those developments had prompted the resignation of Gary E. McCullough as president and chief executive.

Two-year college students blocked from enrolling

2011-11-18T07:42:00.001-06:00

Colleges and universities are experiencing unprecedented cuts in public funding.

In Wisconsin Governor Walker's budget slashed technical college funding by 30% for each of the next two years. As a result, technical college state funding has returned to a level not seen since the 1980s. The state's investment in the Milwaukee Area Technical College, the Wisconsin Technical College Systems' (WTCS) flagship institution with more than 50,000 students, has dwindled to a measly 7% of total funding. The state's contribution is suppose to be 33%..

At the same time the University of Wisconsin system was cut by $250 million and more cuts are being contemplated.

Across the country similar draconian cuts are undermining access to higher education as colleges and universities cut back on classes and sections and increase tuition to make up for the loss of state funding. The cuts are also undermining the ability of two-year colleges like MATC to address the skills gap by training the the next generation of skilled and technical workers at the very time that large numbers of veterans and dislocated workers are enrolling to acquire new skills of upgrade existing ones.

The Latest issue of the Chronicle on Higher Education reports:

A weak job market has brought a wave of applicants to community colleges in search of job training, but those same students are finding it difficult to gain access to courses they need, says a report released Thursday.

Nearly four in 10 community-college students responding to a national survey commissioned by the Pearson Foundation said they were unable to enroll in at least one class they wanted this fall, and 20 percent said they had trouble enrolling in the courses they needed to complete their degree or certificate.
'
Students who had the most difficulty with course enrollment were those attending part time and taking remedial courses.

Pearson's first survey of community-college students, conducted last year, found similar results, with one in five students feeling squeezed out of classes they needed.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed article is linked here.

Putting Millionaires Before Jobs

2011-11-04T07:37:00.000-06:00

New York Times editorial

November 3, 2011

There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster.

That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group — and hewing to their rigid antitax vows — was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports.

Senate Republicans filibustered the president’s full jobs act last month for the same reasons. And they have vowed to block the individual pieces of that bill that Democrats are now bringing to the floor. Senate Democrats have also accused them of opposing any good idea that might put people back to work and rev the economy a bit before next year’s presidential election.

There is no question that the infrastructure bill would be good for the flagging economy — and good for the country’s future development. It would directly spend $50 billion on roads, bridges, airports and mass transit systems, and it would then provide another $10 billion to an infrastructure bank to encourage private-sector investment in big public works projects.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican of Texas, co-sponsored an infrastructure-bank bill in March, and other Republicans have supported similar efforts over the years. But the Republicans’ determination to stick to an antitax pledge clearly trumps even their own good ideas.

A competing Republican bill, which also failed on Thursday, was cobbled together in an attempt to make it appear as if the party has equally valid ideas on job creation and rebuilding. It would have extended the existing highway and public transportation financing for two years, paying for it with a $40 billion cut to other domestic programs. Republican senators also threw in a provision that would block the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing new clean air rules. Only in the fevered dreams of corporate polluters could that help create jobs.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, bitterly accused Democrats of designing their infrastructure bill to fail by paying for it with a millionaire’s tax, as if his party’s intransigence was so indomitable that daring to challenge it is somehow underhanded.

The only good news is that the Democrats aren’t going to stop. There are many more jobs bills to come, including extension of unemployment insurance and the payroll-tax cut. If Republicans are so proud of blocking all progress, they will have to keep doing it over and over again, testing the patience of American voters.

Midwest Airlines pilot CEO blues

2011-10-27T21:03:00.002-06:00

Republicans attack on labor board is attack on labor rights

2011-10-14T18:34:00.000-06:00

Labor Rights, Under Republican Attack

By MARK BARENBERG, JAMES BRUDNEY and KARL KLARE

In the past month, the National Labor Relations Board has come under furious attack from Republicans in Congress, and decades-old workers’ rights are at risk. Backed by a well-financed lobbying and publicity offensive, Republicans are using a recent labor-law complaint against Boeing to achieve a radical goal that goes far beyond the legal issues in the case: unraveling workers’ rights that have been part of the fabric of our social contract since the Great Depression.

In April, the labor board’s acting general counsel filed a complaint against Boeing, alleging that the company retaliated against unionized workers by opening a nonunion aircraft facility in South Carolina, instead of using a facility in its home state of Washington. Citing multiple public statements by Boeing executives, the general counsel contended that the company decided to locate the plant in South Carolina in significant part to punish its Washington workers for having exercised their right to strike, enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Boeing has an opportunity at trial and in administrative and court appeals to disprove these allegations. It also may avoid the general counsel’s proposed remedy — an order restoring the aircraft production in question to Washington — if it can show that the order would be unduly burdensome.

But for Republicans, the legal process is beside the point. Representative Darrell Issa of California has disparaged the labor board as a “rogue agency,” and the presidential candidate Mitt Romney has called the general counsel’s complaint a “job killer” — even though the outcome of the case will determine only the location, not the number, of jobs. Last month, in an ambush against a federal agency’s powers in a pending case, the Republican-controlled House, voting almost entirely along party lines, approved a bill that would eliminate one of the paramount federal rights afforded workers for decades by prohibiting the labor board from ever ordering any employer to restore jobs illegally outsourced or relocated.

The attack against the Boeing complaint rests on three myths.

Myth No. 1: The general counsel has invoked an unprecedented legal rule. Apart from its unusually large scale (the location of an estimated 1,800 jobs is at stake), the Boeing case involves nothing legally new. The general counsel’s complaint is based on principles accepted by the labor board and the courts over many decades. In 1967, the future Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger (then a federal appellate judge) wrote a decision holding that an employer may not transfer work to punish employees for exercising National Labor Relations Act rights (like the right to strike). Likewise, the labor board has long had the authority to order restoration of work relocated as part of an unfair labor practice, and the appellate courts have approved such orders. In the absence of work restoration, any alternative remedy available to the labor board — like an order that Boeing post a bulletin-board notice promising to obey the law from now on — would be cosmetic.

Myth No. 2: The Boeing complaint means that the government can dictate the location of businesses. Everyone agrees that a company may legally locate its production anywhere it wishes and for any reason — except retaliatory ones. Imagine if Boeing had deliberately located a new plant in an area with a predominantly white labor force and then publicly stated that it did so because it was tired of listening to discrimination complaints made by African-American employees at its home plant. If the general counsel’s allegations are true, Boeing did something legally indistinguishable — unless labor rights no longer count as “real” rights.

Myth No. 3: The general counsel has discretion to drop the case in the name of economic policy. The general counsel is not a policy maker authorized to base decisions on what is good for employment in a particular region of the country. His discretion is confined to enforcing the policy already chosen by Congress in the National Labor Relations Act. If his investigation yields reasonable cause to believe that a violation occurred, his only legally proper course is to bring a case to be decided through the ordinary process. If the Internal Revenue Service determines that a South Carolina employer owes millions in unpaid taxes, should it drop the case if it believes doing so would help the local economy?

The Boeing case is not about jobs. Selecting one place rather than another to build planes creates no additional jobs. The general counsel did his job as the law requires. It would be tragic if his dutiful efforts provided an occasion for Republicans to extinguish decades-old workers’ rights.

Mark Barenberg, James Brudney and Karl Klare are professors of labor law at Columbia, Fordham and Northeastern University, respectively.

For-profit colleges target Britain despite being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice and fraud investigations in 18 states

2011-10-05T07:12:00.000-06:00

By Hannah Richardson,BBC News education reporter

Minister David Willetts held at least 12 meetings with for-profit education firms before publishing his plans for university reform for England.

Meetings with representatives from two firms accused of recruitment or public loan fraud in the US were among them.

The universities minister published plans to make it easier for private providers to enter the sector in June.

The government said Mr Willetts had spoken to higher education providers "of all types" before doing so.

Mr Willetts has been up-front about his plans to open up England's higher education system to private providers to help increase the number and type of university places available and boost competition.

But his plans have drawn criticism from academics and opposition politicians who fear that it could lead to a fall in the quality of education available, with more learning being carried out online and in non-traditional ways.

Most of the meetings were revealed to the BBC in answer to a parliamentary question from Barry Gardiner MP.

He said the scale of the contact between these for-profit firms and Mr Willetts was "extraordinary and appalling".

In July 2010 Mr Willetts met one firm, the Education Management Corporation (EDMC), which is currently being sued for $11bn by the Department of Justice in the US over its alleged student recruitment practices.

The firm is accused of wrongly using federal education funds to pay bonuses to its student recruiters, a claim it vehemently denies.

Another firm Mr Willetts met, Apollo, has paid out millions of dollars over claims it improperly recruited students to the University of Phoenix.

Although Apollo admitted no liability in a whistleblower case in 2009, it settled saying it wanted to bring "closure to a long-running dispute" and avoid "uncertainty and further expense associated with protracted litigation".

Apollo is the parent company of BPP University College of Professional Studies, which gained university college status last year. It was the first private sector institution to gain this status for more than 30 years.

Vocational degrees

Mr Willetts met representatives of Apollo and BPP in May 2011. He also met BPP as part of wider meetings with higher education providers in December 2010 and January 2011.

A spokesman for BPP said of the meetings: "There was an exchange of views which centred on BPP University College's plans to grow its career-focused degree programmes."

Mr Willetts also met publishing giant Pearson five times. This includes three meetings in close succession in the run-up to the publication of White Paper on higher education in England, which pledged to "make it easier for new providers to enter the sector".

Mr Willetts, who spoke at a Pearson event in May 2010 about the future of higher education, also plans to allocate 20,000 places to degree course providers charging less than £7,500 a year.

These are expected to be mainly from further education colleges and the private providers, and have widely been seen as a means of addressing the fact that so many universities plan top-price fees of £9,000 a year.

Pearson, one of the world's biggest publishers, has made no secret of its plans to seek degree-awarding powers in England's education system.

After a meeting with Mr Willetts in December 2010, the firm announced that it was planning to start by offering four vocational degrees with a further education college at "very competitive" prices. These will be piloted from September 2012, when the new fees system beings.

It also said in June that it would be offering degrees in conjunction with Royal Holloway, part of the University of London, which would be the validating partner.

But it is still pursuing its aim of gaining degree-awarding powers itself, potentially working as a validating partner for England's further education colleges.

Continue reading the main story “Start QuoteThese are not chance meetings; they are ideologically driven ”
End Quote Barry Gardiner MP
A Pearson spokesman said: "Pearson provides and develops qualifications including BTecs, A-Levels and GCSEs as well as publishing support materials and offering technology products for schools, colleges and universities.

"As part of this work, we meet with teachers, education stakeholders and government representatives to discuss our plans and share ideas."

Mr Willetts also met a firm called Laureate, which has 55 higher education institutions in 27 countries. In England it runs online masters and doctoral degree courses accredited by the University of Liverpool.

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said its ministers complied with the rules regarding disclosure of their meetings.

"In the run-up to the publication of the higher education White Paper David Willetts spoke to higher education providers of all types," he added.

'Fraught with danger'

But Mr Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent North, said: "The fact that there have been at least 12 meetings just shows what the focus of the higher education minister is with private sector providers and undermining the existing public sector provision. This is not what he should be focusing on.

"These are not chance meetings; they are ideologically driven meetings about what this government sees as the future of higher education on this country.

"It is not a pretty sight and it is not what the British people recognise. They want to Americanise the system."

General secretary of the UCU lecturers' union Sally Hunt said: "Events in America have shown the for-profit model is fraught with danger for students and taxpayers alike.

"Rather than meeting with the privateers, we believe the government should tighten up existing regulations and abandon any proposals that would further encourage for-profit companies in the UK.

"The companies being sued and investigated by the US Congress are the very same ones who are now eyeing up the UK."

Scott Walker's job killing policies cost Patrick Fuhrman 2 jobs

2011-09-25T15:50:00.000-06:00

For-profit colleges target veterans

2011-09-22T19:49:00.000-06:00

By HOLLISTER K. PETRAEUS
New York Times

MILITARY personnel and their families are finding themselves under siege from for-profit colleges. A number of these schools focus on members of the armed forces with aggressive and often misleading marketing, and then provide little academic, administrative or counseling support once the students are enrolled.

Vast sums are involved: between 2006 and 2010, the money received in military education benefits by just 20 for-profit companies soared to an estimated $521.2 million from $66.6 million.

The government provides two important educational benefits to service members: the Tuition Assistance program for service members on active duty, and the G.I. Bill, which is mostly used for education after military service.

Today’s veterans are eager to earn post-secondary degrees — and to replicate the example of the generation that returned from World War II and fueled our prosperity. But their desire for learning is too often exploited by unscrupulous for-profit colleges.

The schools have a strong incentive to enroll service members and veterans, in large part because of the “90-10 rule” created by the 1998 amendments to the Higher Education Act. Put simply, the rule says that a for-profit college must obtain at least 10 percent of its revenue from a source other than Title IV education funds, the primary source of federal student aid. Funds from Tuition Assistance and the G.I. Bill are not defined as Title IV funds, so they count toward the 10 percent requirement, just like private sources of financing.

Therein lies a problem. For every service member or veteran (or spouse or child, in the case of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill) enrolled at a for-profit college and paying with military education funds, that college can enroll nine others who are using nothing but Title IV money.

This gives for-profit colleges an incentive to see service members as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform, and to use aggressive marketing to draw them in and take out private loans, which students often need because the federal grants are insufficient to cover the full cost of tuition and related expenses.

One of the most egregious reports of questionable marketing involved a college recruiter who visited a Marine barracks at Camp Lejeune, N.C. As the PBS program “Frontline” reported, the recruiter signed up Marines with serious brain injuries. The fact that some of them couldn’t remember what courses they were taking was immaterial, as long as they signed on the dotted line.

Some for-profit colleges have also created Web sites with military-sounding names. Although they present themselves as offering unbiased advice on G.I. Bill benefits, some are using deceptive methods to bring in students.

For example, I looked at one of these sites and found that the schools listed on the home page as “G.I. Bill schools” all happened to be for-profit colleges. On another site, a member of my staff filled out an application asking what the school would recommend if he had a law degree and a postdoctoral degree in physics. Their suggestion: get a vocational certificate at a local for-profit college.

To be sure, there are some for-profit colleges with a long record of serving the military, solid academic credentials and a history of success for their graduates. But, compared with other schools, for-profit colleges generally have low graduation rates and a poor record of gainful employment for their alumni.

A number of for-profit colleges have questionable academic credentials or lack accreditation accepted by other institutions. This makes it very difficult for students to transfer credits to other schools. Not surprisingly, for-profit colleges also tend to have a higher-than-average student loan default rate, which means that, in the end, the college experience there may hinder, rather than help, the careers and financial prospects of their graduates.

Prior to the Military Lending Act of 2007, which capped the annual interest rate for some consumer loans to service members at 36 percent, they were victims of unchecked payday lending and other predatory financial services. I see a parallel in what is happening today with for-profit colleges.

As long as military education funds are on the 10 percent side of the 90-10 rule, service members will be a lucrative target for exploitation. As Congress explores legislative solutions at a hearing today, it is critical that federal agencies redouble efforts to prevent aggressive and deceptive practices. The benefits provided to our military and their families should not be wasted on programs that do not promote — and may even frustrate — their educational goals.

Hollister K. Petraeus is the assistant director for service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her husband, David H. Petraeus, is the director of the C.I.A. and a retired Army general who commanded American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Student default rates soar at for-profit colleges

2011-09-13T07:31:00.001-06:00

The proportion of borrowers defaulting on federal student loans continued to increase during the Great Recession, according to Education Department data released Monday.

The two-year "cohort" default rate, which represents the proportion of federal loan borrowers who entered repayment between October 2008 and September 2009 and had defaulted on their loans by the end of September 2010, increased to 8.8 percent, the highest such rate since 1997. The rate increased 1.8 percentage points from fiscal 2008.

While students in all sectors were likelier to default on their loans than they had been the previous year, defaults increased the most at for-profit colleges: 15 percent of borrowers from those institutions defaulted in 2009, compared with 11.6 percent in 2008. That was more than twice the rate at public and not-for profit private institutions. Critics have compared for-profit colleges' exhorbitant tuitions and the huge federal loans students take out to pay them to the sub-prime mortgage bubble that led to the Great Recession.

Defaults increased to 7.2 percent at public institutions, from 6 percent in the 2008 fiscal year. At private institutions, the default rate increased from 4 percent in 2008 to 4.6 percent in 2009.

The rates are the first to consist entirely of loans that entered repayment during the worst of the economic downturn, and Education Department officials pointed to the bad economic situation as a major factor in the increase in defaults. Defaults tend to increase as unemployment rises, and delinquency rates on other types of credit, such as mortgages and credit cards, increased during the same period, they said.

But officials also pointed to booming enrollments at for-profit colleges as a contributing factor. Default rates have historically been higher for students at for-profit institutions. Nearly half of the 320,000 defaulting borrowers who began repayment in fiscal 2009 were enrolled at for-profit colleges, said James Kvaal, the deputy undersecretary for education, during a conference call with reporters.

Since fiscal year 2005, default rates over all have nearly doubled, from 4.6 percent in 2005 to 2009’s 8.8 percent. Still, default rates are far from their peak in 1990, when 22.4 percent of students defaulted on their loans and the Education Department shut down dozens of programs.

The department cautioned that the actual default rate may in fact be higher, because many colleges encourage their students to seek forbearance or defer payments rather than go into default. While that sometimes can help students repay their loans, in many cases it just delays the default beyond the two-year window, Kvaal said. The Project on Student Debt called Monday’s figures “the tip of the iceberg,” noting that most defaults occur after two years.

Next year, the department will begin using three-year default rates to evaluate programs, meaning that the rate will increase. Trial three-year default rates for 2009 will be released in spring 2012.

Five institutions, four of them for-profits, will lose eligibility for federal student loans due to high default rates: Tidewater Technical, in Norfolk, Va.; Trend Barber College in Houston; Missouri School of Barbering and Hairstyling in St. Louis; Sebring Career School, in Houston, and Human Resource Development and Employment-Stanley Technical Institute, in Clarksburg, W.V. Institutions must have default rates that exceed 40 percent in one year or 25 percent for three consecutive years to incur sanctions.

Culinary school graduates claim they were ripped off, sue to get their money back

2011-09-07T16:10:00.001-06:00

SAN FRANCISCO - Food enthusiasts have been enrolling in culinary school in growing numbers, lured by dreams of working as gourmet chefs or opening their own restaurants.

For many graduates, however, those dreams have turned into financial nightmares, as they struggle to pay off hefty student loans and find work in a cutthroat industry known for its long hours and low pay.

Now, some former students are suing for-profit cooking schools to get their money back, saying they were misled by recruiters about the value of culinary education and their job prospects after graduation.

"They just oversold it and pushed it. They made misleading statements to lure you in," said Emily Journey, 26, a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against San Francisco's California Culinary Academy, part of Career Education Corp.'s chain of 16 Le Cordon Bleu cooking schools.

Journey, however, may get some of her money back. Under a pending $40 million settlement in state court, Career Education has agreed to offer rebates up to $20,000 to 8,500 students who attended the academy between 2003 and 2008.

In 2004, Journey was a recent high school graduate, dreaming of opening her own bakery, when she enrolled in a 7-month program in pastry and baking arts at the San Francisco school. Recruiters convinced her it was a worthwhile investment and helped her borrow $30,000 to pay for it.

After finishing the program, the only job she could find paid $8 an hour to work the night shift at an Oregon bakery — "something anyone could have gotten without a culinary certificate," she said.

Journey, who now lives in Bakersfield, has abandoned her baker's dream and now plans to attend community college to become a nurse or dietitian. Without the settlement money, she will be paying for that culinary certificate for another 15 years.

"Was it worth the money and the time to have this loan hanging over my head?" she asked. "Absolutely not."

Two other Le Cordon Bleu schools — the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena and the Western Culinary Institute in Portland — also face lawsuits from former students who say they were duped by deceptive advertising, particularly the schools' job placement rates.

Schaumburg, Ill.-based Career Education denies its recruiting and marketing practices are illegal, but its schools recently changed their policies to "ensure that students understand that we are not promising any specific job outcomes or salaries," said spokesman Mark Spencer.

The publicly traded company, which operates more than 90 career colleges worldwide, agreed to settle the San Francisco lawsuits because they were too expensive to litigate and distracting to employees, Spencer said.

Enrollment at for-profit colleges and trade schools has surged over the past decade, fueled by federal student aid that makes up as much as 90 percent of revenue at many institutions. Profit-driven career colleges are facing heavy criticism for their aggressive recruiting and marketing practices, as well as their graduates' low rates of loan repayment.

Students who attend for-profit institutions represented 12 percent of all college students in 2009, but 43 percent of those who defaulted on federal student loans, according to a recent report by The Education Trust, an education advocacy group.

"It's a business predicated on volume, not quality. How many students can you get to sign on the dotted line?" said Jose Cruz, the group's vice president for higher education policy. "It's a debt that takes over their financial life."

Career Education has capitalized on the growing interest in culinary education, fed by popular television shows such as the Food Network's "Iron Chef," Fox Broadcasting's "Hell's Kitchen" and Bravo's "Top Chef."

Enrollment at the company's 16 Le Cordon Bleu cooking schools increased from 8,400 in 2008 to 13,100 in 2010, according to Career Education officials.

Le Cordon Bleu officials defend the value of a culinary education, saying many restaurants, hotels and hospitality companies don't have the time or money to train employees.

"Culinary arts education today gives people a much-needed foundation they need to be successful," said Edward Leonard, vice president and corporate chef for Le Cordon Bleu Schools in North America.

School officials point to alumni such as Jill Barton, a 2005 California Culinary Academy graduate who recently opened a crepe shop in Santa Barbara, or Gonzalo del Castillo, a 2007 graduate who co-owns a San Francisco tapas bar.

The academy's tuition and fees range from $21,000 for a certificate in pastry and baking arts to $43,000 for an associate's degree in culinary arts. Those costs don't include books, supplies, or room and board.

The school's website says 48 to 100 percent of graduates find work in their field of study or a related field, depending on the program or methodology.

Critics say many of those jobs don't pay much more than minimum wage and don't require formal culinary education.

"It is a ridiculous business decision to attend one of these schools," said attorney Ray Gallo, who represents plaintiffs suing the California Culinary Academy. "The whole thing doesn't make economic sense. They know it and they don't tell you."

In June, the U.S. Department of Education in June issued new regulations aimed at protecting students who attend private career colleges. Under the new rules, a school can only have access to federal student aid if at least 35 percent of its graduates are repaying their loans — or if graduates' annual loan payments don't exceed 12 percent of their earnings.

Critics say the new rules are a small step in the right direction, but don't go far enough.

"Unfortunately, it's really a buyer-beware environment for people seeking higher education at culinary schools or other kinds of training programs," said Lauren Asher, who heads the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success.

Matt Foist, 46, regrets his decision to borrow $45,000 to attend the California Culinary Academy in 2005, when the Silicon Valley software engineer was looking for a career change.

"They did a great job of selling it to me," Foist said. "I was kind of tricked into believing that I would become a highly regarded chef in the San Francisco area and that I would make a lot more money than the reality turned out to be."

After realizing he wouldn't be able to earn enough to cover his student loans, he decided to stick with software engineering. Five years later, he said he's barely made a dent in paying off his culinary school debt, though the settlement money will help if it comes through.

His advice to people contemplating culinary school: "Don't go. Go to a community college."

In honor of Teachers

2011-09-03T06:41:00.000-06:00

By CHARLES M. BLOW
New York Times, September 3, 2011

Since it’s back-to-school season across the country, I wanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers. Like so many others, it was a teacher who changed the direction of my life, and to whom I’m forever indebted.

A Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll released this week found that 76 percent of Americans believed that high-achieving high school students should later be recruited to become teachers, and 67 percent of respondents said that they would like to have a child of their own take up teaching in the public schools as a career.

But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid, and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywide failure.

A March report by the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that one of the differences between the United States and countries with high-performing school systems was: “The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same high status as it once did, nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy in the world’s best-performing economies.”

The report highlights two example of this diminished status:

• “According to a 2005 National Education Association report, nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years teaching; they cite poor working conditions and low pay as the chief reason.”

• “High school teachers in the U.S. work longer hours (approximately 50 hours, according to the N.E.A.), and yet the U.S. devotes a far lower proportion than the average O.E.C.D. country does to teacher salaries.”

Take Wisconsin, for instance, where a new law stripped teachers of collective bargaining rights and forced them to pay more for benefits. According to documents obtained by The Associated Press, “about twice as many public schoolteachers decided to hang it up in the first half of this year as in each of the past two full years.”

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t seek to reform our education system. We should, and we must. Nor am I saying that all teachers are great teachers. They aren’t. But let’s be honest: No profession is full of peak performers. At least this one is infused with nobility.

And we as parents, and as a society at large, must also acknowledge our shortcomings and the enormous hurdles that teachers must often clear to reach a child. Teachers may be the biggest in-school factor, but there are many out-of-school factors that weigh heavily on performance, like growing child poverty, hunger, homelessness, home and neighborhood instability, adult role-modeling and parental pressure and expectations.

The first teacher to clear those hurdles in my life was Mrs. Thomas.

From the first through third grades, I went to school in a neighboring town because it was the school where my mother got her first teaching job. I was not a great student. I was slipping in and out of depression from a tumultuous family life that included the recent divorce of my parents. I began to grow invisible. My teachers didn’t seem to see me nor I them. (To this day, I can’t remember any of their names.)

My work began to suffer so much that I was temporarily placed in the “slow” class. No one even talked to me about it. They just sent a note. I didn’t believe that I was slow, but I began to live down to their expectations.

When I entered the fourth grade, my mother got a teaching job in our hometown and I came back to my hometown school. I was placed in Mrs. Thomas’s class.

There I was, a little nothing of a boy, lost and slumped, flickering in and out of being.

She was a pint-sized firecracker of a woman, with short curly hair, big round glasses set wider than her face, and a thin slit of a mouth that she kept well-lined with red lipstick.

On the first day of class, she gave us a math quiz. Maybe it was the nervousness of being the “new kid,” but I quickly jotted down the answers and turned in the test — first.

“Whoa! That was quick. Blow, we’re going to call you Speedy Gonzales.” She said it with a broad approving smile, and the kind of eyes that warmed you on the inside.

She put her arm around me and pulled me close while she graded my paper with the other hand. I got a couple wrong, but most of them right.

I couldn’t remember a teacher ever smiling with approval, or putting their hand around me, or praising my performance in any way.

It was the first time that I felt a teacher cared about me, saw me or believed in me. It lit a fire in me. I never got a bad grade again. I figured that Mrs. Thomas would always be able to see me if I always shined. I always wanted to make her as proud of me as she seemed to be that day. And, she always was.

In high school, the district sent a man to test our I.Q.’s. Turns out that not only was I not slow, but mine and another boy’s I.Q. were high enough that they created a gifted-and-talented class just for the two of us with our own teacher who came to our school once a week. I went on to graduate as the valedictorian of my class.

And all of that was because of Mrs. Thomas, the firecracker of a teacher who first saw me and smiled with the smile that warmed me on the inside.

So to all of the Mrs. Thomases out there, all the teachers struggling to reach lost children like I was once, I just want to say thank you. You deserve our admiration, not our contempt.

U.S. corporations and CEOs game the system

2011-08-31T07:29:00.001-06:00

A new study by the Institute for Policy Studies reports that at least 25 top United States companies paid more to their chief executives in 2010 than they did to the federal government in taxes.

The companies — which include household names like eBay, Boeing, General Electric and Verizon — averaged $1.9 billion each in profits. Rather than paying taxes these firms each received more than $400 million in tax rebates.

The authors of the study, which examined the regulatory filings of the 100 companies with the best-paid chief executives, said that their findings suggested that current United States policy was rewarding tax avoidance rather than innovation.

“We have no evidence that C.E.O.’s are fashioning, with their executive leadership, more effective and efficient enterprises,” the study concluded. “On the other hand, ample evidence suggests that C.E.O.’s and their corporations are expending considerably more energy on avoiding taxes than perhaps ever before — at a time when the federal government desperately needs more revenue to maintain basic services for the American people.”

It is outrageous that Republicans, like Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, are demanding huge cuts in federal discretionary spending, cuts to education, health care, research and development, local governmental services such as police and fire protection, and emergency federal disaster relief while they allow U.S. corporation's to manipulate the tax system to avoid contributing their fair share and reward CEO's with unconscionable salaries that have no relationship to performance.

The NY Times article is linked here.

US Federal debt increases by U.S Presidents

2011-08-29T06:38:00.000-06:00

U. S. Department of Justice sues nation's 2nd largest for-profit college

2011-08-11T10:57:00.000-06:00

The Department of Justice and four states on Monday filed a multibillion-dollar fraud suit against the Education Development Management Corporation (EDMC), the nation’s second-largest for-profit college company, charging that it was not eligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it had received from July 2003 through June 2011.

An EDMC subsidiary,the Art Institute of Wisconsin, recently began operations in Milwaukee's Third Ward, in close proximity to the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD). It is one of several for-profit colleges, including the notorious Everest College, that have recently opened branches in the city.

The Art Institute of Wisconsin anchored a controversial development that received $6.5 million in federal New Market tax credits from the Milwaukee Economic Development Corporation. I had written a letter in opposition to subsidizing this development with New Market tax credits because they are designed to promote development in poor communities, not gentrified areas like the Third Ward, and because of the large number of lawsuits against EDMC alleging unscrupulous business practices.

While the civil lawsuit filed earlier this week is one of many raising similar charges against the expanding for-profit college industry, the case is the first in which the government intervened to back whistle-blowers’ claims that a company consistently violated federal law by paying recruiters based on how many students it enrolled. The suit said that each year, Education Management falsely certified that it was complying with the law, making it eligible to receive student financial aid.

“The depth and breadth of the fraud laid out in the complaint are astonishing,” said Harry Litman, a lawyer in Pittsburgh and former federal prosecutor who is one of those representing the two whistle-blowers whose 2007 complaints spurred the suit. “It spans the entire company — from the ground level in over 100 separate institutions up to the most senior management — and accounts for nearly all the revenues the company has realized since 2003.”

Education Management, which is based in Pittsburgh and is 41 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, enrolls about 150,000 students in 105 schools operating under four names: Art Institute, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University.

For more information go to this link.

August 9th elections: a step forward

2011-08-11T08:58:00.001-06:00

The New York Times analyzes Wisconsin's recall elections writing: "...voters around the country who oppose the widespread efforts to undermine public unions — largely financed by corporate interests — should draw strength from Tuesday’s success, not discouragement."

" Republicans will not admit this, but the numbers showed significant strength for Democrats even in the districts they lost — strength that could grow if lawmakers continue cutting spending and taxes while reducing the negotiating rights of working families. In one rural senatorial district that had not elected a Democrat in a century, the Democratic candidate reached 48 percent of the vote. Another race was also close, and as Nate Silver noted in The Times, the overall results suggest that a contemplated statewide recall of Mr. Walker himself would be too close to call. (Two Democrats face recalls next week.)"

The editorial is linked here.

Politifact: Walker's job claim is false!

2011-07-29T16:00:00.000-06:00

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Politifact has analyzed Walker's fictitious job creation boast that Wisconsin created half the nation's new jobs in June and labeled it false.

The MJS analysis is linked here.

Walker denies jobs boast even as allies repeat it

2011-07-28T08:50:00.004-06:00

Less than a week after Governor Scott Walker claimed that Wisconsin had created half the nation's new jobs, he has denied making the statement.

The Wausau Daily Herald reports: "Walker said it was never his intention to draw a direct line between the Wisconsin total and the national total."

"We made it very clear at our announcement that (our number) was not half of all the jobs out there, though it is an interesting parallel," he said.

That's not what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's economics reporter John Schmid reported. Schmid wrote of the Walker's announcement:

"Walker noted that job growth in Wisconsin effectively accounted for about half of the new jobs in the nation in June, an abysmal month for job creation.

The state had a net total of 9,500 new jobs in the month, because a decline in government employment offset some of the gains in the private sector. Nationally, Walker said, 18,000 new jobs were created last month - 57,000 gained in the private sector minus a drop of 39,000 in government payrolls.

"It's incredibly important to put that in perspective," Walker said. "To have 9,500 net new jobs in the state at a time when the country saw just 18,000 net new jobs all across the country is incredibly good news..."

While Walker may be denying his earlier statement, others are not. As Bill Cristofferson reported in his blog, conservative James Wigderson mounted a spirited, if convoluted, defense of Walker while attacking Christofferson and me for questioning Walker's numbers.

More importantly, Walker's claim has become the newest Republican talking point.

At a town hall meeting in Whitefish Bay, Congressman James Sensenbrenner bragged that Wisconsin had created half the nation's new jobs in June and attributed this to Walker's economic policies.

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson repeated Sensenbrenner's and Walker's boast on national TV as did Assembly Majority Leader Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, who bragged: "Accounting for more than half of the nationwide gain in June employment is a remarkable feat."

The same echo will will undoubtedly be heard in Madison over the next few weeks.

As I wrote earlier Walker used a misleading statistic to create a distorted perception of the state’s job creation record for overtly political purposes-promoting Walker and his economic program.

Others have now picked up Walker's ball and are running with it. Rather than deny the truth about what he said, Walker ought to man up, admit he was wrong and actually do something to help the tens of thousands of Wisconsinites who are unemployed.

Gov. Walker's victory dance misses the beat

2011-07-27T07:49:00.000-06:00

Last week Governor Walker claimed that Wisconsin was responsible for half the nation’s monthly job growth.

Republican Party politicians and operatives have run with Walker’s numbers, arguing they prove that his program of corporate and investor tax cuts and reduced regulation is working.

Let’s put Walker’s jobs victory dance iin perspective.

Several states; Texas (+32,000), California (+28,800), Michigan (+18,000), Minnesota (+13,200) and Massachusetts (10,400) had more job growth than Wisconsin.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics data Walker touted, Texas was responsible for almost 200% of net job growth in June, California 150%, Michigan 100%, Minnesota 65% and Massachusetts slightly more than 50% .Nor was Wisconsin’s monthly percentage increase among the nation’s largest. Alaska experienced the largest over-the-month percentage increase in employment (+1.7 percent), followed by North Dakota (+1.2 percent), Vermont (+0.9 percent), and South Dakota (+0.8 percent).

In fact, Wisconsin was one of only 9 states that reported statistically significant over-the-month unemployment rate increases in June.

South Carolina experienced the largest increase (+0.5 percentage point), followed by Alabama, Arkansas, and Illinois (+0.3 point each) and Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin (+0.2 point each). The unemployment rate did not increase in 41 states.

Wisconsin lost nearly 171,000 jobs during the Great recession. It has gained back 50,000 over the last year and a half, about 30%.

These numbers illustrate what a useless, misleading and politically motivated statistic Governor Walker and DWD used in claiming half the nation’s job growth.

It is useless, misleading and politically motivated because it creates a distorted perception of the state’s job creation record for overtly political purposes-promoting Walker and his economic program.

More importantly, there is ZERO evidence that Wisconsin’s June job growth has anything to do with anything that Governor Walker or the current legislature has done. Economists recognize that there are lags between the adoption of economic policy, its implementation and the policy’s impact. Given the reality of policy lags, there has simply not been enough time for Walker’s initiatives to have had the impact that the Walker administration claims.

The creation of 9,500 jobs is a positive development. But it hardly justifies the Governor’s jobs victory dance.

Alberta Darling has turned her back on Wisconsin

2011-07-22T06:36:00.000-06:00

For-Profit College CEOs Reap Rewards of Weak Regulation

2011-07-21T06:38:00.000-06:00

In the six weeks since the Obama administration issued weaker-than-expected rules governing student debt at for-profit colleges, the University of Phoenix's founder and executive board chairman has cashed out more than $59 million of the school's parent company’s stock, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company's share prices on Wall Street have climbed to the highest levels in more than six months.

John G. Sperling's sale of 1.8 million shares comes as the stocks at many for-profit college companies have surged in the wake of the Department of Education's issuance of "gainful employment" rules, which the for-profit college industry had been aggressively fighting for more than a year.

And Sperling isn't alone. Donald Graham, the main stakeholder in Kaplan University, reaped a gain of $12.5 million over the last month. Andrew Clark, the CEO of Bridgepoint Education, made a $2.5 million profit on his stock holdings. Dennis Keller of Devry University made $27.6 million.

In total, the CEOs of the 15 publicly traded American for-profit colleges have collected $2 billion from selling company stock over the last seven years.

Many for-profit schools have been shown to aggressively recruit low-income and minority students—in some cases providing false information about accreditation and the prospects for salary and job opportunities after graduation—raising the question of whether the recent gains of for-profit CEOs like Sperling are being made on the backs of the most vulnerable students.

As enrollments at for-profit colleges have swelled over the past decade, along with the federal financial aid dollars that deliver as much as 90 percent of their revenues, scrutiny has intensified on students' outcomes. Hundreds of thousands of students at for-profit colleges have emerged with enormous debts and meager job prospects, resulting in a disproportionate share of student loan defaults at for-profit colleges.

The Obama administration's new rules were expected to rein in schools that aggressively recruited students but did little for their academic and employment outcomes once they were in the door. Many industry executives and Wall Street investors anticipated stricter rules that could have barred certain underperforming programs from accessing lucrative federal student aid dollars.

Beginning last summer, when the Department of Education released a draft version of the regulations, stocks at the Apollo Group, the University of Phoenix's parent company, and many other higher education corporations began to tumble. But the resulting rules essentially gave the industry carte blanche to continue as usual, taking a more lenient approach that gives schools an additional three years to come into federal student aid compliance. One former Department of Education official said the administration "caved in" to the industry’s pressure.

The market certainly signaled that the rules changed little, as stocks at many of those schools' parent companies soared and have remained strong ever since.

The weakening of the rules came after an extensive yearlong battle in Washington waged by the for-profit college industry that included substantial lobbying and campaign finance money from the Apollo Group and Sperling himself.

18 State Attorneys General Investigating For-Profit Colleges

2011-07-19T11:59:00.000-06:00

“Quite frankly, the industry’s response to our investigation has been very disappointing,” says Conway. “For-profit schools should acknowledge and work to correct the well-documented issues involving high student loan default rates, overaggressive recruiting practices, misleading advertising and high student withdrawal rates.”

Despite the somewhat diluted nature of the final gainful employment rule issued by the Department of Education in early June, opponents of gainful employment have not let up their fight. Just last week, the House Subcommittee on Education and Workforce Training held a hearing not-so-subtly titled “The Gainful Employment Regulation: Limiting Job Growth and Student Choice."The hearing, chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC saw testimony from several witnesses, including head of the National Black Chamber of Commerce Harry Alford – who called the gainful employment rule ‘racial’ and ‘evil’ in an op-ed last week – Dr. Dario A. Cortes, the President of New York for-profit Berkeley College, and student Karla Carpenter, who appeared in an advertisement for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) one of the biggest opponents of reform.

For-profit colleges spent millions of dollars on advertising and high-powered lobbyists in an attempt to weaken or squash outright the gainful employment regulations. It remains to be seen how much more money and manpower they will pour into such efforts in the coming months.

The information in this blog came from a post by Katie Andriulli/ Campus Progress.Org, July 11, 2011.Katie is the Communications and Outreach Manager for Campus Progress.

Darling's pay to play legislation

2011-07-18T14:08:00.000-06:00

Dollars for Afghanistan; pink slips for Americans

2011-07-17T05:36:00.001-06:00

The New York Times NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF writes:

All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled...

And he asks: How is it that we can afford to double our military budget since 9/11, can afford the carried-interest tax loophole for billionaires, can afford billions of dollars in givebacks to oil and gas companies, yet can’t afford to invest in our kids’ futures?

Sometimes I hear people endorse education cuts by arguing that “school isn’t for everybody,” which usually means something like “education isn’t for other people’s children” — or that farm kids in places like Yamhill really don’t need schools that double as rocket ships. I can’t think of any view that is more un-American.

The column is linked here.

Technical education faces federal funding cuts

2011-07-11T17:41:00.002-06:00

The New York Times reports that federal funding for technical education is on the chopping block as the Obama administration focuses education policy on increasing the number of four-year college graduates.

This is a disturbing development because:

70% of all new jobs will require some post-secondary education, but not a four-year degree;
four year colleges and universities are increasingly becoming too expensive for low and moderate income students;
many students find technical colleges' hands-on education better suited to their learning styles;
as baby boomer retire there will be a shortage of middle skills workers, the very skilled and technical workers that technical colleges produce and business and industry needs;
as public technical colleges reduce programs in response to budget cuts, students will gravitate to the highly exploitative for-profit college sector.

The New York Times article is linked here.

Republicans twiddle their thumbs while the unemployed lose their benefits

2011-07-01T07:15:00.004-06:00

Milwaukee's Democratic legislators have written a letter asking the legislature's majority leaders to call a special session to enact legalisation enabling Wisconsin to secure $89 million in federal extended unemployment benefits.

10,000 unemployed workers in the state have run out of unemployment insurance benefits because of the legislature's failure to act.

Two weeks ago the New York Times wrote that Wisconsin and Arizona were among a handful of states that were refusing to accept federal aid for "ideological reasons." A Wisconsin Manufacturer's and Commerce (WMC) spokesman claimed that the extended benefits were unnecessary and discouraged the unemployed from seeking work.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel followed up the Times' expose with a front page article that reported that Governor Walker supported extending the benefits, but did think they would create jobs, an unsubstantiated declaration that contradicts economic research that concludes extending unemployment benefits is among the strongest job creating policies governments can implement.

Following a demonstration in front of her legislative office earlier this week, State Senator Alberta Darling, co-chair of the powerful joint finance committee, claimed that she supported taking the money and assisting the unemployed.

Yet neither Darling, the Fitzgerald brothers nor Governor Walker have taken any steps to secure the $89 million that would not cost the state a single penny.

Their lack of urgency stands in sharp contrast to their actions immediately after Walker assumed office when they convened a special session to enact approximately $140 million in tax breaks for corporations and investors..

The failure of Darling, Walker and the Fitzgeralds to act is an outrage and immoral.

More than 10,000 hard-working, tax-paying Wisconsinites who lost their jobs through no fault of their own have run out of benefits. Many have lost their homes or are at risk of losing them. Others have been forced to drop out of school diminishing their hope for reemployment through retraining.

Wisconsin has a jobs shortage. Nationally there are 4.6 job seekers for every job.

It is time for Darling, Walker and the GOP to put up or shut up.

Call a special session immediately or justify your refusal to accept the federal money to the public and the state's unemployed.

Walker & Darling cruelly betray Wisconsin's hard working people

2011-06-23T06:49:00.005-06:00

It is outrageous that 10,000 unemployed Wisconsinites have lost their unemployment compensation benefits because Governor Scott Walker and Joint Finance Committee co-chair Alberta Darling have done nothing to collect $89 million in federally funded jobless benefits.

All that is required to secure these federal dollars and provide extended benefits to the unemployed is a small change in state law. The change would have absolutely no impact on the state's struggling unemployment insurance trust fund or the state's deficit. But it would provide 13 more weeks of benefits to workers who have been without employment for roughly a year and a half and promote economic growth and job creation in the state.

While refusing the $89 million in federal extended unemployment benefits, Walker and Darling have led the legislature in passing legislation forcing the unemployed to wait a week before becoming eligible for unemployment which will take $50 million out of their pockets and the Wisconsin economy.

Why haven’t Walker and Darling who campaigned on a platform of jobs, jobs, and more jobs and orchestrated almost $600 million in corporate and investor tax breaks in this budget acted?

The New York Times suggested they were refusing the money because of ideological reasons. And that certainly is one factor. But another is that both of these career politicians are the agents of the Wisconsin corporate community that wants to use the jobless recover to drive down wages of Wisconsin’s working people by forcing the unemployed to accept any job at any wage in an unforgiving labor market.

Despite skilled labor shortages in certain sectors, Wisconsin, like the nation, has a jobs deficit, not a labor shortage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wisconsin has 126,000 fewer jobs than it did before the recession began. Nationally there are 4.6 workers for every job. Wisconsin’s numbers mirror the nation.

Yet some Wisconsin business leaders think that Wisconsin’s unemployed workers would rather sit at home and collect unemployment checks than work.

They are dead wrong.

Over the past year, the Wisconsin unemployment rate has inched downwards by 1.4 percentage points. But this decline can be explained in part by some workers dropping out of the labor force as they have become discouraged by prolonged unemployment. As a result they are no longer considered unemployed. Just last month professional services, financial firms, restaurants, hotels, and city and county governments cut jobs. More job cuts are on the way as a result of the cuts in state aid for public schools and local government.

Walker claims that the $89 million won’t create jobs. On this he is dead wrong. Mark Zandi, an economist who works for both political parties, has documented that extending unemployment benefits is one of the most effective policies government can employ to promote economic growth and job creation. Its economic impact of 1.63 is almost five times greater than cutting corporate taxes or capital gains taxes, policies both Walker and Darling have pushed through the legislation.

Extending unemployment benefits is good economic policy. It is also the decent thing to do.

Literally thousands of hard-working, tax- paying Wisconsin workers and their families have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. They want to work and cannot find work. Many have lost their homes or are in danger of losing their homes. It is not only bad for the economy to deny the unemployed these benefits it is also a cruel betrayal of Wisconsin’s values and the state’s hard-working people.It is in a word immoral!

John Nichols: Alberta Darling works with Ryan to cut Medicare

2011-06-20T16:40:00.000-06:00

Is State Senator Alberta Darling working with Congressman Paul Ryan to dismantle Medicare? According to John Nichols, the Capitol Times associate editor, Senator Darling, the co-chair of the Committee on Joint Finance, is doing exactly that.

Check out Nichols column here.

MATC welding instructor responds to Bucyrus CEO: Don't blame MATC

2011-06-16T19:56:00.000-06:00

Larry Gross, an MATC welding instructor who trains welders for Bucyrus International and other manufacturing firms, writes that CEO Tim Sullivan's criticisms of MATC are off the mark.

Gross asserts that if we are serious about addressing the shortage of welders and other skilled tradesmen we must reverse the Walker cuts to technical education and invest in MATC and other technical colleges.

Read Mr Gross' response to Tim Sullivan here.

Congress needs to regulate for-profit colleges

2011-06-13T15:00:00.000-06:00

A week after the Department of Education issued watered down rules regulating for-profit colleges, the New York Times urges Congress to step in with tougher regulations.

The Obama administration is right to tighten rules for for-profit colleges, which have come under scrutiny for deceptive practices and burying students in unreasonable debt. But the Department of Education is limited in its regulatory authority. It is up to Congress to rein in abuses by toughening the laws that govern this industry.

The for-profit system, which enrolls only about 12 percent of all students in higher education, absorbs about a quarter of the federal government’s $155 billion student aid budget. These schools, some of which get as much as 90 percent of their money from federal student aid, earn a profit partly by charging higher tuition than public colleges and by driving their students into debt. Among bachelor’s degree recipients, for example, nearly a quarter of 2008 graduates from for-profit colleges owed $40,000 or more, compared with just 6 percent of graduates from public colleges.

According to Congressional testimony this week, the debt burden is higher because for-profit schools sometimes encourage students to borrow privately from the school, rather than from federal programs, which often have lower rates and loan forbearance for those who fall ill or become jobless. The private loans are often subprime, with high rates and almost no consumer protections.

Even though the for-profit system serves only a little more than a tenth of those in postsecondary education, it accounts for nearly half of student loan defaults. The losses are generally of little concern to the companies themselves, because most of the tuition is paid by federal loans backed by the taxpayer. The defaulting students often end up with their lives in financial ruin.

Bankruptcy makes it possible to escape credit card and gambling debt but nearly impossible to escape student loan debt. As a result, students who default on school loans may never be able to have that weight lifted and can end up with creditors garnishing their wages.

The Obama administration has tried to address these problems with new rules to make programs with especially high levels of student debt and very low repayment rates ineligible for federal student aid. But these rules are insufficient.

Congress should rewrite the law so that the Department of Education is allowed to consider a school’s student loan default rates over a period of up to a decade or more in determining sanctions. Similarly, Congress should make it illegal for companies to drive students into costly private loans when they are eligible for more affordable, federally guaranteed loans.

For-Profit College Stocks Soar in Response to Weakened Federal Regulations

2011-06-07T06:16:00.000-06:00

Shares of for-profit colleges surged the most in six years after the Obama administration eased rules that would cut off federal aid to schools whose students struggle the most to repay their government loans.

Under the rules published last Thursday, companies including University of Phoenix owner Apollo Group Inc. won't risk losing their federal funding until 2015, three years later than under a previous draft, the Education Department said.

Shares of Phoenix-based Apollo, the largest for-profit college company, rose $4.71, or 11%, to $46.90. The Bloomberg U.S. For-Profit College Index of 13 stocks rose 12%, the most since January 2005.

Calling the proposed rules a threat to their existence, for-profit colleges spent $6.6 million last year on lobbying and generated thousands of letters to the government in protest. The final version was delayed seven months, and some provisions were deleted or altered to favor the industry, said Jarrel Price, an analyst at Height Analytics in Washington.

"This is good for certain schools, and it's a home run for certain schools," he said. "Apollo is a clear winner."

Under the earlier proposal, loan-repayment rates at Corinthian Colleges Inc., Strayer Education Inc., Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan education business, DeVry Inc. and ITT Educational Services Inc. would have put them at risk of losing eligibility, according to Price.

Shares of Corinthian, of Santa Ana, jumped $1.07, or a whopping 27%, to $5.06. Strayer, of Herndon, Va., advanced $23.08, or 19%, to $144.95. Washington Post gained $20.46, or 5%, to $426.42. DeVry, of Downers Grove, Ill., rose $7.87, or 15%, to $61.86. ITT Educational, of Carmel, Ind., rose $14.94, or 21%, to $85.67.

Congress and state attorneys general are investigating the education companies' recruitment practices and use of government aid, which totaled $30 billion last year. The Education Department developed the rules to try to curb loan default rates at for-profit colleges that are twice as high as at public institutions and three times as high as at private nonprofit colleges.

The regulations seek to ensure that for-profit college graduates get jobs that allow them to repay their student loans. Although the harshest measures are being delayed, the regulations protect students from "exploitative" college programs that leave them with government-backed debt they can't repay, the Education Department said.

The rules "reflect input from the industry, and they're designed to give for-profit colleges every opportunity to reform without letting them off the hook," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

Under the rules, programs would remain eligible for federal aid if they meet at least one of three tests in a given year: at least 35% of former students are repaying their loan balance; yearly educational-debt payments of typical graduates account for a maximum of 12% of their total income; and those payments account for no more than 30% of their discretionary income.

Programs would have to fail all three tests in the same year for three out of four years before losing aid eligibility. The earlier draft would have cut aid to failing programs beginning next year.

About 5% of for-profit college programs are expected to lose eligibility, compared with 16% under the previous proposal, which gave colleges less time to comply.

For-profit colleges enroll about 12% of U.S. higher-education students, but they use about one-quarter of federal student grants and loans and account for 46% of student loan dollars in default, the Education Department said.

Feds issue for-profit regs: concessions or a cave-In?

2011-06-03T16:43:00.000-06:00

After 10 months, more than 100 meetings with for-profit colleges and other stakeholders and 90,000 written comments, the Education Department today formally unveiled its second attempt to craft a new system for determining whether vocational programs prepare their graduates for "gainful employment."

Like the highly controversial draft rules that the department proposed last July, the final rules focus on the amount of debt that students in for-profit and certificate programs take on, and on their prospects for paying it off. The final regulations offer colleges significantly more leeway, lowering the required debt-to-income ratios and giving institutions more chances to improve before they lose eligibility for federal financial aid.

Many of the changes address concerns that for-profit institutions (and their allies in Congress) have raised, and over which they have threatened to sue. But Education Department officials (and a leading White House aide) tried to make clear in describing the new rules to reporters on Wednesday that colleges were not "off the hook." Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the new set of regulations “more thoughtful and more sophisticated” than the previous version, but added that the for-profit sector’s success “should not come at the expense of taxpayers and students.”

In refining the measures, the department landed between critics and supporters of for-profit institutions -- and failed to please either group. For-profit colleges wanted nothing more than for the matter to disappear entirely, arguing that the Education Department had overstepped its bounds by issuing the regulations at all and continuing to hold out the prospect of a lawsuit, even as their advocates conceded that the department had moved significantly in their direction.

Supporters of tougher regulations felt disappointed or even betrayed by the new measures, which they said had been watered down to the point where they could no longer protect students. The real test will come in Congress, where a bipartisan group of representatives approved an amendment in February that would block the regulation. The changes the department has made seemed in many ways aimed at winning them over.

Round Two

Compared to the original proposed regulations, the new rules (a PDF of which is available here) will kick in later, give colleges more chances to fix problems and loosen several requirements on measuring debt and repayment. The first year that programs could lose eligibility is now 2015, three years later than previously proposed, and data collection will not begin until 2012, after the new measures take effect.

The rules require programs at for-profit universities and certificate and vocational programs at nonprofit institutions to show that at least 35 percent of their students are repaying their loans or that the annual loan payment does not exceed 30 percent of a typical graduate’s discretionary income or 12 percent of total income. An institution need meet only one of the three requirements to stay eligible for federal aid.

In the proposed rule, those benchmarks were considered the minimum that colleges had to meet to retain aid eligibility. The preferred standards were a 45 percent repayment rate, a debt-to-discretionary-income ratio of 20 percent or a debt-to-income ratio of 8 percent. Colleges falling in between the two levels would have been placed on “restricted” status, which would cap enrollment and require the institutions to warn students they might not be able to pay off their debt, among other measures. Colleges that could not meet the minimum would have lost eligibility immediately.

In the final regulations, the restricted status has been eliminated and replaced with the “three strikes” rule, which department officials say is closer to its policies in other areas, such as on student loan default rates. Colleges would have to fail to meet each of the criteria for three years out of four. In the meantime, they would not face enrollment caps, though they would still have to tell students the first year that they missed the target and warn them about the program’s status after the second.

“We’re asking companies that get up to 90 percent of their profits and their revenue from taxpayer dollars to be at least 35 percent effective,” Duncan said, referring to the federal financial aid on which many for-profit colleges depend almost entirely. It is only reasonable, said Duncan and Gene B. Sperling, who heads the White House economic council and helped craft the new rules, to hold such institutions accountable.

The administration made several other concessions as well. Students have been allotted a longer time to pay off loans, so that the annual debt burden is lower: a 10-year term remains in place for certificate or associate degree programs, but bachelor’s and master’s degree candidates would have 15 years to pay off their loans, and other graduates would have 20. And colleges can cap their measurements of student debt at the amount necessary to pay tuition, fees, textbooks and other college expenses -- to avoid counting debt amassed by students who borrow more than that amount and use some of it to pay living expenses while enrolled.

The methods for measuring debt repayment have also been adjusted. Students will now be evaluated in their third and fourth years out of college, rather than in each of the first four years out, and those enrolled in the government-sponsored income-based repayment plan, or in other government programs that allow them to pay interest rather than repay principal on their loans, will be considered to be successfully repaying.

Administration officials, who have come under intense lobbying pressure from for-profit colleges over the gainful employment and other "program integrity" regulations, emphasized repeatedly during the call with reporters that they had listened to for-profit institutions’ concerns and adjusted the rules, and that they thought the second version was an improvement.

“This rule will increase access for students to get to attend a quality career college education,” said Sperling. “It will only decrease access to very weak programs that leave students with a crushing debt burden and do little to help them achieve gainful employment that was supposed to be the purpose of the education they were receiving.”

Observers pointed out that the department's changes supplied most of the items on for-profit colleges' wish lists -- short of dropping the matter entirely. An industry adviser pointed to the cost-of-living exemption as one of the more significant changes, but said that many would be “helpful” to for-profit colleges.

Some of the most vocal advocates for tighter regulation reacted with dismay to the changes. The Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit group that rarely publicly criticizes Duncan, called the new rule a “first step” but said it was ultimately inadequate to protect students.

“More needs to be done to prevent the waste of taxpayer dollars and protect students, including veterans, from programs that swindle them rather than prepare them to succeed in the work force,” Pauline Abernathy, the institute’s vice president, said in a statement.

The colleges themselves reacted cautiously, walking a fine line between reinforcing the complaints (and legal threats) they had already made and acknowledging that the department had made important concessions. The Coalition for Educational Success, a lobbying group made up of for-profit colleges that has challenged other program-integrity regulations in court, maintained that the Education Department, in defining "gainful employment," had stepped into territory that should be controlled by Congress.

The Association of Private-Sector Colleges and Universities will review the new rule to see how many programs it will affect, President Harris Miller said. The Education Department estimates that 18 percent of programs at for-profit colleges will fail to meet at least one of the benchmarks at some point, and 5 percent of for-profit programs will lose eligibility under the “three strikes” rule.

He maintained that the group’s legal position, that the regulations were “a backdoor way of price fixing” outside the department’s authority, still stood, and would be grounds for a lawsuit. But whether one is filed will come down to the colleges' opinion of the revised regulations, regardless of the legal situation.

“The department did make changes,” Miller said. “I can’t say this is a victory or a defeat because it’s all about the students.”

Key players in Congress, including Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who, as Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chairman, has held a series of high-profile (and highly critical) hearings on for-profit colleges, issued equally guarded statements. Harkin called the regulations a “modest and important first step.”

Other observers noted how much the landscape has changed in the past 10 months. Since the initial regulations were issued, Congress has held hearings on for-profit colleges’ recruiting tactics, state attorneys general have opened investigations into their operations, and scrutiny in the media has grown, said David Halperin, director of Campus Progress, a liberal youth advocacy group.

Some who hoped for a crackdown said they thought the combination of regulations and scrutiny might accomplish what the regulations alone will not: reining in the proprietary institutions, and especially the worst among them. “It ultimately means that the for-profit industry is going to have to be held accountable,” he said.

Libby A. Nelson
Inside Higher Ed

Scott Walker Blues

2011-06-01T11:05:00.002-06:00

For-Profit Colleges Spend Much Less On Educating Students Than Public Universities

2011-05-27T07:37:00.000-06:00

Chris Kirkham reports:

For-profit colleges devote less than a third of what public universities spend on educating students, even though the for-profit institutions charge nearly twice as much as their public counterparts for tuition, according to new federal government data released Thursday...

On average, for-profit schools spent $2,659 per student on instructional costs during the 2008-09 school year, compared with $9,418 per student at public universities and $15,289 per student at private non-profit colleges.

Meanwhile, the average cost for an undergraduate student at a for-profit college was nearly $31,000, after factoring in grants received. The average cost for private non-profit colleges was $26,600, while students at public universities paid on average $15,600.

The entire article which first appeared in the Huffington Post is linked here.

Where is Senator Darling?

2011-05-26T15:59:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin plans to give grants to for-profit college students; Illinois plans plan to eliminate them

2011-05-25T08:38:00.000-06:00

While Wisconsin's Republican legislators discuss legislation that make for-profit college students eligible for the state's underfunded Wisconsin Higher Education Grants, the Illinois General Assembly is poised to pass legislation that bars students at for-profit colleges in the state from receiving funds from Illlionois' main need-based grant program.

The Illinois measure, Senate Bill 1773, passed overwhelmingly in the Senate last month, but in a form that would have allowed funds to flow to students at for-profit institutions. But with lawmakers facing the need for cuts in the Monetary Award Program, leaders in the state House amended the legislation to say that the Illinois Student Aid Commission "may not make grants to applicants enrolled at for-profit institutions." "Shouldn't our priority be public higher education, which is distressed right now?" Rep. Dan Brady, a Republican legislator, told The News-Gazette of Springfield.

New York AG subpoenas Corinthian and 4 others for-profit colleges

2011-05-24T06:51:00.000-06:00

Erica Perez, the higher education reporter for California Watch writes:

The New York state attorney general's office has subpoenaed five for-profit college companies, including two California-based operations, Bridgepoint Education of San Diego and Corinthian Colleges of Santa Ana.

The New York Times and Bloomberg reported the investigation, which makes New York one of six states where attorneys general are known to be investigating for-profits' business practices. Attorneys general in Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky and Massachusetts have launched similar probes (see chart below). The New York attorney general's office is also looking into Career Education Corporation, Lincoln Educational Services and Trump Entrepreneur Services.

Corinthian Colleges spokesman Kent Jenkins said the company had received a request for documents on Thursday and plans to comply with the demand. He described the request as wide-ranging and general, saying it did not make specific references to the company's one campus in the state of New York – Everest Institute in Rochester.

Corinthian runs more than 120 campuses in 26 states and Canada under the Everest, Heald and WyoTech brands.

Then-California Attorney General Jerry Brown spent three years investigating Corinthian Colleges and filed a lawsuit [PDF] in 2007 alleging the company inflated its job-placement statistics, lied about how much students could expect to earn upon graduation, and offered programs that failed to meet minimum legal standards.

The company that year paid a settlement of about $6.5 million to the attorney general's office for consumer education and protection, and debt forgiveness for former students, among other uses. The company also agreed to stop enrolling students in 11 programs in nine California campuses, according to its 2007 annual report. But Corinthian admitted no wrongdoing, and some describe the sanctions as a slap on the wrist.

A spokeswoman for Bridgepoint Education said the company would comply with the subpoena, but she did not provide additional details about the request. Bridgepoint enrolls about 78,000 students in mostly online programs under the Ashford University and University of the Rockies brands, according to its most recent annual report. The company also has two campus locations in Colorado and Iowa.

Bridgepoint was the focal point of a March 2011 hearing of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. As the Huffington Post chronicled, Bridgepoint executives built the multimillion-dollar company by buying up small colleges that had regional accreditation but were financially strapped.

The company brought in $600 million in federal financial aid in 2010, while nearly two-thirds of students who had enrolled in 2008-09 had dropped out by September 2010.

“In the world of for-profit higher education, spectacular business success is possible despite an equally spectacular record of student failure,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said at the hearing, according to a Bloomberg report.

Earlier this month, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway said he is also leading a joint investigation into for-profit colleges by 10 state attorneys general.

State attorneys general investigate for-profit college companies
State	Company	Focus
Florida	Education Management Corporation's Argosy University	Determine whether colleges have violated Florida law prohibiting deceptive or unfair business practices
	Corinthian Colleges' Everest College
	Kaplan University
	MedVance Institute
	University of Phoenix
	Keiser University
	Concorde Career College
	Career Education Corporation's Sanford Brown College
Illinois	Kaplan University	Unclear
Iowa	Bridgepoint Education's Ashford University	Possible violations of the Iowa's Consumer Fraud Act
Kentucky	Education Management Corporation's Brown Mackie College (and five other unnamed universities)	Student loan default rates, recruitment practices and job placements
Massachusetts	University of Phoenix	Recruitment and student loan practices
	Corinthian Colleges' Everest College
	Kaplan University's Kaplan Career Institute
New York	Career Education Corporation	Unclear
	Corinthian Colleges
	Lincoln Educational Services
	Bridgepoint Education
	Trump Entrepreneur Initiative

Sources: News reports and filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

Wiconsin's tech college grads have higher employment rate and starting salaries than 4 year grads

2011-05-19T07:37:00.002-06:00

The New York Times reports that only half of four-year college grads are landing jobs that require a four-year degree and that starting salaries have fallen from $30,000 in 2006 to 2008 to only $27,000 in 2010-11.

And these are the lucky ones. Only 56% of four-year college grads even held a job.

These results makes a Wisconsin technical college education look quite attractive.

The Wisconsin Technical College System’s Graduate Follow-up Report indicates that 88 percent of 2009- 2010 technical college graduates were employed within six months of graduation, 71% in fields related to their field of study.

The median starting salary for all technical college grads was also higher than salaries earned by four-year college grads at $31, 198.

Associate Degree	$35,676
Two-Year Technical Diploma	$31,198
One-Year Technical Diploma	$29,118
Short-Term Technical Diploma	$24,568

And, of course, technical college students graduate with significantly less debt than their four-year counterparts.

The New York Times article is linked here and the WTCS Grad report is linked here.

Cuts to tech college funding undermine economic recovery

2011-05-17T06:20:00.003-06:00

At a time when technical college enrollments are soaring, Governor Walker is proposing to slash Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) state funding by 30% and freeze the property tax levy at its current level.

In an analysis of these proposals, Wisconsin Budget Project warns that Walker is jeopardizing the state's fragile economic recovery by asking Wisconsin's technical colleges to take a disproportionately large cut especially following years of declining state aid.

The WTCS was established in the early 1970s with three equal sources of funding, one-third state aid, one-thrid property taxes, and one-third other sources.

As recently as 1990 the state contributed 30% of the sixteen college system's' funding. By 2010, however, state aid had fallen to a record low of only 8% despite enrollment increases of 36% between 2001 and 2010. Walker proposes to slash another $70 million in his 2011-2013 budget.

This combination of declining state aid and increasing enrollment means that state aid per student has tanked, dropping from about $2,900 (in 2010 dollars) in 2001 to about $1,700 in 2010, a decline of more than 40 percent. As result, WTCS's students have the largest unmet financial need of all of Wisconsin's college students.

Since the early 1990's Wisconsin's business leaders have argued that the biggest obstacle to business expansion and economic growth was the state's shortage of skilled workers. As recently as last week, Badger Meter, Inc. CEO Rich Meeusen, an avid Walker booster, acknowledged that having "a pool of talented employees" was more important to business expansion decisions than low tax rates.

Wisconsin's technical colleges have a stellar one hundred year track record of training the state's "pool of talented employees."

At a time when firms like Marinette Marine, Oshkosh Truck, Bucyrus Erie and their Wisconsin-based supplier chains are struggling to hire hundreds of skilled workers, cutting WTCS funding and the state's supply of skilled workers is the wrong thing to do. It will undermine the Wisconsin's fragile economic recovery, the prosperity of its citizens and businesses and Governor Walker's campaign promise to create 250,000 new jobs.

When the Committee on Joint Finance convenes on Thursday to discuss Walker's WTCS budget proposals it should restore the WTCS's state funding and remove the property tax levy cap.

The Wisconsin Budget Project analysis is linked here.

New York Times: Congress should protect students & regulate uscrupulous schools

2011-05-12T06:14:00.000-06:00

The New York Times May 12th editorial is reprinted below:

May 11, 2011

Education Is the Last Thing on Their Minds

The for-profit education industry complained of excessive regulation last fall when the Obama administration issued new rules intended to curb abuses at profit-making colleges and trade schools. But lawsuits brought by whistle-blowers with firsthand knowledge of the industry make a strong case for why tough rules are needed.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department took the unusual step of joining a lawsuit brought by former employees of the Education Management Corporation, one of the largest for-profit college companies in the country. The employees charged that the company knowingly defrauded the government by illegally paying recruiters based on the number of students they enroll.

The court papers describe a “boiler room” atmosphere in which recruiters enrolled students who stood no chance of graduating and saddled them with debt they were unlikely to be able to pay off. They say the academic requirements laid out in Education Management’s advertisements were a sham and that the company accepted all students who completed applications and submitted 150-word essays.

The former employees also charge that students who declined to enroll because their financial aid packages were too small were sometimes pressed to convert to part-time studies. They were then given refunds but were not told that the proceeds were from loans that they were obligated to repay. The plaintiffs claim large numbers of students who enrolled in Education Management schools dropped out, probably after incurring debt from loans.

Despite these claims, and other revelations, the industry is continuing to press Congress to roll back government regulation. It is pushing particularly hard against a new rule that would cut off federal education aid to programs whose graduates end up saddled with debt that they have little hope of ever repaying.

Instead of protecting the industry, lawmakers should be looking out for constituents who have been ripped off by unscrupulous schools and for the taxpayers who foot the bills for both student aid and loan defaults.

Faculty at For-Profits Allege Constant Pressure to Keep Students Enrolled

2011-05-11T05:57:00.000-06:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that faculty at for-profits colleges are under constant pressure to keep students enrolled.

Faculty report that they were pressured to ignore plagiarism and inflate grades to keep enrollments high and federal funds, the source of up to 90% of for-profit college revenues, flowing. Not surprisingly Corinthian College's trade school, Everest College, and the Educational Development Management Corporation's (EDMC) Art Institutes are two of the diploma mills whose practices are scrutinized in this front page expose. Both recently opened operations in Milwaukee.

Kelly Field writes:

In interviews with The Chronicle and lawsuits filed around the country, more than a dozen current and former professors from six of the seven largest publicly traded education companies say they were leaned on to dumb down courses, offer lengthy extensions, and change failing grades. They describe a system in which expectations are low, cheating is tolerated, and faculty are under tremendous pressure to keep students enrolled.

"We were supposed to keep students in the classroom by any means necessary," says Luccia Rogers, a former professor at Career Education Corporation's Collins College, who says the college fudged grades and forgave repeated plagiarism—claims that the college denies. "It was all about keeping people in the seats to keep the federal money coming in."

In interviews with The Chronicle, current and former professors from a wide range of for-profit colleges said they were pressured—and in some cases ordered—to offer extensions, forgive plagiarism, and inflate grades to keep students enrolled and the federal aid flowing.

Kate M. Burkes, who has taught online courses for the University of Phoenix, said plagiarism is widespread at the college. She said she reported one student for plagiarism seven times.

Faculty complaints about grade changes are widespread in the for-profit sector. In recent years, faculty members from several for-profit colleges have filed lawsuits alleging that they had been fired after reporting altered grades or refusing to raise grades. Two such lawsuits are pending against ITT Educational Services, which paid $725,000 to California in 2005 to reimburse the state for Cal Grants awarded to academically ineligible students. The payment settled the state's portion of a lawsuit filed by two former employees that accused the company of falsifying grades to qualify the students for the grants, a claim the company denied.

At some for-profit companies, the link between faculty compensation and retention is explicit. The American Public University System pays adjunct faculty members by the student rather than the course, offering $130 per student in undergraduate courses and $150 per student in graduate courses. But students must complete 60 percent of the class for the faculty member to receive the full amount; if a student drops the course before then, the professor gets only 45 percent of the fee, or $58.50 for an undergraduate. Full-time faculty, which make up a quarter of the total, receive a salary.

At Everest College Phoenix online, 15 percent of a professor's evaluation is based on his or her efforts to track down absent and at-risk students to offer "assistance and encouragement."

Some campuses of Heald College base 20 percent of each faculty evaluation on "student outcomes," a category that takes into account student surveys as well as retention and pass rates. The target rate for each is 85 percent, according to Ayn Embar-Seddon O'Reilly, an instructor who has taught online courses for both Everest College Phoenix and Heald. She says professors with high retention and pass rates are rewarded with pay raises and additional classes.

Both colleges are owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc, which enrolls 102,000 students at 120 campuses in the United States and Canada.

The entire expose is linked here.

Public employees kept their promises,politicians are breaking theirs

2011-05-10T06:19:00.001-06:00

Public employee pensions, deferred compensation promised to firefighters, teachers. nurses and others after years of service, are being threatened in states across the country.

Wisconsin's pension system is fully funded. According to a new report by the Pew Center on the States, the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) is among the best in the nation.

Yet, in his budget repair bill Governor Scott Walker proposed that a study group be organized with the task of transforming the WRS from a defined benefit pension system to a defined contribution plan. The former guarantees retirees an income based on their contributions, earnings and years of service. The later would undermine retirees' economic security by tying pensions to the performance of the stock market. But a defined contribution system would enrich the financial managers, presumably Walker campaign contributors, hired to manage the pension fund whether it makes or loses money.

The commercial that follows this post is sponsored by the Chicago Federation of Labor. It provides some valuable context for understanding the emerging debate over public employee pensions.

Democratic win in 94th Assembly District is rejection of Walker agenda

2011-05-04T07:07:00.001-06:00

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s political bias is again on display in its coverage of Wisconsin’s assembly elections held yesterday.

Three special elections were held in districts that had been represented by Republicans. Two of districts are so reliably Republican that the outcome was never in doubt.

But the 94^th Assembly District which has been held by the Republicans for 16 years is more evenly divided.

The seat opened up when 94th District incumbent Mike Huebsch was appointed secretary of the Department of Administration by Governor Walker. Here the election became a referendum on Walker.

The winner- Democrat Steve Doyle, an attorney and the Onalaska County Board chair, who won with 54% of the vote despite being heavily outspent by the Republicans.

Doyle’s victory was a decisive repudiation of the Governor and his war on public employees in a community that had long leaned Republican.

The 94^th Assembly District is one of three assembly districts in the 32^nd Senate District where incumbent Republican Senator Dan Kapanke is being challenged by Democratic State Representative Jennifer Schilling in a July recall election. As a result, this assembly race was an especially important preliminary event for both parties.

Doyle’s decisive victory demonstrates that the anger over Walker’s effort to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights remains high; that the opposition to Walker has become a potent electoral force; and that political momentum, at least in Western Wisconsin, is with public workers and their allies.

Yet the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel doesn’t mention that Doyle’s election was a repudiation of Walker’s agenda. In fact, the headline, “GOP wins 2 of 3 assembly seats” suggests that the election was a victory for the GOP and Walker.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

U.S. to Join Suit Against For-Profit College Chain

2011-05-03T06:37:00.000-06:00

The Justice Department plans to intervene in a whistle-blower lawsuit charging that one of the nation’s largest for-profit college companies, the Education Management Corporation (EDMC), defrauded the government by illegally paying recruiters based on the number of students they enrolled, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday.

An EDMC affiliated college, the Art Institute of Wisconsin, recently began operations in Milwaukee's Third Ward, in close proximity to the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD). It is one of several for-profit colleges, including Everest College, that have recently opened branches in the city.

The Art Institute anchored a controversial development that received $6.5 million in federal New Market tax credits from the Milwaukee Economic Development Corporation. I had written a letter in opposition to subsidizing this development with New Market tax credits because they are designed to promote development in poor communities, not gentrified areas like the Third Ward, and because of the large number of lawsuits against EDMC alleging unscrupulous business practices.

The Security and Exchange Commission filing by Education Management, known as EDMC, said “several states” also planned to join in the False Claims Act case, in federal court in Pittsburgh, alleging violations of their state laws.

According to the New York Times' Tamar Lewin:

This is the first time prosecutors have joined such a case, one of dozens in recent years that accuse the for-profit college industry of illegal practices devised to increase federal student aid revenue.

The company, which enrolls nearly 150,000 students, operates several career-college chains, including the Art Institute, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University.

EDMC, 40 percent of which is owned by Goldman Sachs, said in its securities filing that its compensation plan for recruiters did not violate the law, and that it would “vigorously defend itself.”

In federal whistle-blower, or qui tam, suits filed under the False Claims Act, private citizens file fraud complaints on behalf of the federal government, seeking to recover public money that was wrongly paid out. The lawsuits are filed under seal, giving the government an opportunity to investigate and decide whether to intervene, so the one against EDMC has yet to be made public.

Some such suits have been settled for significant amounts of money. In 2009, Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, the largest chain of for-profit colleges, agreed to pay $78.5 million to settle one.

For-profit schools enroll about 12 percent of the nation’s higher-education students yet receive about a quarter of all federal student aid; their students account for almost half of all defaults. In general, these institutions get more than 80 percent of their revenues from federal student aid.

The United States Department of Education and Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, have become concerned in recent years that such colleges too often leave their students with mountains of debt and no marketable job skills.

The Education Department has taken action to rein in abuses by the for-profit sector but has so far delayed the most controversial regulation it has proposed, the “gainful employment” rule that would cut off federal aid to programs whose graduates have high debt loads and not enough income to pay them.

The for-profit schools are lobbying intensely against the rule, and last week more than 100 members of Congress wrote to President Obama asking that his administration drop the gainful employment rule, which they say would cut off access to higher education for many poor minority students.

Supporters of the rule say it would not harm poor students but rather protect them from taking out large loans to enroll in expensive programs that would not lead to good jobs.

Is Walker planning to raid public employee pensions?

2011-04-28T07:19:00.002-06:00

A new study by the Pew Center on the States reports that Wisconsin public employee pension system is one of only two in the nation that is fully funded and that the state is a leader in managing its liabilities for both pension and health benefits over the long term.

Given the health of the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS), Eli Lehrer, vice president of the conservative Heartland Institute, advised Governor Walker to focus his budget balancing effort elsewhere.

But Walker doesn't appear to be heeding Lehrer's sound advice.

On page three of Walker's budget repair bill, there is language that mandates that a study of the existing WRS be performed and that it must “specifically address establishing a defined contribution plan as an option for WRS participating employees.” The mandate even includes a deadline for completing this study, June 30, 2012.

So if the Wisconsin public employee pension fund is well managed and fully funded, why does Walker's budget repair bill include organizing a group to study it?

Because as the notorious bank robber Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, that's where the money is.

For profit colleges spend massively to defeat regulations

2011-04-26T11:08:00.000-06:00

The for-profit higher education industry spent $8.1 million on lobbying activities in 2010, up from $3.3 million the year before, according to an analysis by The Huffington Post of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Corinthian College which owns Everest College, the controversial tech school with among the nation's highest student loan default rates, led the way, spending $1.28 million on lobbying. Everest opened a branch in Milwaukee earlier this year despite the opposition of several Common Council members including the district's Alderwoman, Melele Coggs, the Hillside Neighborhood Association, the NAACP, AFT Local 212, Voces de la Frontera and several student organizations.

The Huffington Post emphasized the sharp increase in such spending took place at the same time that the U.S. Department of Education is attempting to regulation for-profit colleges. But Harris Miller, president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, said that the lobbying was "not unique in any sense," comparing it to "...Boeing or defense contractors using their money to promote an agenda, which is to win a contract of the U.S. government."

The entire article is linked here.

Ryan's proposal will increase inequality and the deficit

2011-04-18T07:34:00.001-06:00

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan and other deficit hawks are using scare tactics to achieve the long held Republican goal of dismantling Medicare and Medicaid and other social programs. Social Security cannot be far behind.

His budget bill would end the guarantee provided by Medicare and Medicaid to the elderly and the poor, which has been provided by the federal government with society’s clear assent since 1965. The elderly, in particular, would be cut adrift by Mr. Ryan. People now under 55 would be required to pay at least $6,400 more for health care when they qualified for Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Fully two-thirds of his $4.3 trillion in budget cuts would come from low-income programs.It would:

cut food stamps by $127 billion, or 20 percent, over the next 10 years, increasing hunger among the poor.
cut Pell grants for all 9.4 million student recipients next year, removing as many as one million of them from the program altogether.
remove more than 100,000 low-income children from Head Start
slash job-training programs for the unemployed desperate to learn new skills.

Ryan's analysis that profligate spending on the poor and middle class is bankrupting America is a lie.

Only a decade ago the United States was running a surplus projected to be $5.2 trillion over ten years.

The current and projected deficits are largely the product of Bush era tax cuts (1.65 trillion that went mainly to the super rich) two wars ($1 trillion and counting) and the Great Recession which was caused by the Republican's manic pursuit of financial deregulation. See the graph and youtube video below for more details.

Ryan supported every single one of these deficit driving policies making his concern over the deficit impossible to swallow.

Ryan also proposes $2.9 trillion in tax cuts by lowering tax rates for the rich and corporations. People with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $125,000.

This is not a serious deficit reduction plan. It is a budget that accelerates the nation's redistribution of wealth and income, already at historic highs, to the haves by undermining the nation's social compact with its poor and working middle classes.

Walker taken to task at DC hearing

2011-04-15T07:02:00.000-06:00

U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa convened a hearing today on the "tough choices" facing state governments. But instead of focusing on real solutions to state budget crunches, Issa invited Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to tell members of Congress that attacking teachers, nurses, and other middle class workers is a good thing.

The hearing was not the inside the beltway coming out party that Walker planned. Cleveland Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Milwaukee's Congresswoman Gwen Moore made sure of that by taking Walker to task for scapegoating Wisconsin's public employees and stripping them of their rights while cutting taxes for the rich and corporations while raising them on the working poor.

100 Years After Triangle Fire, Clock Turning Back on Workers' Rights

2011-04-13T05:49:00.000-06:00

100 years after the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City that killed 146 mainly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women workers, a garment factory fire in Bangladesh killed 26 young female workers and injured almost 100. In both cases the exit doors were locked and many of the young women jumped to their deaths to avoid being burned to death.

Just two years ago MATC hosted a National Labor Committee tour where three young female workers from Bangladesh discussed their 9 cent an hour pay making clothing for WalMart with a standing room only audience of MATC students.

U.S. corporations have moved production abroad to countries like Bangladesh to escape unions and the labor and workplace regulations that brought democracy to the American workplace.

The corporate dominated global economy is taking us back to the 19th Century when workers had no rights and protections. The rights people like the Triangle workers died for in the U.S. are being destroyed by moving production to global sweatshops in developing nations

As we remember the Triangle fire victims on the 100th anniversary of that terrible and avoidable fire, we must never forget that the inhumane conditions that caused their deaths continue to exist in garment factories in the developing world.

The fight for workers' rights continues.

Take back Wisconsin - Vote on April 5th

2011-04-02T06:28:00.000-06:00

Steven Colbert interviews Michael Moore on Walker's war on unions

2011-03-30T06:36:00.000-06:00

Michael Moore on the Colbert Report -- March 28th, 2011 from MMFlint on Vimeo.

Everest, Kaplan, Phoenix and Education Development Management Corp under investigation

2011-03-30T05:35:00.000-06:00

Florida is investigating five private, for-profit colleges, several of which have operations in Milwaukee, to determine if they've engaged in unfair or deceptive practices in recruitment and other areas, the state attorney general's office said Friday.

The office is also looking into whether the colleges misled students about financial aid, the main source of revenue for these institutiions.

Ryan Wiggins, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill McCollum, confirmed Friday his office was conducting a civil investigation.

Wiggins said the investigation began in response to consumer complaints and a federal report that accused some for-profit schools of encouraging fraud and engaging in deceptive marketing practices.

"It's all in its infancy right now," Wiggins said. She said officials are unsure how long the civil investigation will take.

According to McCollum's office, the colleges being examined are Kaplan Inc. of Alpharetta, Ga.; University of Phoenix Inc. of Arizona; Argosy University of Florida Inc.; Everest College, a subsidiary of Corinthian Colleges Inc. of Santa Ana, Calif., and Medvance Institute Inc., of Miami.

There is more information linked here.

The Republican Party's attempt to intimidate Professor Cronon

2011-03-28T08:18:00.003-06:00

The New York Times has appropriately characterized the Republican Party's open records request on University of Wisconsin Madison history professor William Cronon's emails a "political fishing expedition" designed to intimidate critics.

It is vengeful, a misguided attempt to silence critics of the Walker administration.

It is ironic that the party whose leaders broke the state's open records laws to strip public employees of their right to be represented by a union would now employ that very law to try to silence its critics.

The editorial is linked here.

Cronon's own brilliant response is linked here. It is very long, but well worth the read.

U.S. seeks dismissal of for-proft college lawsuit

2011-03-25T06:40:00.000-06:00

The Obama administration has filed a motion with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, urging the court to throw out a lawsuit that the group formerly known as the Career College Association has brought against the Department of Education over consumer protection regulations the agency finalized in November.

Stpehen Burd of Higher Ed Watch writes:

"As we’ve previously reported, the for-profit college lobbyists’ lawsuit seeks to block the Education Department from putting into effect in July several rules that aim to prevent unscrupulous schools from taking advantage of financially needy students. These regulations would eliminate the “safe harbors” that Bush administration officials put in place in 2002 to help for-profit schools skirt a long-standing federal law that prohibits colleges from compensating recruiters based on their success in enrolling students; strengthen the role that states play in preventing fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal student aid programs; and bolster the ability of the Department to prevent colleges from providing misleading information to prospective students and others about their programs.

The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, as the group is now called, argued in its complaint that these regulations were illegal and will be extremely damaging to its member institutions. “The challenged regulations are beyond the Department’s authority and seek to impose on APSCU’s members and other schools, including public and non-profit schools, restrictions that are unlawful and arbitrary and capricious,” the lawsuit states. “APSCU has filed this lawsuit to prevent these unlawful regulations from harming students and the schools that serve them.”

In its response, which was filed with the court on Friday, the administration rejects these claims, arguing that the Department has acted well within the authority granted to it by the Higher Education Act (HEA). “The challenged incentive compensation, misrepresentation, and state authorization regulations are all permissible under the plain language of the HEA,” the government’s response states. “Plaintiff’s crabbed reading of that broad language is neither persuasive nor required.”

The administration also challenges the lawsuit’s assumptions about the alleged harm that these rules will cause. “Plaintiff’s claims amount to abject speculation about Draconian enforcement of the regulations by the Department -- speculation belied by the language of the regulations themselves, statements in the preamble to the regulations, and subsequent regulatory guidance issued by the Department regarding how it interprets and intends to enforce the regulations,” the government argues.

“In the event that any of plaintiff’s unsubstantiated predictions of enforcement run amok actually materialize, plaintiff is free to raise its claims at that time,” the response says. “But it would be inappropriate for the Court to issue what would amount to an advisory opinion on these issues now.”

At Higher Ed Watch, we have argued that the career college lobbyists’ lawsuit is rife with misleading statements and out-right errors. The administration’s response supports our findings. We will elaborate more on this shortly.

In the meantime, click here to read the government’s brief, here to read a copy of the career college group’s original complaint, and here and here for our previous coverage of the lawsuit

The Triangle factory fire - when New York was "open for business"

2011-03-24T05:55:00.001-06:00

In their attempt to strip public employees of their right to organize Governor Walker and the Republican dominated legislature have attacked public employees as slobs and attempted to divide us from the private sector workers that we serve. They have tried to rewrite history, a history written in the blood of workers who died because they did not have a voice on the job and who sacrificed their lives fighting for the right to be represented by a union.

As public servants fight to protect our rights we should never forget the debt we owe to those who preceded us like the 146 workers, mostly teenage Jewish and Italian immigrant girls, who perished in the Triangle Waist Shirt factory fire in New York City (NYC) one hundred years ago on March 25, 1911.

The Triangle factory was a militantly anti-union operation. Hundreds of girls and women working 12 to 16 hours a day earned $5 a week or less to help dress Americans in the white gauzy blouses called shirt waists. (New York Times, March, 25, 2011)

Factory foremen locked the exit doors to keep workers from taking breaks and stealing scraps of fabric and to keep union organizers out. Other doors only opened inward and were blocked during the fire by the stampede of workers struggling to escape. The fire started on the 9th floor and swept through the factory on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors. Within a half hour, 146 workers, all but 23 women, had died. 90 jumped to their deaths through the 9th floor windows. The others perished in the flames.

The largest public funeral march in the New York City’s history, more than 100,000 people, was held a few days later. Another 250,000 lined the route. Their grief built support for the right of garment workers to unionize. An enraged public demanded that industrial abuses be regulated.

Three weeks before the fire, NYC’s Fire Commissioner ordered sprinklers installed in the Shirt Waist factory. But the owners refused. Industry spokesman indignantly accused the Fire Department of seeking to force the use of cumbersome and costly‟ apparatus“ and warned that the new laws would drive “manufacturers out of the city and state of New York.” The New York Herald supported the owners claiming the order amounted to “„a confiscation of property…‟ (Stein, Triangle Fire, p. 25-26)

Following the fire Mr. H. F. J. Porter, a fire prevention expert who in 1909 had advised Triangle to organize fire drills, told the New York Times: “The neglect of factory owners in the matter of the safety of their employees is absolutely criminal. One man whom I advised to install a fire drill replied to me: “Let em burn. They’re a lot of cattle anyway.‟” (Stein, p. 29.)

Only a year before the fire, the Triangle workers had led a general strike of 20,000 to 40,000 garment workers demanding union recognition and fire safety regulations. Most of the city’s factories agreed to the demands of the Women’s Trade Union League. Triangle’s owners refused. A year later 146 workers were dead.

A surviving Triangle worker, Rose Sabran, said of that defeat: “If the union had won we would have been safe. Two of our demands were for adequate fire escapes and for open doors from the factories to the streets. But the bosses defeated us and we didn’t get the open doors or better fire escapes. So our friends are dead.” (Stein, p. 18)

Following this the fire, garment workers throughout the country, including in Milwaukee’s sweatshops, organized. In NYC the Factory Investigating Committee was established and succeeded in getting fire, sanitation, child labor and occupational health and safety regulations passed. Yet New York’s business leaders, like Wisconsin’s corporate leadership today, opposed the legislation, hysterically insisting that that changes to the fire code would mean “the wiping out of industry in this state.” They wanted to keep New York City, in the words of Wisconsin current Governor, “open for business”

George W. Olvany, the special counsel to the Real Estate Board could have been speaking for the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) when he wrote: “The owners of real property are becoming terrified by the number of laws which have been enacted affecting real property…This compels the owner to expend…large sums of money, which…are absolutely needless and useless.”
( Op-ed by: “The Fire Hazard in Big Buildings,” NYT. May 3, 1914)

Laurence M. D. McGuire president of the Real Estate Board also weighed in declaring:”….The experience of the past proves conclusively that the best government is the least possible government, that the unfettered initiative of the individual is the force that makes a country great and that this initiative should never be bound…” (FIC Fourth Report, 1915, Vol. 1, p 76-83)

These are the same arguments used by the WMC and Governor Walker today in their fight to destroy public sector unions, cut corporate taxes and eliminate workplace, consumer and environmental regulations

Walker and company hope we will forget what the American workplace was like before we had unions, labor laws and public employees to enforce those laws.

They want us to forget about the 146 women who died in the Triangle fire because it was too expensive to install fire escapes and sprinklers and set up fire drills.

They want us to forget that unions civilized the American workplace by ensuring that workers have a voice at work.

As we fight to protect our right to organize, let’s honor the sacrifice of the Triangle Factory workers whose terrifying and horrible deaths we remember this week.

A tribute to the Wisconsin worker

2011-03-19T13:29:00.001-06:00

Senate hearing focuses on for profit college with 84% drop out rate

2011-03-16T07:30:00.000-06:00

Last week the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, heard testimony about Ashford University, a for-profit college owned by Bridgeport Education, with an associate degree program drop-out rate of 84%.

Using data from federal filings and documents provided by Bridgepoint, Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the committee, described an institution that gets 86 percent of its revenues directly from the federal government, but sees the vast majority of its students drop out, burdened with student-loan debt. Bridgepoint employs 1,703 recruiters, the senator said, but only one employee is charged with job placement.

The amount spent on instruction per student has plummeted from above $5,000 before Bridgepoint bought Asford, to about $700 a student — about a tenth as much as at Iowa State. According to Mr. Harkin, for each Bridgepoint student, $2,700 went to recruiting and $1,500 to profits. Its chief executive, Andrew Clark, earned $20.5 million in 2009.

“From a strictly money-making perspective, this is a highly successful model,” Mr. Harkin said. “But from an educational perspective, from the perspective of public money and an ethical perspective, I think it’s a highly disturbing model.”

Read the New Tork Times article on the hearing.

AFT president says gainful employment rule will protect students and taxpayers

2011-03-15T06:03:00.000-06:00

Rhandi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, writes in Politico:

Everywhere we turn, we are hearing that there is not enough transparency and accountability in education. So it’s puzzling that when the Department of Education issues very modest regulations for higher education that would improve accountability and ensure career-education students have a real chance at gainful employment without unmanageable debt, the for-profit college industry claims this accountability is unnecessary. They insist government is overreaching.

These claims could not be further from the truth.

The “gainful employment” regulations proposed by the Education Department are designed to target the worst actors in career-education programs.

Read the entire article is linked here.

Union busting has gone public, making laws not flouting them.

2011-02-28T14:58:00.000-06:00

"...union-busting has traditionally been a matter for private business. But this winter it has suddenly gone public, and its weapon is not flouting laws but making them."

Read more here.

or here:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/03/07/110307taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz1FHzEiUrf

Wisconsin public employees pay 100% of their pensions!

2011-02-28T07:52:00.000-06:00

David Cay Johnston, a 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning economics journalist, writes:

When it comes to improving public understanding of tax policy, nothing has been more troubling than the deeply flawed coverage of the Wisconsin state employees' fight over collective bargaining.

Economic nonsense is being reported as fact in most of the news reports on the Wisconsin dispute, the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles.

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to "contribute more" to their pension and health insurance plans.

Accepting Gov. Walker' s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

The entire article is linked here.

Krugman and Sachs, leading economists, take on Walker's attacks on the working middle class

2011-02-25T08:26:00.000-06:00

Nobel Prize winning economist writes:
What’s happening in Wisconsin is...a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

The article is linked here.

Watch this video:

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs: inequality is greater than it has ever been in America, the middle class is in rapid decline and Republican governors want amazingly to crush unions that are one of the few institutions that speak and fight for the working middle class

Walker talks with Texas billionaire but refuses to talk with 300,000 Wisconsin citizens

2011-02-23T14:43:00.002-06:00

Gonzo journalist Ian Murphy heard one of Wisconsin's Senate Democrats complaining that Gov. Scott Walker was impossible to reach on the phone. So Murphy came up with a prank call: He posed as right-wing financier David Koch and called Walker's receptionist. Shortly thereafter, he was on the phone with the governor himself.

In the interview Walker admits that he considered infiltrating the demonstrations, jokes about bashing unions with a bat and declares that he is not a pragmatist, but a conservative. In other words Walker isn't interested in solving problems. He is a true believer whose commitment is to an ideology not solving Wisconsin's problems. This explains why even after the unions have agreed to his economic demands he continues to demand to that public employees give up their democratic right to have a union.

Here is the interview:

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein writes that "... the transcript of the conversation is unexceptional (I disagree), the fact of it is lethal. The state's Democratic senators can't get Walker on the phone, but someone can call the governor's front desk, identify themselves as David Koch, and then speak with both the governor and his chief of staff? That's where you see the access and power that major corporations and wealthy contributors will have in a Walker administration, and why so many in Wisconsin are reluctant to see the only major interest group representing workers taken out of the game.

The critique many conservatives have made of public-sector unions is that they both negotiate with and fund politicians. It's a conflict of interest. Well, so too do corporations, and wealthy individuals. That's why Murphy -- posing as Koch -- was able to get through to Walker so quickly. And it shows what Walker is really interested in here: He is not opposed, in principle, to powerful interest groups having the ear of the politicians they depend on, and who depend on them. He just wants those interest groups to be the conservative interest groups that fund him, and that he depends on.

House Members Plan to Block 'Gainful Employment' Rules

2011-02-15T05:49:00.000-06:00

A group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers said Monday that they would seek to use budget legislation the House will consider this week to try to block the Education Department from carrying out regulations requiring vocational programs (and all programs at for-profit colleges) to ensure that they prepare students for "gainful employment." In an interview in his office, Representative John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said that he and three other lawmakers would sponsor an amendment to the continuing resolution legislation that the House could take up as early as today. The measure would bar the Education Department from using any of its appropriated funds in 2011 to promulgate or enforce the gainful employment regulations, which for-profit college officials have fought on a variety of fronts.

Kline, who spoke with reporters along with Representative Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, said the lawmakers were confident that the House would pass the legislation, and hoped that that vote would send a "strong signal" to "the administration and our friends in the Senate" that "somebody ought to take another look at" the wisdom and fairness of the rules. "We have an opportunity right now to make a statement." Kline said the lawmakers objected both to the one piece of the gainful employment regulation that the department has already published -- which requires institutions wishing to create new vocational programs to get the Education Department's approval to do so -- and to the forthcoming portion of the rules that would institute a new set of outcomes that vocational programs would have to meet.

Income inequality soars!

2011-02-10T08:15:00.000-06:00

Inequality is growing in the United States. In recent decades, the bulk of income growth has gone to the top 10% of families. That was not always the case. Throughout most of the 20^th Century, and particularly following World War II when more than 1/3 of all workers were represented by unions, the bottom 90% claimed a much larger share of income growth than they have in recent years.

The chart below from Economic Policy Institutes's’s new interactive State of Working America Web site, compares the distribution of income growth over two periods.

Between 1948 and 1979, a period of strong overall economic growth and productivity in the United States, the richest 10% of families accounted for 33% of average income growth, while the bottom 90% accounted for 67%. The middle class grew and the overall distribution of income was stable for these three decades.

In an extreme contrast, during the most recent economic expansion between 2000 and 2007, the period that led up to the Great Recession, the richest 10% accounted for a full 100% of average income growth. During the same period, average incomes for the bottom 90% of households actually declined.

Earmark ban costs Burnett County, Wisconsin

2011-02-09T07:50:00.001-06:00

Federal earmarks represent less than half of 1% of the federal budget.

Compared to the trillion dollar (and counting) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the $1.6 trillion Bush era high income tax cuts, the $500 billion prescription drug bill, and the recession, earmarks have played virtually no role in creating the deficit.

Yet Republicans have made earmarks a national issue. The House of Representatives has banned them as has President Obama.

Now local communities, like Burnett County, Wisconsin, that used these federal dollars to fund socially necessary local projects are having second thoughts. Local governmental leaders from both political parties have realized that the moratorium on earmarks will force them to eliminate valuable and necessary projects or raise property taxes to pay for them.

Just a few weeks ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives insisted that the Bush era tax cuts be extended for those making over $250,000 annually. This will cost $81.5 billion over two years and Burnett County the modern communications system that it sorely needs and cannot afford..

The New York Times article on how local officials are rethinking the ban on earmarks is linked here.

Civil Rights Coalition Backs Tough Rules for For-Profit Colleges

2011-02-04T08:02:00.000-06:00

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national organizations, on Thursday released a letter strongly endorsing the proposed "gainful employment" regulations that would deny federal financial aid to programs that do result in employment with compensation sufficient to repay the loans.

The proposal is opposed by for-profit colleges that have spent hundred of millions of dollars lobbying against it.

The letter is designed in part to counter the lobbying campaign of the for-profit colleges which has argued that they institutions are helping low-income, minority students advance economically.

"For-profit colleges have launched an all-out campaign using the American Dream as bait to trap vulnerable students into underperforming schools and saddle them with a lifetime of debt,” said Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president of the Leadership Conference, in a statement. “We support the Education Department’s efforts to hold these schools accountable by issuing this rule and vigorously enforcing it.”

What happened to Governor Walker's jobs agenda?

2011-02-01T07:48:00.002-06:00

by Phil Neuenfeld (

As Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday delivers his first "state of the state" address, working men and women across Wisconsin are wondering what happened to the jobs agenda that played such a prominent role in November's election.

As a candidate, Walker pledged that addressing unemployment - currently 7.5% statewide but higher in urban and some rural areas - would be his administration's top priority and the focus of a special session of the Legislature. It was part of his promise to create 250,000 jobs by 2014.

So far, it's hard to pinpoint any action by the governor that creates a single job or does anything to boost the state from its economic slump.

There certainly isn't a new job to be found in Senate Bill 1 and Assembly Bill 1, the so-called tort reform legislation passed during the session. The measure severely limits the legal protections of workers and consumers injured through acts of corporate negligence or malfeasance, such as the "Big Blue" crane accident that led to the deaths of three ironworkers during the construction of Miller Park.

A witness testifying on behalf of the legislation flatly refused to say if it would create any jobs, calling it a "trick question."

Other initiatives by Walker and his allies are, to be blunt, head-scratchers. Without corresponding revenue increases, tax breaks for a handful of small businesses, deductions on health savings accounts and a voter ID bill actually will add to the state's $3 billion budget deficit. As a result, these moves threaten essential state programs such as health care for the elderly and education.

And while reasonable observers can disagree about the precise number of jobs lost during the high-speed rail fiasco, no one disputes the fact that the employment and economic opportunities in the construction, retail and manufacturing sectors the train would have brought are now gone.

In his address Tuesday, Walker probably will try to pin the blame for Wisconsin's budget woes on the wages and benefits of state workers. It's an argument that's unfortunate and misguided. State workers and their families, like their counterparts in the private sector, have made enormous sacrifices: Furlough days, double-digit jumps in payments for health care premiums and wage freezes have stretched and broken the budgets of public servants in every corner of the state. Demonizing public employees and their families is wrong.

The fact is that the state's finances will not improve until Wisconsinites are working again. The governor was elected on his promises to create family-supporting jobs, improve economic opportunities and build businesses.

Working families all over Wisconsin are cheering on the governor to make good on his promise to spur job growth. But we know that taunting elected officials from Illinois and putting up new signs at our borders are not serious job creation efforts.

Walker has formidable resources to accomplish his agenda. His allies control both houses of the Legislature, and he has one of the most powerful veto pens in the country.

So, will he use his power to do what he promised and focus on creating family-supporting jobs for Wisconsin? And, no, that's not a trick question.

Phil Neuenfeldt is president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. E-mail pneuenfeldt@wisaflcio.org

This article is linked here. .

Assistant Secretary of Ed endorses gainful employment rules

2011-01-31T07:46:00.000-06:00

Scott Jaschik reports in Inside Higher Ed:

On Friday, the Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Postsecondary Education, Eduardo M. Ochoa, told a meeting of college presidents that the Department was proceeding with "gainful employment" regulations that would bar federal aid from career-oriented programs at which large percentages of graduates fail to earn enough money to pay back their student loans.

The proposed regulations have been opposed by the for-profit higher education industry -- which would feel most, but not all, of the impact. Last week Ochoa gave another talk in which he suggested that there would be major changes in the next version of the regulations. The next version will be "significantly different," Ochoa said in a talk at the meeting of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

But on Friday, Ochoa spoke only positively of the regulations. He acknowledged that the regulations represented “a new direction for federal regulation” of higher education in that they moved beyond reliance on accreditation for quality control. But he said that the additional oversight they involved was appropriate, and was required by statute. In the interview, he sidestepped questions about whether his position had changed since he predicted major changes in the regulations earlier in the week. But he said that the talk here was to a different audience and with a “different context.”

Ochoa also reassured those here that they need not fear that the regulations would be applied to all of higher education – as some advocates for for-profit colleges have suggested would be appropriate. And recent articles about the high prices and questionable job outcomes for graduates of law and other professional schools have also raised this possibility.

He said he understood that some educators at colleges not covered by the regulations have “a legitimate concern about the danger of conflating the operational definition of quality” with the debt/income ratios in the proposed rules. The concern, he said, is that such a policy would “flatten the definition of quality.” Ochoa said he wanted “to assure you that the department is fully cognizant” of the role of “liberal education as the foundation not only of degrees in liberal arts and sciences but also for professional degrees.” He said that, as a business dean earlier in his career, he was aware of the importance of courses outside the business school to broaden his students’ education.

Educational quality, Ochoa said, “cannot be reduced solely to the ability to get a first job after graduation.” But at the same time, he said, for career-related programs, definitions of quality “must include employability,” and “that’s what gainful employment is all about

Students Petition Washington Post Company to Fix or Close Kaplan U.-Sign the Petition

2011-01-28T07:44:00.001-06:00

A petition urging the Washington Post Company to make changes at its lucrative Kaplan University, or shut it down, has garnered more than 7,000 signatures, 5,000 yesterday alone, and the number is rising rapidly.

Each signature generates an e-mail message to Donald E. Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, and several other Post officials. The messages ask them to stop admissions to the for-profit university, the source of the Post's profits, until it develops an "independent, third-party" system to investigate student complaints.

The petition was posted on Change.org a little over a week ago. It was initiated by a group of about 25 disaffected former Kaplan students.

The leader of the group, 40-year-old Shannon Croteau, said she was swindled by the university when she enrolled in its paralegal bachelor's-degree program. Ms. Croteau said the company had stuck her with $30,000 in debt for a loan she never took out, and refused to offer her any more financial aid, claiming it had "run out." She later discovered that her program had actually been an associate-degree program that isn't accredited in her home state of New Hampshire.

Kaplan is one of several for-profit colleges such as Corinthian College and Phoenix University that have come under criticism for duping students into taking out huge student loans for programs whose credits do not transfer or lead to gainful employment. The result-huge profits for for-profit colleges while students are left with broken dreams and mountains of debt.

Sign the petition!

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

Consumer and minority groups urge tougher rule on for-profit colleges

2011-01-27T08:58:00.000-06:00

A broad coalition of student, consumer and minority groups on Wednesday exhorted President Obama to issue a "strong and enforceable" rule aimed at ensuring that vocational programs prepare their students for "gainful employment."

The letter from 38 groups cites a series of practices in which "some" career education programs have deceptively recruited students, inflated and falsely reported job placement statistics, and buried students in debt, and urges the administration not to back away from its tough but "common sense" regulation. "We will support you every step of the way," they write, a nod to the intense lobbying in which opponents of the rule have engaged.

The signatories to the letter include higher education associations like the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers and the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, unions like the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, and consumer groups such as the National Consumer Law Center and Public Citizen. But it may be most notable for the large number of minority advocacy groups represented, since advocates for for-profit colleges have lined up numerous minority lawmakers and business groups to laud the institutions' success in educating black and Latino students. Signers of Wednesday's letter include the League of United Latin American Citizens, the NAACP, and the National Council of La Raza.

The letter is linked here.

There is no social security crisis

2011-01-25T11:57:00.000-06:00

Alarmists like Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan inaccurately claim that the Social Security System is on the verge of bankruptcy. This is patently untrue.

The Social Security System is currently running a surplus and will continue to do so for several years.

As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes: ...there is no Social Security crisis. There is a foreseeable problem with the program’s long-term financing, but it can be fixed with changes that do no harm to its elderly beneficiaries. One obvious step would be to raise the cap on payroll taxes (currently $106,000) so that wealthy earners shoulder a fairer share of the burden."

Herbert's column is linked here.

For-profit colleges sue U.S. to stop rules protecting students

2011-01-24T07:17:00.000-06:00

By Diane Bartz Diane Bartz – Fri Jan 21, 2011

A group of for-profit schools sued the U.S. government on Friday, seeking to overturn three rules that are part of a federal crackdown on the sector.

The rules are part of a larger package of new regulations being imposed on for-profit schools, accused of churning out poorly educated students with large debts.

The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), which represents more than 1,500 for-profit schools, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It asked the court to toss out the rules, which are due to go into effect on July 1.

One rule challenged by the suit would stop deceptive advertising by schools, another bars recruiters from being paid based on how many students they enroll and a third requires states to authorize post-secondary schools for their students to be eligible for federal loans.

The lawsuit did not challenge the yet-to-be-finalized and most controversial of the reforms -- the "gainful employment" rule.

That rule would require schools to show that students are paying back federal loans or can do so. Students at schools that fall short would be barred from receiving federal loans, which would cripple many schools.

APSCU members include Career Education Corp, which owns the Sanford-Brown schools; Corinthian Colleges, DeVry Inc; Education Management Corp; ITT Educational Services; and Lincoln Educational Services.

The pending reforms have rocked shares in the sector over the past few months and Friday's suit failed to give the overall sector a lift. The Standard & Poor's education index closed 1.1 percent lower on Friday.

Shares of sector leader Apollo Group, which does not belong to APSCU, fell 2 percent.

Harris Miller, head of the trade group, said the rule barring misrepresentation by the schools was poorly done so that inadvertent misstatements by a single employee would be treated the same as intentional deception.

"We certainly oppose any misrepresentation to any actual or potential students," he said.

The Education Department defended the rules.

"We're confident that the published regulations will do the best job of protecting students and taxpayers," said department spokesman Justin Hamilton in an emailed statement.

Sector analyst Jeff Silber of BMO Capital Markets said the lawsuit was not a surprise since schools had been threatening to file suit.

"But it shows the industry is using all angles to try and fight this. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same strategy used once the final gainful employment regulations are posted," he said in an emailed comment.

The prospect of the rules has already roiled the sector as some schools tighten enrollment standards in a move to push down their loan default rates and increase graduation rates.

On Thursday, Career Education said it would cut about 600 jobs over the next several months and close a culinary school in Pittsburgh because of lower enrollment.

Apollo cut about 700 jobs in late November amid a 40 percent drop in new enrollments at its flagship University of Phoenix. Washington Post's education unit, Kaplan Higher Education, slashed about 770 positions.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Andre Grenon and Tim Dobbyn)

Bloomberg News: For-Profit College Grads Earn a Life of Debt

2011-01-20T07:33:00.000-06:00

Ronnie Franklin borrowed to pay his tuition at a for-profit college that advertised its success in preparing graduates for better jobs. The decision still haunts him. Despite graduating from RETS Technical Center in Boston in 2000, he found himself so strapped for money that he and his two sons lived in a homeless shelter last year. Frustrated that his degree didn't lead to work in electronics, Franklin—now a $12-an-hour housepainter—decided to go to a community college this year. He can't qualify for a federal grant that would pay the cost because he has defaulted on $20,000 of his earlier U.S. student loans.

Students seeking to move up in life by getting a degree from a for-profit college are being trapped in a growing underclass of education debtors. Under U.S. law, their loan obligations can rarely be discharged in bankruptcy, making them more onerous than credit-card debt or subprime mortgages. Defaults can subject students to government confiscation of salaries, tax refunds, and Social Security payments—and disqualify them for aid to get more marketable degrees.

Students at for-profit colleges carry the biggest loans in U.S. higher education. Bachelor's degree recipients at for-profits have median debt of $31,190 compared with $17,040 at private, nonprofit institutions and $7,960 at public colleges, according to Washington-based nonprofit Education Trust.

While currently enrolling one in eight U.S. students, for-profit colleges account for almost one in two federal-loan defaults. The Obama Administration wants to curb rising default rates and the threat of student destitution by cutting off federal funds to for-profit college programs whose students have the worst loan-repayment rates and lowest incomes relative to debt, which suggests their degrees aren't translating into higher salaries. That's if a degree is earned: The graduation rate for first-time, full-time candidates for four-year degrees at for-profit colleges is 22 percent, compared with 55 percent at state colleges.

For-profit colleges have higher student-loan default rates and dropout rates because they serve lower-income students, minorities, immigrants, and working adults, says Harris Miller, president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a trade group.

Don Harris, president of RETS at the time Franklin attended, says 80 percent of RETS graduates succeeded in finding jobs related to their fields within 60 days of graduating. Washington Post's (WPO) Kaplan Higher Education bought RETS in 2002. About 20 percent of students at the school, now called Kaplan Career Institute, default in the first two years they're required to make payments—more than three times the rate at public colleges. That figure reflects the low-income backgrounds of Kaplan students, spokeswoman Melissa Mack says. "Most Americans are willing to take some risk with a student loan, knowing the payoff for them individually can be quite significant," Miller says.

The degree didn't pay off for Franklin. "I got an outstanding student loan, I got no job, and I'm further and further in debt," he says. "It's basically crippling me from doing a lot of things to improve my living condition."

The bottom line: Students at for-profit colleges graduate with higher debt loads and loan default rates than those who attend conventional schools.

John Hechinger is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Dr. Martin Luther King died fighting for public employees

2011-01-17T17:08:00.002-06:00

As we celebrate Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., it is important to remember that Dr. King viewed ther right to organize as one of the nation's most important civil rights. Virtually his last act was in support of that right, for he was killed on April 4, 1968 as he prepared to lead striking Memphis garbarge workers on another march for union recognition.

King's assassination brought to bear tremendous public pressure on behalf of the strikers in Memphis.

Dick Meister writes; President Lyndon Johnson sent in federal troops to protect them and assigned the undersecretary of labor to mediate the dispute. Within two weeks, an agreement was reached that granted strikers the union rights they had demanded.

For the first time, the workers' own representatives could sit across the table from their bosses and negotiate and air their grievances and demands for remedies. They got their first paid holidays and vacations, pensions and health care benefits. They got the right to overtime pay and raises of 38 percent on wages that had been so low - about $1.70 an hour - that 40 percent of the workers had qualified for welfare payments.

They got an agreement that promotions would be made strictly on the basis of seniority, without regard to race, assuring the promotion of African-Americans to supervisory positions for the first time. The strikers, in fact, got just about everything they had sought during the 65-day walkout.

William Lucy, secretary-treasurer of the strikers' union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, saw Dr. King "bring tears to the eyes of strikers and their families just by walking into a meeting" and "the surge of confidence he inspired in the movement in Memphis."

The strikers' victory in Memphis led quickly to union recognition victories by black and white public employees throughout the South and elsewhere. They had passed a major test of union endurance against very heavy odds, prompting a great upsurge of union organizing and militancy among government workers.

As Lucy said, it was "a movement for dignity, for equity and for access to power and responsibility for all Americans."

Anyone doubting that the labor and civil rights movements share those goals need only heed the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:

Our needs are identical with labor's needs: Decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community.... The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the blacks and forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.

For profit college lobbyists work to undermine efforts to protect college students

2011-01-13T13:21:00.000-06:00

Kaplan accused of deceptive registration leaving students deeply in debt

2010-12-23T10:45:00.005-06:00

Managers at Kaplan--the highly profitable educational arm of the Washington Post Co.-- have for years pressured academic advisors to use guerrilla registration to boost enrollment numbers, according to former employees, offering accounts consistent with dozens of complaints filed by former students with the Florida Attorney General's Office and reviewed by The Huffington Post.

Guerrilla registration has been part of a concerted effort by the university to keep students enrolled as long as possible in order to harvest more of the federal financial aid dollars that make up nearly all of the company's higher education revenues, according to former Kaplan academic advisor Sheldon Cobbler, who described the practice in detail.

Most advisors had access to a company database that allowed them to view students' e-mail correspondence without their knowledge, said Cobbler, who worked at Kaplan's Fort Lauderdale, Fla., corporate office from 2007 through July of this year. The advisors routinely searched through students' e-mails to look up their user names and passwords for Kaplan's enrollment system, and then they used that information to sign in using multiple student identities, enrolling them in classes they never intended to join, he said.

"The company didn't want students to withdraw," Cobbler said. "They wanted them to stay in class by any means."

The entire Huffington Post expose is linked here.

Free market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything

2010-12-20T08:32:00.000-06:00

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes in today's Times:

Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

The column is linked here.

Tax deal saves bailed out CEOs millions

2010-12-16T08:46:00.005-06:00

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., praised the President's agreement with Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts.

"If we're going to strengthen our economy and grow jobs, this type of outreach - and cooperation between the administration, Congress, and the private sector - are critical," says Dimon.

It is no wonder Dimon liked the tax bill which extended the Bush era high income tax cuts for another two years. Dimon's compensation over the last three years has averaged $21,991,394 a year. The tax deal agreed to between President Obama and the Republicans will give Dimon and extra $1,179,000 next year, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice.

The bank Dimon heads was also the beneficiary of the giant Wall-Street bailout of 2007 and 2008. JPMorgan Chase & Co, along with other Wall Street banks, also poured millions of dollars into a lobbying campaign to water down the financial reforms Congress considered earlier this year.

College, Jobs and Inequality

2010-12-14T08:08:00.004-06:00

In an editorial today the New York Times writes that a college education is not a cure-all for joblessness and income inequality, although it does correlate with higher incomes and lower unemployment.

Searching for solace in bleak unemployment numbers, policy makers and commentators often cite the relatively low joblessness among college graduates, which is currently 5.1 percent compared with 10 percent for high school graduates and an overall jobless rate of 9.8 percent. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, cited the data recently on “60 Minutes” to make the point that “educational differences” are a root cause of income inequality.

A college education is better than no college education and correlates with higher pay. But as a cure for unemployment or as a way to narrow the chasm between the rich and everyone else, “more college” is a too-easy answer. Over the past year, for example, the unemployment rate for college grads under age 25 has averaged 9.2 percent, up from 8.8 percent a year earlier and 5.8 percent in the first year of the recession that began in December 2007. That means recent grads have about the same level of unemployment as the general population. It also suggests that many employed recent grads may be doing work that doesn’t require a college degree.

Even more disturbing, there is no guarantee that unemployed or underemployed college grads will move into much better jobs as conditions improve. Early bouts of joblessness, or starting in a lower-level job with lower pay, can mean lower levels of career attainment and earnings over a lifetime.Graduates who have been out of work or underemployed in the downturn may also find themselves at a competitive disadvantage with freshly minted college graduates as the economy improves.

When it comes to income inequality, college-educated workers make more than noncollege-educated ones. But higher pay for college grads cannot explain the profound inequality in the United States. The latest installment of the groundbreaking work on income inequality by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez shows that the richest 1 percent of American households — those making more than $370,000 a year — received 21 percent of total income in 2008. That was slightly below the highs of the bubble years but still among the highest percentages since the Roaring Twenties.

The top 10 percent — those making more than $110,000 — received 48 percent of total income, leaving 52 percent for the bottom 90 percent. Where are college-educated workers? Their median pay has basically stagnated for the past 10 years, at roughly $72,000 a year for men and $52,000 a year for women.

A big reason for the huge gains at the top is the outsize pay of executives, bankers and traders. Lower on the income ladder, workers have not fared well, in part because health care has consumed an ever-larger share of compensation and bargaining power has diminished with the decline in labor unions.

College is still the path to higher-paying professions. But without a concerted effort to develop new industries, the weakened economy will be hard pressed to create enough better-paid positions to absorb all graduates.

And to combat inequality, the drive for more college and more jobs must coincide with efforts to preserve and improve the policies, programs and institutions that have fostered shared prosperity and broad opportunity — Social Security, Medicare, public schools, progressive taxation, unions, affirmative action, regulation of financial markets and enforcement of labor laws.

College is not a cure-all, but it will certainly take the best and brightest minds to confront those challenges.

New House education chair opposes for-profit regulations

2010-12-13T07:57:00.004-06:00

The incoming Republican chairman of the House of Representatives education committee said that he would oppose any bill tightening rules on for-profit schools, and hoped the Education Department would ease a planned rule that could cost some schools critical federal funding.

The schools have been in a battle with the department and Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, who had reiterated on Thursday that legislation might be needed next year to rein in the schools, under fire for high student loan default rates and low graduation percentages.

"I would push back really hard against a bill that might come out of Chairman Harkin's committee," said Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who takes over the Education and Labor Committee next month.

Asked if such a bill could succeed, Kline told Reuters: "I don't think so."

The industry is fighting the Education Department's plan for a rule that would bar federal loans to students in programs where fewer than 35 percent of former students are paying back loans or are capable of doing so. A final rule on repayment rates is due out early next year.

Asked if the final version of the rule would be eased, Kline said, "I certainly hope so."

For-profit education stocks include Corinthian Colleges, Strayer Education and ITT Education.

For-Profit Colleges Face Beefed-Up Aid Audits From Education Dept.

2010-12-10T19:28:00.004-06:00

The U.S. Department of Education plans to increase its scrutiny of how colleges award federal grants and loans to their students, and a department official told The Chronicle it will pay particular attention to for-profit colleges owned by publicly traded companies and on all institutions with large distance-education programs.

The department, which has been beefing up the compliance-office staffing in its Office of Federal Student Aid, expects to conduct about 300 program reviews of student-aid operations next year, in contrast to about 200 this year. Program reviews are audit-like examinations of student-aid operations designed to ensure that students receive only the grants and loans they are entitled to and that institutions make refunds in accordance with the law in cases where students withdraw.

With the focus on the nation's deficit, the Obama administration wants to be sure the billions of dollars in new federal funds for student-aid programs are serving students, said James Kvaal, deputy under secretary of education, speaking on Friday at a meeting of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. "People are taking the budget very, very seriously."

Mr. Kvaal said the administration also wanted to protect Pell Grants from cuts. Some members of Congress have proposed reducing federal spending to 2008 levels. "The White House is calling that 'economic unilateral disarmament,'" Mr. Kvaal said.

That was welcome news to people in the audience, many of them operators of for-profit colleges. About 30 percent of all Pell Grant funds now go to students in the for-profit sector. Mr. Kvaal said colleges that educate such needy students with good programs are performing "a service to those students and a service to the country." But he said then, and at several other times during his talk, that the department remained very concerned about for-profit colleges that rely on "deceptive and high-pressure sales tactics" to enroll students or leave them with unreasonable levels of student debt.

He said the department's proposed "gainful employment" rule, aimed at curbing such abuses, was designed not as an attack on the for-profit industry but as a means to deal with some of the "worst-performing programs."

For-profit colleges have undertaken a vast lobbying and public-relations campaign that assails the rule as an ill-conceived approach that will hurt students and their own companies. At the session on Friday, Mr. Kvaal said that the proposal, as released in July, "was not perfect" and that the department would consider the criticisms, including more than 90,000 comments pro and con, before issuing a final version of the rule in early 2011.

By Goldie Blumenstyk , Chronicle of Higher Education