David Mahan, a 29-year-old student studying digital design, says an angry Sen. Dick Durbin noticed him wearing a T-shirt for his college — Illinois Institute of Art, Schaumburg (ILIS) — while protesting outside an education hearing Durbin was holding at the Dirksen building last Tuesday. Mahan (a veteran who served in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan) tells me that after some back-and-forth, Durbin said: “I don’t give a tick s— about ILIS.”
A Durbin spokesman denied the Democratic senator made that particular remark, but Matt Reams, another ILIS student who witnessed the encounter, insists that he did.
One might wonder why a college student would take such umbrage at criticism of his school, but Mahan tells me he has invested himself so much in ILIS that he feels an attack on it is tantamount to an attack on him.
There’s more to the story, of course. Durbin has called for more oversight of for-profit colleges such as the one Mahan attends. The hearing was intended to look at complaints that such colleges entice students to take on massive debt while failing to deliver on their promise of jobs that pay enough for graduates to pay back what they owe.
A proposal by the Department of Education would require for-profit educational institutions to demonstrate that their graduates are repaying student loans (and that they do not have a high debt-to-income ratio) before qualifying for additional loans. There have also been proposals that for-profit colleges should bear a percentage of the risk if their students default. (For-profits received more than $24 billion in federal grants and loans last year.)
Studies show that students who attend for-profit schools like Strayer, Devry, and The University of Phoenix, for example, currently have a lower rate of repayment than students who attend other schools.
These proposed changes, of course, could have a major impact on for-profits. Earlier this year, as part of the health care reform bill, the Obama administration pushed most private lenders out of the student loan game (they can still manage the loans) in favor of having the government almost exclusively make direct loans to students. As such, withholding government loans is a serious stick to wield over for-profit schools.
Critics charge that when it comes to picking winners and losers in higher education, as might be expected with the Obama administration, for-profits are now at risk — even though, on average, for-profit institutions charge less than private non-profits, according to the College Board (and less that public non-profits, once taxpayer subsidies of public schools are taken into consideration).
Nevertheless, a proposed “gainful employment rule,” which ostensibly seeks to ensure that graduates of an institution are able to find work after graduation — may well end up favoring traditional non-profit schools over for-profits. This, of course, has for-profit institutions worried.
For example, ITT Technical institute ran a full-page open letter to President Obama in Sunday’s Washington Post about it.
To be sure, there are some bad actors — colleges that run TV ads promising the moon to students, but then failing to deliver — but these schools are the minority. One school that could be hurt by the changes is ILIS, which is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission.
In a June letter to the editor, ILIS campus president David W. Ray wrote, “The proposed rule, cleverly termed ‘Gainful Employment,’ will remove student choice and deny access to programs and degrees for many. The result is that entire programs now available under Title IV federal financial aid could be ineligible if they don’t meet the Education Department’s unrealistic ‘one-size-fits-all’ debt-service-to-income ratio test. Career-focused education is at particular risk.”
(According to ILIS: “Of all 2008 graduates of The Illinois Institute of Art — Schaumburg available for employment, 88.1% were working in a field related to their program of study within six months of graduation, at an average starting salary of $31,722.”)
These for-profit schools serve a lot of non-traditional students like Mahan. Many are older students who often work part time, making one wonder if government skepticism may be at least partially due to how different these students are from the people making the rules. Ken Blackwell, a conservative columnist who also taught at Xavier University, thinks the proposed rules reflect elitism, noting that, “A college or university that primarily serves working-class adults is, apparently, somehow illegitimate to these liberals.”
Such criticism, however, is not merely coming from the right. Many of the students attending these schools come from poorer families than those attending traditional colleges. As The Washington Post recently editorialized: “The government is right to fashion reasonable regulation to discourage fraud or misleading practices, but it would be wrong to impose rules that remove an option that is especially useful for poor and working students.”
Tell Dick what YOU think – http://durbin.senate.gov/contact.cfm
Gainful Employment - Fact and Fiction 
Preparing the Scapegoats for Slaughter
Posted: September 13, 2010 in CommentaryTags: Dick Durbin, DOE, for profit education, Gainful Employment, Richard Bishirjian
The president of an online school watches the government’s unfolding campaign against schools that seek profits, and is aghast.
By Richard Bishirjian
July 30, 2010
Editor’s note: Richard Bishirjian is president of Yorktown University, an Internet-based school whose undergraduate programs are rooted in the liberal arts and whose graduate programs focus on business and government.
The Obama administration, working with congressional Democrats, has rolled out a concerted effort to change American postsecondary education. As with health care and finance, the administration has a consistent method: Focus on a felt need, find a scapegoat, and use the full force of coercive state power to effect radical change.
Today’s scapegoats are the proprietary higher education companies. In addition to offering online education, some of those firms are starting to purchase near-bankrupt nonprofit colleges and convert them into platforms for Internet-based courses. If they are allowed to proceed in that, American higher education will become more diverse, less expensive, and more consumer-oriented. But the Obama administration apparently believes that profits are resources better distributed by government agencies than by the marketplace.
The U.S. Department of Education has begun a multi-pronged attack on for-profit schools. One offensive consists of proposed regulations. The “gainful employment” rule, for example, would cut off proprietary colleges from access to federal tuition assistance unless they can show that their graduates earn enough to pay off student loans. Another thrust is to prevent accrediting agencies from allowing for-profit investors to purchase traditional schools (even when those schools are failing financially). We are already seeing a response to that pressure from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
Yorktown University, which I head, has followed these unfolding developments with acute interest. We are accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), a national accreditor. We hope to obtain regional accreditation as well, so that our students can transfer the credits they earn at Yorktown to regionally accredited institutions; these schools will not accept transfer of credits from schools that have “only” national accreditation.
In April, I attended a seminar conducted by the Higher Learning Commission. This was the second such seminar I have attended in order to prepare Yorktown for applying for regional accreditation.
Until recently, the Higher Learning Commission was a trendsetter, the only regional accrediting association willing to accredit institutions that teach mostly or entirely over the Internet; until 2008, no excessive barriers to accreditation were placed on Internet-based applicants. A few months before the election of President Obama, however, Sylvia Manning became president of HLC, and the policy changed.
At the April 2010 seminar I attended, Karen L. Solinski, vice president for legal and government affairs, informed the seminar that not only must all accredited institutions be incorporated in one of the states in the region but they must have a state license in each state in which they have a “substantial presence.”
During the break I asked Ms. Solinski to specify what constitutes “presence” in a state. In good lawyer-like fashion she asked me, “Do you have representatives in any states?” I said “no.” Her raised eyebrows suggested that I did, and I thought, well, we do have instructors who reside in and instruct our students from states other than Colorado, where Yorktown University is incorporated.
She then asked, “Do you have proctors in states?” I replied, “Yes, but surely you aren’t saying that the use of a proctor triggers a state licensing requirement?” She said that it would. Proctors supervise the exams taken by students in online courses. Solinksi seemed to be saying that merely having a student taking an exam, and thus having a proctor monitor it, whatever the state, would require the university to have a license in that state. In addition to the cost of multiple state licenses, each state has its own regulations. Some states require annual fees, others require a hefty surety bond, and Virginia even taxes authorized shares of stock companies. Keeping track of them would be costly, time-consuming, and difficult.
During a break, I asked Solinski, “Do you mean that HLC intends to enforce state licensing regulations?” She said, “Yes.” This means that HLC, a private organization, is taking on the responsibility of enforcing regulations promulgated by the state. Not only is this inappropriate but it is probably unconstitutional.
I called to Solinski’s attention a Federal Trade Commission finding that it is a restraint of trade for states to require out-of-state optometrists to be licensed if they sell contact lenses in the state. The example seemed to be exactly parallel. To my comment, Ms. Solinski replied, “Education is a special responsibility of the states.” Okay, education has historically been responsible for education (the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention education), but regulating private companies from other states is not a recognized state responsibility, whether the companies are in education or not.
During this seminar I was sitting at a table along with two representatives of an institution also accredited by DETC. They were shocked by this exchange. I explained to them that the inspector general of the Department of Education had informed the Higher Learning Commission last December that its charter could be revoked. According to InsideHigherEd.com, HLC had endangered its status “because it granted accreditation to a for-profit university despite a single flaw that the inspector general deemed to be serious.”
Apparently, HLC has decided that by promoting and emphasizing state licensing, it is making clear that it will no longer accredit solely Internet-based distance-learning institutions. That may save it from censure or revocation of its charter by the Department of Education.
But it will also harm numerous institutions, both profit-making and non-profit. There are two methods of attaining regional accreditation: earn it or buy it. In June, the Higher Learning Commission denied the application for change of ownership to two proprietary companies that were seeking to purchase regionally accredited institutions, Dana College in Nebraska and Rochester College in Michigan.
The message is coming through loud and clear that the Department of Education simply doesn’t want for-profit institutions to exist. On April 28, Robert Shireman, deputy undersecretary of education, gave a speech emphasizing the large amount of federal aid that is channeled to the for-profits.
And on June 30, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Il) gave a speech to the National Press Club in which he stated that purchasing colleges for their accreditation should be banned, and he outlined a comprehensive plan for reining in proprietary education companies.
Sen. Durbin referred to testimony by Wall Street arbitrager, Steve Eisman, that proprietary education companies are analogous to mortgage companies that created the subprime credit crisis. Since then, it has become known that short-sellers, a group to which Eisman belongs, have been working with Durbin—and probably others, including the Department of Education—to discredit for-profits in order to reap the rewards of declining share prices.
Durbin then outlined a broad plan to attack for-profits, by the following steps:
Sen. Durbin’s assault raises severe constitutional questions. Restricting normal advertising violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Requiring state licensing of companies not domiciled in that state violates the commerce clause of the Constitution. And singling out for-profit education for using Title IV funds without including non-profit colleges violates the due process clause.
On these constitutional grounds alone, the Obama administration attack on for-profit education should be rejected.
But other consequences are equally objectionable. By deterring the purchase of accreditation, for example, the administration will challenge the ability of marginal nonprofit institutions—including institutions with large minority populations—to survive. And whether the for-profits can survive this assault is an unanswered question. My worst fear is that for profit education delivered via the Internet will experience the fate of the nuclear power industry after Three Mile Island.
The adage that “federal money brings federal control” is proving to be true. It confirms the suspicion of some that President Lyndon Johnson knew that if he could control the financing of higher education he could control the content of higher education. That control is now in federal hands.