The New York Times reported on Friday that the for-profit University of Phoenix will close 115 physical campuses, dispossessing around 13,000 students and putting 800 employees out of work. Why now? Tamar Lewin, the story’s author, suggested that competition from other for-profit universities played a role. But she also cited the “steady drumroll of negative […]
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Several years ago Harper’s Magazine ran two articles on “The Uses of Liberal Education.” One article, subtitled “As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor,” was written by Earl Shorris, and describes how poor and underprivileged members of our society were eager to study the great books and benefited from them. He devised a […]
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Curbing for-profit colleges has been a goal of the Obama administration’s department of education. The plan was to erect regulatory hurdles to a very profitable product: online courses. In pursuit of that plan, the department issued a regulation last October requiring institutions offering Internet classes to seek permission from every state in which they enroll […]
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Though civil liberties groups have been slow to react, there’s a disturbing aspect to the Education Department’s new “gainful employment” rules pertaining to for-profit colleges: Starting in 2015, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will start turning over its data on the earnings of individual students at career colleges to the Education Department. This is so […]
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May 28, 2020, was a good day for the American economy and a momentous one for traditional colleges and universities. President Jodie Foster, the sixth Yale graduate to reach the White House, announced that the congressional agreement on Medicare and Social Security had finally begun to reduce the country’s debt, and the disastrous bout of […]
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