These bills are America’s best ways of thanking veterans for their service and helping them launch successful civilian careers. Unfortunately, veterans and active-duty military (approximately 30% of whom are minorities) are under attack from unscrupulous for-profit education companies. These institutions see service men and women returning from Afghanistan and Iraq as goldmines, since each one represents tens of thousands of dollars in federal benefits and federally subsidized student loans.
Similarly, minorities – military and civilians alike – are targeted for their access to federal education assistance. While most attend public colleges, minorities are disproportionately enrolled in for-profits. African Americans are more likely than all other ethnic groups to go to for-profits. African-American and Hispanic undergraduates (together) at for-profit colleges are more than twice as likely to borrow federal student loans – and more than three times as likely to take out private, high-interest rate education loans – as their counterparts at other colleges.
But many for-profits leave students with substandard educations, non-transferable credits, useless degrees or no degrees at all, and with heavy student loan debt. The U.S. Department of Education has reported that students at for-profit colleges represent 13 percent of all college enrollments but account for nearly half of all loan defaults. Approximately 95 percent of the for-profits’ revenue comes from taxpayer-supported benefits.
There are more than 3,000 for-profit education companies in the U.S. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lure students with TV, radio and Internet advertising, as well as direct marketing tactics, such as an avalanche of spam email and constant phone calls. Their recruiters aggressively pursue members of vulnerable populations. For-profits’ sales people are often paid by how many students they enroll, not by how many graduate. They promise a high-quality education that will lead to high-paying jobs.
What they really deliver is often far less. More than half of the students who enroll in a for-profit program leave without a degree or diploma after only a few months. Shockingly, students sometimes complete their degrees only to find that the “college,” or a specific degree or certificate program, was not properly accredited. That means that even graduates of those schools or programs are ineligible for licensing exams in the professions they studied for, including public safety, plumbing and electrical, law and healthcare.
What is more, opportunities are being missed to use their benefits to attend county and state schools or private, non-profit colleges, where they could get high quality, fully accredited degrees at far lower cost. For example, qualified veterans can use their Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to pay for their entire tuitions (plus cost of living allowances) at state schools.
