Last week’s state elections attracted attention for a variety of causes and elections, most notably the defeat of Ohio’s tough new collective bargaining law and the defeat of the pro-life “personhood amendment” in Mississippi. But for for-profit colleges, the most important election of the night mostly flew under the radar: Democrat Jack Conway was re-elected…
A few weeks ago, I looked at some of the methods which for-profit universities use to get “leads” on potential students. Getting contact information on a possible new student is, however, just the first step. The next steps are to get in touch with the potential student and convince them to enroll. In today’s blog…
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”–Julius Caesar The star system is one of the worst afflictions to hit academia, and responsible for many of academia’s current problems. Frank Donogue wrote a recent blog on academic stars that got me thinking about the topic. Academia has…
In my last post, I examined “Education Start,” a deceptive site run by a company called Vantage Media. Education Start asks students which colleges they are interested in applying to, and promises it will give them information about applying. In reality, it gives their contact information to for-profit recruiters which are paying for leads. In…
My essay on due process violations at Northwestern University in the cases of David Protess and Michael Bailey appears at InsideHigherEd today. You can read more about the Protess case at my blog College Freedom. Peter Kirstein wrote about academic freedom and the Bailey case at his blog. While the two cases are very different…
Administrators at Sullivan University in Kentucky were trying to avoid an investigation, but they might regret how far they went to try to stop it – and in the process, they’ve earned themselves an additional investigation. It’s a long, complex story, but it illustrates just how far some for-profit schools will go to protect their business.
It all started this summer, when attorney general Jack Conway began a series of investigations into several for-profit schools in Kentucky (you may remember Conway from the 2010 senate race in Kentucky, where he lost to Rand Paul). One investigation for example, into Daymar College, is looking at whether the schools forced students to buy overpriced textbooks from the campus bookstore, misled students about whether their credits would transfer to other schools, and accepted students who did not meet Daymar’s minimum qualifications for admission.