The costs of higher education are growing much faster than inflation. The average price for tuition, fees, room and board at a private institution averages nearly $24,000, or almost half of what the average family brings in each year.
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania on Friday, reviewing allegations that the private liberal arts school has failed at handling sexual misconduct on campus and retaliated against sexual assault survivors.
The debate over for-profit higher education is heating up again. And while much of the criticism revived here by Democratic politicians is unlikely to lead to policy changes, at least some action appears likely in two areas in coming months.
Faculty salaries at public universities are failing to keep pace with private colleges and industry, surveys show — and that reflects South Dakota’s reality, too, though not necessarily the dire consequences.
A subsidiary of Barnes & Noble has been chosen to run Hawaii Pacific University’s bookstores in Downtown Honolulu and at its Hawaii Loa campus in Windward Oahu, the state’s largest private university said Tuesday.
The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia has ordered the unaccredited University of Northern Virginia to shut down for failing to achieve candidacy with an accreditor recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
As part of its “Decision Makers 2013″ project, The National Journal selected 250 top Obama-administration officials and identified the colleges and universities where they received their undergraduate and graduate degrees. In that sample, it found that graduate degrees from the University of Oxford were more common than graduate degrees from any American public university. Harvard University was the top-ranked institution in both the graduate and undergraduate categories. Over all, four out of 10 officials in the group earned an undergraduate or graduate degree from an Ivy League institution.
California asked a court on Wednesday to order Bridgepoint Education to turn over hundreds of thousands of records as the state investigates complaints of false advertising at for-profit colleges.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Holly Petraeus goes on the attack, saying a federal rule encourages for-profit colleges to exploit veterans. Federal aid can make up no more than 90 percent of a for-profit college's revenue. But veterans' benefits don't count. In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Petraeus will say the rule gives "some for-profit colleges an incentive to see servicemembers as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform and to use some very unscrupulous marketing techniques.”
House Education Committee Chairman Rep. John Kline, who saw a dramatic upsurge in campaign contributions from for-profit colleges in recent months, is pushing legislation that would help the industry preserve its access to federal student loans.
Ann Arbor's University of Phoenix campus is in the process of shuttering and is not accepting new students, although the closing will likely take at least a year, according to a school official.
It's a good time to be an investor in the NASDAQ-traded company with the ticker symbol LOPE. As of Friday its share price had risen more than 48 percent this calendar year, and more than 80 percent over the past 12 months. In its first quarter earnings call held May 7, a Deutsche Bank analyst asked the company's CEO how a recent initiative might affect its marketing strategy going forward.
It sure seems ironic that the Pac-12 Conference and Arizona State President Michael Crow are targeting Grand Canyon University’s move to NCAA Division I status.
The shuttering of Ivy Bridge College could dump cold water on the online aspirations of some colleges, particularly ones that prefer to play it safe with their regional accreditor.
President Obama announced on Wednesday his nomination of France A. Córdova, a former president of Purdue University, to serve as the new director of the National Science Foundation.
The Thunderbird School of Global Management, based in Arizona, announced in March its pending partnership with Laureate Education Inc. Several board members have since resigned, and alumni are protesting the alliance.
Detroit's bankruptcy filing last week and the decades of decline that preceded it have been a predictable political and historical Rorschach test. The right blames the city's demise on moral failures and weak character -- the banana-republic-caliber corruption and fiscal fecklessness of its politicians, the greed of its unions, the spinelessness of automobile executives who gave into them. To the left -- more inclined to see history as the product of "great forces" than "great men" (or terrible ones) -- the Motor City was swamped by powerful tides: racism, sprawl, and unbridled capitalism.
Career Education Corp. has begun one of higher education’s broadest experiments with adaptive learning. Institutions in the for-profit chain have powered more than 300 online course sections with the emerging technology, and enrollments in those courses have topped 11,000 students.
After dismissing claims that Kaplan University defrauded the government, a federal judge expedited briefing for Kaplan's accuser to abate that final judgment.
Strong and growing support from Arizonans helped push revenue sharply higher for Grand Canyon University’s parent company during the second quarter, the company reported Tuesday.
Forty-four percent of for-profit private institutions have higher rates of students who default on loans than students who actually graduate college, a new report shows.
When FRONTLINE viewers last saw Sgt. Chris Pantzke, he was struggling to deal with the fallout from signing up for courses at a for-profit college that he couldn’t complete.
The federal government should have no role in trying to make college affordable, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said, backing legislation that would prevent the Obama administration from enforcing new rules on for-profit colleges.
The final result is a toss-up in a study comparing how for-profit and nonprofit colleges stack up in job market returns of their certificates and associate degrees. That finding is a big shift from the unflattering conclusion about for-profits reached in an earlier version of the paper.
An improving job market and a smaller population of traditional college-aged people have resulted in the first significant drop in college enrollment since the 1990s.
Given the pathetic record of so many for-profit colleges, one might think that members of Congress would agree that the industry needs more oversight – especially since those schools eat up about one-fifth of the available federal student aid.
Names of the stakeholders chosen to rewrite the controversial “gainful employment” regulation beginning in September are starting to slip out. Some are prominent critics of the sector, indicating the Obama administration isn’t backing off from tightening regulations on vocational programs despite a court challenge to its last attempt.
Over the past ten years, I have watched a smattering of “for profit colleges” do just that – make money. Sadly, these “for profit” entities are raking in so much money while offering some of the worst educational outcomes to America’s most vulnerable students.
A for-profit college in Richmond, Va., has agreed to pay $5 million in a class-action settlement filed by eight former students who said the training they received was a sham.
Private education stocks climbed on Thursday, led by share of Apollo Group Inc. (NYSE: APOL). DeVry, Inc. (NYSE: DV) ITT Educational Services Inc. (NYSE: ESI) and Corinthian Colleges Inc. (NYSE: COCO) also moved higher.
The U.S. Justice Department has ended its investigation into talks among the leaders of some private colleges about ways to encourage institutions to spend more on need-based aid and less on non-need-based aid.
Aurora University, North Central College and dozens of other private universities across Illinois found out Wednesday that they were receiving millions in state aid under a capital construction program that is helping private colleges and universities pay for campus upgrades and improvements.
The U.S. Education Department has named negotiators to a panel that will rewrite its controversial "gainful employment" rule, and for-profit colleges are feeling outnumbered.
Tucked into a defense-spending bill that the Senate Appropriations Committee approved on Thursday are a pair of provisions that would bar colleges from...
On the same day two of the state’s largest universities were coming together, tiny Dover Business College was merging with Berkeley College in a marriage of two of New Jersey’s for-profit schools.
On the night of Aug. 5, Andrew Rosen, the chief executive officer of Kaplan Inc., sent a memo to employees about the blockbuster news that their parent company, Washington Post Co., was selling its flagship newspaper.
Jennifer Kerr took a mighty leap of faith when she sued a for-profit college for misrep resenting what kind of degree she'd be earning and its value to her future. Her con tract with Vatterott Educational Centers Inc. had a provision that, should she sue and lose, Kerr would be responsible for Vatterott's legal costs.
Students served by for-profit colleges have been termed the “neediest” by USA Today. Or, as Dr. Tim Gramling explained in his SAGE Open article on the topic, “for-profits largely serve adult students who are not recent high school graduates but who still need a college degree.”
A federal panel will tackle one of most controversial college regulations in Education Department history next month. The rule was meant to ensure that graduates of for-profit colleges are getting jobs and repaying their loans, but it was struck down last summer after a court challenge — so the department is going back to the drawing board.
Altius Education, a for-profit company that runs Ivy Bridge College, announced late Thursday that Tiffin University, a nonprofit institution in Ohio, has been ordered by its accreditor to stop offering associate degrees through Ivy Bridge. Those degrees have been covered by Tiffin's accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission, which according to Altius said that the Ivy Bridge programs must end by October 20.
Kaplan Inc. has been both a savior and a sore spot for The Washington Post over the past decade. The sale of the newspaper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves the for-profit education company behind, its future uncertain.
Even as the Washington Post saw its circulation diminish and its advertising revenues evaporate in recent years, the paper's parent company could draw on a conspicuous center of growth -- a chain of for-profit colleges known collectively as Kaplan Higher Education.
This fall Grand Canyon University will have 8,500 students on its Phoenix area campus, and another 47,000 enrolled in on-line courses. It describes itself as a Christian university with a Christian Viewpoint. GCU operates as a for-profit institution without state assistance or subsidy. Although it has no football team, it has 22 teams competing in men's and women's sports. For the past 10 years GCU has competed at the Division II level, and will now move to Division I as it becomes a member of the Western Athletic Conference.
Kaplan’s fortunes are looking up. The education company no longer has to pick up the slack for The Washington Post, the venerable newspaper and loss leader that Kaplan’s corporate owner, the Washington Post Co., just sold off.
Yet Jay Bilas — former “student-athlete” and current ESPN broadcaster — called out the NCAA, just like he did Crow’s battle against for-profit universities like Grand Canyon University. Bilas went to the NCAA’s official website, typed in the surnames of various college stars and found he could buy their replica jerseys for as much as $179.95.
John Robinson, a local attorney and president of the Charleston School of Law Alumni Board, fondly remembers the closeness he enjoyed with faculty and fellow students as a member of the private law school's inaugural class of '07. With almost all of the courses being taught in a building on King Street, the students jokingly referred to the law school as a "one-room schoolhouse."
A federal appeals court has rejected a South Korean university’s lawsuit that had accused Yale University of acting negligently when it mistakenly confirmed that an art-history professor had earned a doctorate at the Ivy League institution.
Career Education Corporation will pay more than $10-million in a settlement with the State of New York to resolve an investigation into its misrepresentation of data about the job placements of its graduates.
The presidents of three Springfield-based colleges issued a joint statement on Tuesday, saying they will object to any "duplication of programs" if the University of Massachusetts locates a satellite campus in the city's downtown as proposed.
For-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, whose tuition generally falls between state institutions and private not-for-profit universities, were the first to offer large online degree programs. But for-profit enrollment has declined because of the recession, increased government scrutiny and Congressional hearings finding that their students had low graduation rates and high loan default rates. And with so many traditional institutions now offering online degrees, the for-profit colleges may have a tougher time attracting students.
Woodbury-based Globe University must pay a former dean almost $400,000 in damages, a jury in her Washington County District Court whistleblower trial found Thursday.
Heitkamp, a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs, said she is also concerned about the high percentage of student debt that is privately financed, and that about 47 percent of defaults on student loans come from students of for-profit institutions
A bill that would open the door to for-profit companies -- including unaccredited “fly-by-night” ones -- to offer courses in the name of a state’s colleges and universities is fraught with danger. A bill that would require a state’s colleges and universities to outsource their core educational function is truly misguided, however well-intentioned the idea may have been.
Students attending for-profit colleges are more likely to take out student loans than those who attend any other type of institution, according to new data released Monday by the Department of Education.
Private, for-profit colleges have joined the march of institutions that appear to be lowering their tuition as enrollment flattens out and families become increasingly price conscious.
Students at for-profit colleges were especially reliant on federal financial aid programs. More than three-quarters of students at for-profit colleges granting associate or bachelor’s degrees received federal student aid. And an additional 10 percent of students at for-profit colleges granting bachelor’s degrees received veterans’ benefits — a higher proportion than at public or private nonprofit colleges.
Across all sectors of the industry — public, private, and for-profit — there is the sense that online learning offers the greatest opportunity for future growth. For-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix and Strayer University were the first to truly embrace online, and their revenues soared as a result. Between 1998 and 2008, enrollment in U.S. for-profit colleges jumped by 236 percent, according to the independent advocacy group Education Trust.
A lot of people have been complaining that for-profit colleges are merely diploma mills only interested in earning money and not educating students. Is this true?
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office announced the agreement with Career Education Corp., settling charges it inflated job-placement rates
The Obama administration has had no shortage of spats (and some out-and-out warfare) with the for-profit sector of higher education. But typically administration officials outside the Oval Office have been the ones directly expressing views on the sector.
Over the past several months, the credit ratings of several prestigious liberal arts colleges have been downgraded or assigned a negative outlook by Moody’s Investors Service.
One of the more alarming trends in higher-ed financing in recent years has been the startling increase in merit-based and other institutional aid for upper-middle-class and rich college students. As Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation has pointed out, there’s ample evidence that colleges’ “high tuition, high aid” approach — which was meant to allow for price discrimination, whereby rich students pay a lot and poor students get big breaks — has not had that effect, and has indeed resulted in schools using merit aid policies, which usually come at the expense of need-based aid.
In 1999, only two private universities existed in Ghana. Now the country’s National Accreditation Board lists 43 private institutions offering degree programs, and most are Ghanaian-owned.
Clarkson University President Anthony Collins supports President Obama's "shake-up" for higher education and is confident about how the upstate New York research university will fare in the new scorecards for colleges and universities.
The cost of higher education as measured by private and public tuition has indeed risen at rates higher than inflation, roughly 4% per year for non-profit private tuition. And Obama is rightly focused on the middle class — incomes for upper income brackets have risen faster than the rate of tuition, so that for those groups the cost of tuition as a fraction of household income has actually come down.
Have you ever wondered how higher education is financed in other parts of the world? No matter what country you choose, you will find that the topic of financing higher education is a contentious one. Over the last decade, there has been a worldwide shift of the burden of higher education costs from governments and taxpayers to parents and students. This is much to the chagrin of parents of course.
En la búsqueda de una carrera profesional una puertorriqueña se endeudó para matricularse en el Sanford Brown Institute de Manhattan, en Nueva York, pero un engaño frustró su sueño.
President Obama took a swipe at law schools and for-profit colleges on Friday, the second day of his college bus tour, suggesting that legal education could be just as effective if it took two years rather than three, and assailing proprietary colleges that leave students in debt and ill prepared for a job.
Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway said this week his office is in the process of going over documents provided by a for-profit college, in response to a subpoena.
Donald Trump is no amateur when it comes to dispensing tough criticism, but on Saturday, he was on the receiving end of a hard hit when the New York State attorney general's office filed a lawsuit against his eponymous real estate school, The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative -- formerly known as Trump University. As the Donald faces civil litigation and demands for at least $40 million in restitution, the legal actions points another harsh spotlight on the for-profit education industry.
Because the media loves discussing Donald Trump, it wasn't surprising to see heavy press coverage of a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman accusing the unlicensed Trump University of "persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct." Trump responded by harshly attacking Schneiderman, whose suit demands that Trump pay back at least $40 million to the 5,000 people who were enticed into paying $10,000 to $35,000 for real estate investment courses "that did not deliver on their promises." Trump University's sad broken promises included telling some students they would get a photo-op with the Donald, when all they got was a picture with a cardboard cutout. But the real fraud was convincing enrollees that the Trump-owned for-profit "university" would get them on the path to a successful career, which apparently didn't happen for many of them.
Rasmussen College, a regionally accredited private college, today announced two initiatives that advance its commitment to making higher education affordable for students. A new AcceleratED Business Management Associate's Degree will be offered at a flat rate of $15,000 and can be completed in as little as 18 months. The Achieve Scholarship will offer new students enrolling in degree programs the possibility of receiving $500 per quarter toward tuition costs if students are continuously enrolled full time. Both are available to students beginning this fall, with a scholarship application deadline of September 29, 2013.
Ashland University, a private institution in Ohio, is joining a small but growing group of colleges that have sharply cut their tuition while also reducing the amount of institutional aid they offer, to come up with a sticker price that’s closer to what students actually pay. That strategy is one of many that smaller institutions are exploring to try to ease concerns about college costs and shore up enrollments.
Benefits have been disbursed to public and private nonprofit schools, as well as to for-profit universities and institutes, which collected more than $639 million by July 2010.
State Rep. Leon Stavrinakis says quality and affordability are the two main goals for South Carolina’s higher-education institutions, and the company poised to buy the Charleston School of Law doesn’t appear to strive to meet either.
Grand Canyon University was bustling with activity on the second day of classes last week, with an on-campus student population now approaching 8,500, new dormitories and an athletic program ready to launch its first year in NCAA Division I as a member of the Western Athletic Conference.
For-profit schools — which include the University of Phoenix, DeVry University and Strayer University — began booming in the 1990s after changes in state and federal regulations made it possible for them to open campuses across the country and online.
The Obama administration resumed a controversial effort Friday to regulate for-profit colleges and certain others that offer career-training programs to help graduates obtain “gainful employment.”
ATI Career Training Center looked like dozens of other private career colleges that dot South Florida’s educational landscape. It offered hope of a new career, a path into prosperity, an escape from poverty.
Now, a group of schools known as "for-profit colleges" have come under fire for lying to students to get them in the door then sending them into the working world with what some call a worthless degree in addition to tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
If the Obama administration gets its way, for-profit colleges will soon face tighter, tougher regulations based on how much debt their graduates carry.
A drop in tuition at nearby private universities has led to increasing enrollment patterns, whereas state-owned universities are hiking tuition prices while experiencing smaller enrollments.
Generous tuition discounts and aggressive recruitment campaigns are netting record freshman enrollments at some private universities in Western Pennsylvania while lower-cost, state-owned universities struggle.
A. Okulicz-Kozaryn. Journal of Happiness Studies, 12 (2):
225-243(2011)First published online: February 11, 2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10902-010-9188-8. (Eurobarometer).