The Profits of Failure: For-Profit Colleges and the Closing of the Conservative Mind

Most of us know little about for-profit colleges, in part because they're widely viewed as the "second-class citizens" of higher education. Parents dream of sending their kids to an Ivy League school, a flagship research university, their alma mater, or a regional NCAA powerhouse, but not of sending their children to a for-profit college. That's a mistaken bias. Each year, good for-profit colleges train thousands to work as medical assistants, business administrators, RNs, cosmetologists-jobs that can change their lives. Bad for-profit colleges, however, leave many thousands of students in debt and jobless. The federal government heavily subsidizes for-profit colleges, so regulation could determine the fate of billions of taxpayer dollars and is therefore of interest to all of us-we're helping fund those colleges, including the disreputable ones. Typically, the students who attend for-profit colleges are among America's most vulnerable: single moms, disadvantaged adults, veterans, minority students, and mid-career employees looking to better their lives. The worst scandal in higher education is the subpar training that so many of them receive at inadequate for-profit institutions. The 2019 college-admissions bribery scandal pales beside the injustices that countless adults suffer at the hands of low-performing and predatory schools. In 2019, three such college chains closed a total of eighty campuses midsemester, stranding 32,000 students just partway through their courses. After years of sacrifice and hard work, they faced trying to complete their degrees at other institutions-if they could find any that would accept their credits-or canceling their federal loans and starting their career education all over again. Since 2016, nearly 300,000 students have filed to have their loans forgiven, alleging that their for-profit colleges defrauded them. What could our government do to limit such abuses? The Profits of Failure offers a definitive answer.

DAVID WHITMAN is the president and founder of Whitman Wordsmithing & Communications. In a wide-ranging career, he was chief speechwriter/senior writer in the U.S. Department of Education Office of Communications and Outreach, and chief speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He has worked as a freelance journalist, author, editor, and consultant, specializing in education reform and environmental, energy, and social policy issues. He wrote Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, a prize-winning study of secondary schools that succeeded in closing achievement gaps; and was an adjunct instructor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs and a professor for its introductory class in reporting and writing. David was a contributing editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, where he served as chief correspondent covering social policy, and wrote widely on abortion, poverty, welfare reform, homelessness, ethnicity and race, family policy, immigration, inequality, and other social trends, and a visiting Media Fellow with the U.N. Foundation's Better World Fund, where he reported on promising alternatives for reducing oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. He was also a Journalism Fellow in the Alicia Patterson Foundation Program, and a senior research assistant at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. David's numerous TV and radio appearances include: Think Tank (PBS); The John Hockenberry Show (MSNBC); All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, The Scott Simon Show, and The Diane Rehm Show (National Public Radio). He has sung semiprofessionally in two doo-wop a cappella groups, is an avid hiker and fly fisherman, and also works as a certified and licensed massage therapist in the D.C. area. Whitman is married to journalist Lynn Rosellini; they have one daughter, Lily.