12-23-2016, 12:50 AM
An industry with a bit of a shady past turns out to be highly dependent on Federal funds:
The number of for-profit schools receiving at least 90% of their revenue from federal education programs would jump from 17 to nearly 200 when the Department of Veteran Affairs’s post-9/11 GI Bill benefits are counted as federal aid, according to data released Wednesday by the Department of Education. For-profit colleges collect an outsize share of GI Bill benefits, a government program that provides veterans with funding to pay for school and housing.
Nearly 200 for-profit colleges get over 90% of their funding from the government - MarketWatch
Some of these schools used very aggressive marketing to sell fairly worthless degrees, leaving students with no better futures and a pile of debt. By no means all of these, but enough to warrant some oversight. That oversight is now set to diminish or disappear (hence the parabolic stock price movement), we're not sure this is a good idea.
Education is a long-term experience good, it's very difficult to assess the quality of a course at the point of sale, and it's easy to overstate in shiny marketing brochures.