Political Quotes

“Madam President, I have been on the floor quite a few times about an industry which is controversial: for-profit schools. If you want to know about for-profit colleges and universities, you have to remember two numbers, and the numbers are these: 8 and 33. Eight percent of the graduates of high schools go to for-profit colleges and universities; 33 percent of all the student loan defaults are students who started out at for-profit colleges and universities. They are students who didn't finish or ended up with a worthless degree, couldn't make enough money, and defaulted on their student loans. That is an industry that deserves close scrutiny, because, you see, they operate almost exclusively with Federal taxpayers' dollars. I believe that they have really posed an unscrupulous threat to unsuspecting students, to taxpayers, and to the solvency of Federal student aid programs. Corinthian Colleges, sounds great, doesn't it? That was one of them, one of the largest for-profit college companies, and one of the worst. It operated more than a hundred campuses, including six in my home State of Illinois, under names like Everest Colleges, WyoTech, and Heald Colleges. At its peak, Corinthian enrolled more than 110,000 students, raking in a $1.4 billion sum from the Federal Treasury every year, 1.4 billion for Corinthian. How did Corinthian attract its students? It lied. It invested heavily in marketing and advertising.…”