On the recordJune 24, 2014
for a number of years I have come to this floor to talk about an issue I wish to bring up again this morning, and the issue is for-profit colleges and universities. Many people, when they hear me describe this, don't understand which schools I am talking about. It is not the public and private universities that you would think of automatically, such as the University of Illinois and Northwestern University and others. It is the for-profit world of higher education. The for-profit colleges and universities are led by the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, and is the largest; DeVry University, which is based out of Chicago; Kaplan and Corinthian, and many others. They bring about 10 to 12 percent of all the high school graduates into their for-profit colleges. They receive from the Federal Government 20 percent of all the Federal aid to education because the tuition they charge is very high, and these for-profit colleges have another distinction--their students account for 46 percent of all college student loan defaults. They enroll 10 percent of the students and account for 46 percent of the student loan defaults. What is going on here? What is going on here is they are charging these students a high tuition for these for-profit schools, and they are not preparing them to go to work or at least not to work at jobs where they can pay off those student loans.…
