For-profits receive scathing indictment in senate report

After a two-year investigation of the for-profit higher education industry, US Senator Tom Harkin last Monday unveiled an exhaustive report on the colleges' business practices, highlighting institutions that charge excessively high tuition fees and short-change academic investments in order to maximise revenues, writes Chris Kirkham for the Huffington Post.

The report, featuring hundreds of pages of research drawn from internal company emails and statistics, concludes that the federal government has failed to protect students from misleading sales pitches and poor quality programmes, and has not adequately safeguarded the $32 billion in taxpayer dollars that flow to the industry.

“American taxpayers are the single biggest investor in for-profit colleges, yet the government that holds their trust has little ability to ensure that they get the return on investment they deserve: educational and career success for the students who enrol,” the report said. “Congress must put in place a much more rigorous regulatory structure that incentivises the sector to make the financial investments necessary to result in higher student success."
Full report on the Huffington Post site