I’m sure that Davis would insist that he isn’t liberal.
I have never read one good word written about Davis. I mean that quite literally.

This characterization of the contract with Keiser University has a short term contract is just another attempt to spin the deceit of lobbyists like Tom Matzzie and Julian Epstein, who it should be noted refuse to register as lobbyists despite doing quite a bit of lobbying.

However, Lanny Davis has called people I have written for on multiple occasions and tried to get me canned. I do not believe Peter Goodman had anything to do with this

What is ‘astroturfing’?

For-profit education isn’t exactly a scam, but when you combine Wall Street ethics (more profit = good, less profit = bad, nothing else matters), heavy government subsidies, a highly complex product that depends almost exclusively on the quality of the employees and is very difficult to evaluate using conventional business management techniques (let alone by the customer base)… What the heck do you expect?

You see much the same dynamics in for-profit charter schools. The evaluation metrics are weak, so more effort goes into “gaming the system” than into the real quality of the product. The simplest way to ensure high performance by your graduates is to winnow out anybody who isn’t performing to high standards. Actually trying to EDUCATE those with weaknesses is a losing proposition in for-profit education.

Not that NFP colleges are really all that different. A Harvard education is good, but what REALLY differentiates Harvard graduates from the rest is that they get to cherry-pick their talent on admission.

Is it better for society to continue to subsidize a broken model and close our eyes to its flaws? Or to reward a few individuals for raising the curtain on the problems?

And talk about courage: they bet against the current of history, becasue stocks, as a class, tend to rise in value over time, and they do so in a way that gives them unlimited downside risk and limits their potential gains to just the amount of the investment.

So nobody likes shorts because they’re big meanies and they say mean things about companies we like, but mean things need to be said sometimes.

2: Mike Elk was just fired by Huffington Post. The sequence of events makes me wonder if the Huffington Post people were under pressure from these cats.

1. Nearly infinite government-guaranteed leverage available (if someone with no income can borrow $100k for an education that won’t get them a job, what’s the leverage or LTV ratio on that loan?).

2. Widespread cultural approval and the perception that everyone needs this product; massive scalability and minimal customer scrutiny of value/price.

3. Intangible/self-measured outcomes with no consensus about a national system for measuring educational quality.

4. Massive oversupply of highly trained labor willing to work for any amount of money (all the unemployed people with teaching experience in the NFP sector and masters/PhDs whose masters/PhD institution let them go once they had).

5. Persistent underinvestment by its primary competitor (the government), particularly in the programs needed by sympathetic minority groups with organized political action organizations?

No one is making up conspiracy theories about private sector education – it’s prudent to take a harder look at this sector, given the above. Also, larryfine, the fact that you have no idea who Felix is suggests you’re probably a paid shill from one of the organizations he ripped rather than a regular reader. Felix, keep it up – this is good stuff!