He’s everywhere! Here he is fighting against a proposal to regulate for-profit schools:
Davis held a conference call criticized (sic) the original proposal, saying it would block career college students from learning about new technologies and getting training for green jobs.
(h/t BGinChi)
Bobby Thomson
Heh.
The only “green” Lanny Davis is interested in is the check he just got from the people who have been defrauding students and the student loan system.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
If they’re career college students, why would they need to know about new technologies and green jobs? They’re going to be in school all the time.
JPL
For profit schools are popping up all over. IMO, the schools that do a good job, welcome the regulations. Let’s face it Joe’s online Barber school, probably fails it’s students. Does Davis support Madoff also?
TooManyJens
Students deserve to give their money to schools that won’t give them a decent education! How are they supposed to learn about new technologies and get training for green jobs if the only schools available to them are schools that are demonstrably effective at preparing them for those jobs?
Walker
They don’t want regulation, but they are happy to take tax payer funded financial aid. Classic corporate welfare cases.
OT: These Skins adds are giving me epileptic fits.
beltane
Lanny Davis and Mark Penn are the main reasons I opposed Hillary Clinton in the primary. Davis is a pox on the Democratic party.
david mizner
If a space alien came here wanting to know what’s wrong with the Earth, I would have him dissect and analyze Lanny Davis.
BGinCHI
For-profit health care and for-profit education.
What’s next, for-profit human decency?
Ahh, the American dream, one nightmare at a time.
Fuck Lanny Davis (and Mark Penn too).
david mizner
And this, too. What’s a worse word than whore?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-grandin/colombian-free-trade-expo_b_316485.html
Fester Addams
The way it was explained to me, the for-profit schools’ business model is:
1. High tuition
2. Easy credit (loan guaranteed by the government)
3. Worthless degree
The worthless degree part is a feature (not a bug) as it speeds default on the loan and allows the for-profit school to collect from the government.
4. Profit!
Dennis SGMM
@BGinCHI:
Let’s not forget for-profit incarceration. That little gem will of course in now way affect how the laws are written, will it? I would not be surprised to see Tennessee or one of the other states where CCA has a strong presence pass a “Two Strikes” law in the next few years. Eventually, a speeding ticket will get you five-to-life.
BGinCHI
@Dennis SGMM: Or even a “2 balls and one strike” rule: males (balls) who are black (1 strike) go directly to jail.
What a time-saver!
Odie Hugh Manatee
Lanny, like many other ‘experts’, pols or former pols out there, is for rent. Pay him well and he will say or do whatever you want. When he goes home after a hard day of lying his ass off all he has to do to make himself feel better about selling his soul is to look at his bank account and all is better.
@Walker:
What ads? I don’t see any ads.
Install SeaMonkey browser suite, then install NoScript and FlashBlock to it and you too can enjoy ad-free surfing.
No brainer.
Betty Cracker
Davis is a gigantic, leaky douchenozzle who rivals Bill Kristol in the Wrongness Sweepstakes. Here he is at HuffPo earlier this year calling foul on Rachel Maddow for eviscerating Rand Paul, who Davis believes is “unambiguously pro-choice” despite Paul’s hard-right anti-abortion views. God, what an asshole.
Martin
@Walker: A lot of the ads are individual, btw. I’m looking to switch brokers and visited the Ameritrade site about a week ago and I now consistently get 4 Ameritrade ads on every page here (bottom banner, 2 on the right, 1 on the left). I never saw one Ameritrade Ad here before.
A lot of other sites I visit now have the same ads that never had them before.
R-Jud
@Fester Addams: That’s pretty much it. I would also add:
1a. No entrance requirements beyond a high school diploma for undergraduates;
1b. Low GPA requirements for graduate students (mostly MBA programs).
Enrolling students who are not able to hack it at the university level also ensures future defaults down the line.
Dave C
The fact that Lanny Davis is not destitute, homeless and forced to beg for scraps on the street, is irrefutable proof that the world makes no goddamn sense.
Anya
I don’t understand how Lanny Davis has any credibility at all. As we learned from the Dem Primaries, he is an unstable hack, and in my opinion, his level of obsession with HRC, breaks the Richter scale for creepiness.
slag
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
So, you’re saying Death to Balloon Juice’s Business Model?
R-Jud
@Martin:
Thank Google. Or, more specifically, Google Adwords Remarketing.
lamh32
OT: First Lady Michelle Obama Talks About Bullying
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Green jobs = mowing the lawn and raking the leaves, amiright?
After all, once we finish rounding up all the messicans, somebody else is going to have to cultiver notre jardin. They might as well have the best of all possible educations to prepare them for that day.
rikyrah
if he wasn’t being an asshole, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
Dennis SGMM
@R-Jud:
An acquaintance of mine lost his real estate job in the collapse. Then he lost his next job as a High School guidance counselor when California’s school budget was eviscerated. He took a job as a “counselor” with one of the online diploma mills. He told me that it was simply high-pressure sales to people desperate to re-train themselves. He hates it but, that’s all there is between his family and the street.
Larry Bird
Is it wrong to hate his son Seth when I see him covering college basketball in March because I dislike his father so much? Please don’t bother answering this as I’m never changing.
sparky
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: win.
however, it appears that most americans are unable to keep to their own gardens.
as for Lanny, at least he hasn’t been appointed to anything important, unlike, say, Donilon. yeesh.
related edit: Chris Hedges has some excerpts from his new book up, and they are relevant to many of the effects mentioned here.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/
BGinCHI
@Larry Bird: You’re Larry Fucking Bird. You can do whatever you want (note: I’m from IN).
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Dennis SGMM:
Hurray! The new economy is here.
Soylent Green Jobs for everybody!
Odie Hugh Manatee
@slag:
I prefer direct cash donations to John (via the BJ PayPal link).
Fuck the ads. And Google.
morzer
@david mizner:
The question is what they would find underneath the human costume, once they figured out that there was a zipper built into the skin.
h/t Jose Chung’s From Outer Space
R-Jud
@Dennis SGMM:
I know someone who has written marketing materials for a large PFP school. When their compliance department sent back revisions, one of the requests was “remember the target demographic–use smaller words”.
morzer
@R-Jud:
When revising the text, remember that our key slogan is:
“Ur Kid will do gud here”.
Ailuridae
@Martin:
Yeah, I basically only get ads for tigerdirect and clear.com here.
kc
What fucking “green jobs?”
There are no goddamned jobs.
Ailuridae
@Dennis SGMM:
It is impossible for anyone outside of the for=profit education industry to understand just how sleazy it is. The business model of the “school” that I once contracted with was basically to prey on military families
morzer
@Ailuridae:
You get the clear? What about the cream?
kc
@Larry Bird:
I’ll answer anyway: Hell no, it’s not wrong.
david mizner
@morzer:
My guess is the love-child of a female Fox News news anchor and a lizard, a soulless, self-loathing creature that subsists on cash and becomes sexually aroused when in close proximity to Power.
morzer
@david mizner:
You mean he’s really Mark Halperin? How ever does he find time to write his columns?
Pangloss
Lanny Davis has a charcoal soul.
Phoenix Woman
Of course Lanny Davis would attack the best piece of legislation passed by this current Congress. Is there a truly scummy cause that he hasn’t raked in the big bucks for advocating? This is the guy that helped sell the Honduran coup to the media, after all.
scav
OT except for the ongoing thread of cash and pin-striped soulessness: UK boardroom pays leaps 55% in the country a.k.a. Austerity Britain. People sometimes forget in their focus on the French, but the Brits run quite a line in mob action too and I think they’ve more kings’ heads painted on the fuselage as well.
cmorenc
Query: are there any Republicans who are just as whorishly willing to shill-for-pay to support pet positions or clients/patrons of the Democratic Party as Lanny Davis (nominal D) is for the GOP side? Sure, there’s lots of corporate whores on the GOP side, but is there any Republican analogue to Lanny Davis, in that they’re eagerly willing to shill for liberal causes, if the money’s right?
gene108
I’ve seen some for-profit schools actually do a good job in training people. Back in the 1990’s, there were people, who switched into IT through places like the Chubb Institute and other for-profit training schools.
The schools gave a very focused, industry specific, hands-on type of education to the students. They didn’t have to spend time on the traditional liberal arts model of learning a broad range of subjects.
For an adult, wanting to make a mid-career change, I don’t see the benefit of taking freshman English or other courses not concerning their career goal.
The traditional university system really isn’t geared to allow adults to get the education they need to switch careers or gain more marketable skills.
I really think a good for-profit education system, along with a good community college system, can help fill this niche we need in a rapidly changing economy by providing white-collar vocational training. There have been plenty of blue-collar vocational and technical schools around for decades for truck drivers to auto mechanics. I don’t see anyone wanting to shut down the blue collar training schools.
I think the issue with for-profit colleges is when they try to compete against traditional four year colleges, for people just out of high school or recently out of high school, without the years to have a broad back ground. I don’t think you can replace the university experience in your pajamas, sitting in your bedroom, doing things on-line, at that age.
I think the real issue is how the for-profits can find their niche, while providing a service for people, which I don’t think is to replace or compete with the traditional university system.
gene108
@cmorenc: Liberal causes usually don’t have the money to get someone to whore out for them to make a buck or if they did, they’d literally make just a buck ($1.00), which isn’t much of an economic incentive for T.V. talking heads whether they are Republicans or Democrats.
BGinCHI
@gene108:
This is demonstrably false. Many, many universities have continuing education programs of all shapes and sizes.
No one is objecting to putting education into the hands of those that need it. We’re talking about the profiting that ensues: it incentivizes maximum benefit for the corporate school’s coffers and minimum benefits to the student. Plus the shell game and sales pitch of their whole apparatus.
It’s a con, not an educational endeavor.
change
Only five days left until the beginning of the end of Hopey Changey.
scav
@change: yup, here’s the gleeful chorus waving the flags for doom and gloom and drudgery, right on cue. piss off small change. oo.
AxelFoley
Lanny Davis? Is that whiny fuck still around. I couldn’t stand that WATB during the primaries. Douchebag muthafucka.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
There’s really no reason places like ITT need to be for-profit, though. Basically, they’re vocational schools for adults, right? I don’t see that people are better served by a for-profit school skimming money off the top than they would be by a non-profit or state-run school.
We had a nasty situation here in Los Angeles where a for-profit culinary school went out of business halfway through the semester and people were basically SOL as far as getting their money back or finishing their certificate. The really sad cases were the people who had been paying cash, because the school didn’t issue receipts and they had no way of proving that they should get their money back.
gene108
@BGinCHI: I switched fields, in my mid-to-late 20’s.
My experience with the community college system is it allows you take the classes you need to get into a field, but there’s a point you can’t go beyond, so you need to go to a four year college to get the advanced undergrad classes.
The university system really wanted me to re-run through all the liberal arts stuff, I did to get my first degree. I got AP credits for a few classes in high school (3’s on my AP exam), which my first university gave me credit for, while the second one I was attending wouldn’t give me credit. They wanted me to retake first semester freshman English, because they weren’t accepting my AP scores. I didn’t see the point of retaking that class 5-6 years after college.
I took the courses I needed for my professional certification, but I wasn’t able to say I had a bachelor’s in my new field. I got the professional certification out of the way, so that helps, but I sometimes wonder if I’ll get kicked out of a job search because I don’t have the necessary degree job openings say they want to see.
I think a reputable for-profit system could fill the gap for people wanting to retrain, without repeating stuff they did, when they were 18. Maybe getting to a reputable for-profit system, would require some sort of regulation for them to get certified, so the degree or certification you got wouldn’t be questioned. With state budget cuts limiting what universities can spend and increasing cost of tuition, I do think there needs to be an alternative way to retrain adults.
Chyron HR
@change:
Heh, change still thinks that Obama is going to veto the GOP’s “common sense solutions.”
Here’s some words you should get used to hearing, Junior: “I want to thank my good friend, Speaker Boner, for contributing to this Bipartisan Victory.” Because “Mandingoniggerbambi” (or whatever you’re calling him today) is going to say it at every one of the Rose Garden signing ceremonies where he takes all the credit for your bills. Sucker.
change
@scav:
Do you remember how you felt the day after Obambi was elected? Did you think he was the next FDR? Think he wold bring utopia? Think this represented a “new age” of American politics?
It must suck for you, after all the time you volunteered and all the money you spent and all the hope you had that he turned out to be Jimmy Carter instead, huh?
Just when you thought you had the Republicans beat, we come back in record time and clip your wings…
freelancer
@TooManyJens:
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.
:D
Martin
@R-Jud: Oh, I know all about it. And I’m betting heavily that Apple does a better job of personalized ads.
If I’ve got to put up with the ads to support Cole, I might as well get my kids college paid for in the process.
change
@Chyron HR:
Hopey McChange won’t be signing anything. As soon as he says he supports a bill, we’ll just make it even more right-wing.
Our goal isn’t “bipartisan” solutions, it is as Senator-Elect Angle said, to “throw sand in the gears” of big government. To slow things down. To make sure nothing gets done in the next two years.
Dennis SGMM
And then run on your record of accomplishments?
Legalize
Another day, another example of Brown-Shirtery from The Real American Teabagging Patriots.
Just wait until election day.
change
@Dennis SGMM:
Do the same thing the Democrats did to Bush. Obstruct for two years, then run on “Hope and Change”.
Martin
@Mnemosyne: Well, what’s happening on this front is really quite insidious.
Those skills-based jobs that the for-profits specialize in, are also the jobs that aren’t seeing wage growth. The sectors that employ these workers are investing back into the for-profits rather than the non-profit educational system.
So, they pay their employees shit, they block their ability to unionize, they outsource these jobs when they can, and while doing all of this to workers, they’re pulling profits off of the schools that are training people for the careers that the investors are deliberately trying to make worse.
It’s turning into a modern day indentured servitude system – convince people to take on large amounts of debt with the promise of a good job, and then when they get the job, don’t pay them enough to actually pay off the debt.
Now, the non-profits aren’t saints here. They’ve been dismissing the adult education and vocational market for decades, so there’s other reasons why its falling on the for-profits. But the nations attitudes toward skill-based careers is simply criminal – both from the education front and from the labor front. If we’re losing manufacturing and trade jobs, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
There’s no reason for-profit has to be second rate.
As far as non-profit private universities go (Harvard, Duke, Drexel, Fordham, etc.), they may not record whatever money is left over after they collect their tuition as profits, but they are factoring in some amount to be left over at the end of day to keep their operations running and they are raising tuition well ahead of the rate of overall inflation on an annual basis.
The demand for education is not or cannot be met by the current number of non-profit private schools and state supported schools. Private for-profit schools can fill this niche. The issue is what their mission needs to be.
Right now they are looking to grab as much money as possible, in as many ways as possible, with questionable tactics and standards.
Private non-profit schools are also looking to expand to increase their enrollment base, but seem to be trying to improve their standards concurrently. For example, Drexel University’s business school opened a campus in Sacremento, California. Penn. St. (a state run school) is opening a campus in Philadelphia.
All these schools operate under the same principle of increasing enrollments to increase revenues. The issue with the for-profits is what standards are they adhering to and what is there core mission.
They clearly don’t have the standards non-profits or state run schools have developed. Being entirely on-line doesn’t allow students to have the same opportunities as traditional schools have, though many traditional schools also offer on-line degree programs now.
There is a place for for-profit schools. They’ve come up in many different fields, from truck driving to beauty salons to massage therapy, without the government having to step because those schools have a very specific focus. I don’t see why white collar fields can’t have the same training opportunities for people.
Legalize
@change:
Proof positive that all the Teahaddists care about is “getting revenge” for every perceived slight they’ve suffered at the hands of the evil Dems. That the Dems in now way obstructed Bush’s agenda, and in fact, in many instances tried to actually work with him, is irrelevant. All that matters is pissing of libs.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
Should UCLA open a culinary school? Should they offer a degree in cooking? It sucks the school went out of business and the guys got screwed, but I don’t see a non-profit solution to the problem within the existing university framework.
Martin
@gene108:
What you describe is unusual. In most public education systems, once you’ve satisfied general education requirements at one school, you’ve satisfied them at every school. Students that have met these requirements in a previous degree routinely have them waived for a 2nd bachelor’s degree.
That said, fewer and fewer schools are accepting students for a 2nd bachelor, simply because the demand for students getting their first is so high and schools don’t want to turn away students trying to just get a degree in favor of those that already have one. Typically students looking to retrain are encouraged to get a reasonable foundation in a new discipline, without the full bachelors degree and instead apply for a masters degree. Since you already have a bachelors degree, you’ll still be considered. You may not qualify for a top-tier grad program this way, but a LOT of masters level programs are geared for returning students, and you have a decent shot at these. Rather than spend 1-2 years grinding through a bachelors, you can spend 1-2 years getting a masters.
Martin
@gene108:
The top tier universities pull enough off of their endowment each year to pay 100% of student tuition. The IRS started going after them a few years ago claiming that they were now defacto for-profits since they weren’t returning money to students that they didn’t need to run the university. Some of these schools have changed their policies significantly as a result. But these institutions are in some jeopardy to have their status changed.
Ash Can
@Dennis SGMM: Anarchists don’t need accomplishments. Anarchy is the end in and of itself.
gene108
I wasn’t in the same system. I got my B.S. in North Carolina, but moved to New Jersey shortly afterward. The Rutgers system wasn’t accepting what the North Carolina system accepted.
Martin
@gene108: Not UCLA. They’re a research institution. Culinary school is entirely out of their charter. But there’s 23 Cal State campuses that have service learning as part of their charter, and 112 community college campuses.
I’d put the culinary school in the community college system, personally. I’d like to see a lot more vocational programs there, as well as programs that have general interest to the community, as a culinary school would have, mainly because they don’t have an mandatory admissions requirement.
Martin
@gene108: Doesn’t matter. California accepts general education requirements from anywhere. Even from many universities outside of the US. Schools here treat it as a single requirement to be met. Each school defines ways to meet it, but once met anywhere, it’s met. I’m pretty sure that most other public university systems do as well.
change
I also find it funny the Socialists want to talk about “records of accomplishment” when they nominated a man in ’08 who had the thinnest record of any Presidential candidate in history.
But you’re paying the price for it now…
Five days!
TooManyJens
@morzer:
Why, a Raxacoricofallapatorian, of course.
JMC in the ATL
That’s what I did, Martin. BA English, MS Accounting. I used CLEP exams to clear out a lot of the BBA equivalencies, and took the undergrad accounting sequence. It took seven semesters instead of the normal two, but was more cost effective and future-earnings effective than a second bachelor’s
gene108
@Martin: If you put a culinary school in the community college system, the state has to invest more money into the system. States right now don’t seem to want to spend money on education.
Industry focused certifications run through community colleges, in New Jersey are probably priced about the same as taking a similar training certification through a private institution.
California is a different animal with regards to universities, compared to the rest of the country, where tuition is still very low for the universities and class at a community college costs about as much as taking a date to a movie and getting popcorn and drinks.
Not all states have good university systems. I realized that pretty quickly moving from North Carolina to New Jersey. North Carolina has a very good university system, though it doesn’t get the same amount of national attention that California’s does.
New Jersey, and it seems the Northeast in general, doesn’t have a great state run university system. New Jersey, which has about the same population as North Carolina right now (NC’s was probably lower than NJ’s, when I was in school), has only one flagship research university, Rutgers, New Brunswick. There are several smaller colleges sprinkled throughout the state that have some degree of recognition locally, but nothing nationally.
@Martin: My courses got transferred, without a problem, it was some of my AP credits that didn’t transfer. I think what AP credits get transferred will still vary from school to school in any system or across different systems.
JMC in the ATL
I also have an AA from a comm college, which had nursing tech, early childhood, and culinary degrees among it’s technical offerings. From observation, it seems like a lot of comm college districts have included various technical programs in their mandates. I would direct anyone with limited resources to check out their local comm college district. They’re usually an excellent deal.
geg6
@gene108:
You seem to have no idea what you are talking about.
Your experience is one that makes no sense to me in that I don’t know of a single college or university that won’t accept AP classes (as long as you took the test and got a good score) or general studies credits from another reputable, accredited college or university. None. Not a single example I can think of in the entire nation, including the Ivies.
Community colleges were created for two purposes: workforce training and to provide a low-cost 2-year general studies alternative to spending all four years at a more expensive college or university. Community colleges provide all kinds of workforce training for career paths that don’t require a four-year degree, such as auto repair, welding, staff assistants, and other such vocational areas and the cost to tax payers and students is vastly lower than that at proprietary (for-profit) schools. In addition, community colleges and public and non-profit colleges and universities all provide continuing education for career fields that require on-going training, such as IT, food service, nursing homes, real estate, etc. There is no need for a student or company to pay the ridiculously high costs of a for-profit when the same programs are available at numerous other institutions (which are often willing to create and adjust their continuing education offerings to the customers’ needs) that cost anywhere from 33% to 50% less.
The for-profits do not have accreditation for one good reason. It would be impossible for them to have profits if they provided the programs and instruction required for accrediting. That is why no college or university will accept their credits for transfer and why the students who graduate from such schools are not in any way desirable from an employer’s point of view. It is a substandard curriculum, being taught by people with few to no credentials according to scripts, not pedagogy. They lie about their placement rates and types of placements. They charge tuition rates that rival those of Harvard and Yale, with none of the services, quality faculty, or rigorous curriculum that even the lowliest community college requires.
They are a ripoff the worst sort, a boil on the post-secondary educational community, and the dark hole of student loan default.
PurpleGirl
I looked into a training program for medical billing. I found one on-line for-profit school that was charging roughly $14,000 for a 10-month program. According to them, because I already had a B.A., I wasn’t eligible for a grant/scholarship but would have to take a loan.
Excuse me? $14,000 for a 10-month program? For a job that starts at about $28,000 a year? And they wouldn’t guarantee that I could get a job. And when I spoke with one “counselor” (salesman) he implied that I didn’t have the requisite interest or the right frame of mind to do the job or take the class. He was talking as if this certificate was equal to a B.A. in educational value. (Yes, I’m an academic snob but I also have experience in choosing both college-level education and/or training and certificate programs.)
Mnemosyne
@change:
No, I thought, “Thank god someone is taking over the wheel of the Titanic and will actually try to steer us away from the iceberg, unlike that crazy fucker McCain.”
I realize you were really, really, really hoping that the third time would be the charm and our war in Iran would totally rawk and we would finally kick all of those Ay-rabs asses, but you didn’t get your dream.
change
Anyone who majors in useless liberal arts crap (especially any major that has “studies” as the second word in its title) can spare me the whining about paying back student loans.
Want to major in Art History or Women’s Studies? Expect to work at Best Buy for the next 20 years, if you’re lucky.
change
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, instead we’re going to end up with a nuclear weapon in the hands of the mad mullahs. So much better, right?
Just wait until they invade Baharain (which they claim is part of Iran) AFTER they have a nuke.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
In Illinois, that stuff falls under the community colleges and you can get a certificate without needing any GEs. I really don’t see why this is so bizarre to you. If anything, the for-profit schools are stealing business from the community colleges and skimming off students who would do better financially and academically at a community college.
PurpleGirl
Can’t seem to edit comments today…
I didn’t find comparable courses or program in the CUNY system and it also seems that potential employers all want you to have previous experience/training. No one wants to do on-the-job training.
(For the record, I have B.A. in Political Science from NYU, I’ve worked in publishing, a law firm and for a non-profit organization. Granted my typing speed isn’t that great but I have 30+ years experience as a typist, editor, paralegal and administration assistant.)
Mnemosyne
@change:
I can’t imagine why Iran would want a nuclear weapon after the US invaded and occupied two of their closest neighbors. Why, only a crrrazzzzy person would think Iran might be next on the conquest list and start looking for ways to defend themselves.
geg6
@gene108:
And now I know for sure you have no idea what you are talking about.
Penn State is not a state run school. It is a state related school, something that makes a huge difference to someone that actually knows anything about post-secondary education.
But that’s a minor quibble. The bigger quibble is simply a lie you state as fact.
Penn State IS NOT opening a campus in Philadelphia. Penn State already has 24 campuses across the commonwealth and is not in the market for any more. Penn State already has campuses serving the Philadelphia area (Abington, Brandywine, Great Valley, Berks, and Lehigh Valley) and maintains a community recruitment center (which has been there for the last 20 years) in the city of Philadelphia. It’s presence in the Pittsburgh area is similar to that of Philadelphia, with 5 campuses serving the local area and a community recruitment center located in the city. The University already is one of the largest in the nation, with record enrollment throughout the system this year, a student body that tops 95,000 students.
And if you think Penn State has profits that it just secretly socks away so that it can somehow make money through the back door and that is why tuition has increased so much in the last 20 years, you really are living in a fantasy world.
On top of all of that, Penn State provides a lot of those 2 year vocational programs through the associate degree programs and the continuing educational programs for companies, tailored to the community needs of the community in which each campus is located. And our costs are still about 1/3 of what it costs to take those same programs at the local for-profits.
morzer
@change:
Karl Rove finally got some quarters from the bank, I see.
gene108
I got 3’s in some subjects. Some colleges require scores of 4 or higher. The subjects I got 4’s or higher in were accepted and transferred.
To not get bogged down in my how my transcripts transferred, my basic point is there’s a need for vocational training and / or industry specific training, which I don’t think universities and community colleges are geared to meet.
As someone posted above, in an earlier post, the traditional university system has ignored the need for people to retrain as adults.
For-profits can fill this niche, but right now they are so loosely regulated that anything goes, which doesn’t really fill the need in the market and only makes things harder for themselves to get established as legitimate alternatives and people looking to retrain.
I think the flaw is not in the fact they are for-profit, but the fact the business model is as much a scam as anything else, without a clear goal other than to grab as much cash as possible.
There’s no inherent reason for-profits can’t co-exist within the current system. For-profits have existed in vocational and service fields for a long time now.
Ash Can
@change: But that would be great! It’d be only a matter of time before the mad mullahs used their nukes on us, and where would they target? Washington DC, of course. Then the federal government wouldn’t just not work for the next two years, it’d never work again! Anarchist win, libertarian paradise!
change
@Mnemosyne:
So you think the world is a better place with a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard?
Wow.
change
Also, Iran began working on a nuke in the ’90s before bush even took office.
morzer
@change:
And in all those years, they have achieved…. just enough nuclear power to light up your miserable excuse for a cranium? Oh, how the terror seizes me.
Karl, when you read this, consider saving the quarters for laundry day, because your useful idiot really isn’t worth the trouble.
change
Which is it, liberals:
1) Iran isn’t planning to have a nuclear weapon
2) Iran having a nuclear weapon would be a goodthing
Have the sack to take a position and stick with it…
geg6
@gene108:
And frequently lose their ability to receive Title IV funding due to an inability to follow the rules. Like the rules about not forging student signatures on loan documents and little things like that.
Your defense of non-profits makes no sense. Four-year colleges and universities, along with community colleges, provide almost everything you claim that they don’t and what you claim for-profits can do best. But any review of reality and the research out there shows that you are completely wrong.
Which doesn’t surprise me after learning that your AP scores weren’t high enough for any schools I know of to accept. But you only mentioned that after being called out on a deliberately misleading statement. You aren’t arguing in good faith, in addition to arguing about things of which you obviously have no knowledge.
Ash Can
@change: Oh, come on. You’re just brimming with excitement over the idea of Capitol Hilll getting nuked, aren’t you? You can be honest with us.
Chris
Can we call him a whore *now*?
morzer
@change:
Is a twatwaffle like you claiming to know what a sack is?
gene108
Do you mean defense of for-profits?
I don’t think a for-profit school is inherently a bad idea. I think they have gone about things badly, in a rush to cash in as quickly as possible on a confused citizenry not knowing what it needs to remain competitive.
I think there can be a place for for-profit institutions to expand, but I think there needs to be a clear definition of what they can and cannot do, which they are not willing to do because they just want to expand services and keep making more money.
I think the current model is short sighted, but that’s the way of business many times. I’m not sure, if the government can really solve the problem of a goalless for-profit education system. They can crack down in some areas, but ultimately the onus to reform has to come through the for-profit system and / or high schools doing a better job of explaining the educational options available to their students.
Probably the best way to force change are some successful lawsuits against for-profit colleges for fraud or dealing in bad-faith. Usually a successful lawsuit can compel an industry to start or profession to reassess the limits of what it can and cannot do.
With the increasing demands on for the workforce to become skilled and governments unwillingness to spend on higher education, coupled with state (and I guess private universities) facing financial pressure to continue to expand because of increasing demand (and increasing population), we aren’t putting ourselves in a great position to meet the markets labor demands by the university- community college system.
Private for-profit schools could fill a niche, if they get there shit together.
I put in parenthesis, when I talked about my AP scores that I got threes.@gene108:
gene108
@geg6: Sometime I thought I heard that Penn. St. wanted to open a Center City campus for their business school, but maybe I got them mixed up another college.
Mnemosyne
@change:
No, I’m saying that Iran wanting a nuke is a completely rational reaction on their part to the invasion of Iraq, and we’ll do a lot better at getting them to stop developing one by promising not to bomb the shit out of them than we will be using the same threats that made them start investigating a nuke in the first place.
I realize that bullies can’t understand why their victims or potential victims might want to protect themselves from being bullied or even — God forbid! — actually fight back, but that’s why Iran wants a nuke. It’s not some crazy irrational action on their part, so we could actually talk them down from it if assholes like you would STFU for five minutes about invading them since that’s the exact kind of talk that makes them want a nuke.
Mnemosyne
@gene108:
I think that community colleges are equipped to do it and designed to do it, except that — surprise surprise — people don’t want to have to pay the taxes required to support a community college system on the off-chance that they themselves might get laid off or injured enough to require a career change.
There is a niche available, but frankly that niche is available because of anti-tax rhetoric and people’s unwillingness to support a robust community college system, not because community colleges are incapable of delivering the same services that for-profit technical schools do at a lower cost for everyone.
Mnemosyne
@change:
Hmm, gosh, what was going on in that part of the Middle East in the 90s? It couldn’t have been that the guy they just got done fighting a 10-year war with invaded a neighboring country and had to be driven out, because then you’d look like a fucking idiot who doesn’t understand why countries might want to protect themselves from aggressors. Again.
change
@Mnemosyne:
I see, so we’re just too damn mean to the Islamofascists! If we would play nice, they wouldn’t hate us! Peace in our time!
Got a black umbrella anywhere
Oh, and answer the question:
Would the world be better off or worse off if the current regime in Iran went nuclear?
morzer
@change:
Better off, because it would mean that useless twatwaffles like you went to kiss Satan’s ass-hole a year early.
Also too, fuck you and the dinosaur you and Jeebus rode in on.
Ash Can
Would the world be better off or worse off if the current regime in Israel went nuclear? COME ON PEOPLE ANSWER THE QUESTION
change
@morzer:
Is this the level of discourse the left has sunk to? Has your entire movement been taken over by petulant children?
Shouldn’t you be off watching cartoons, child?
change
@Ash Can:
Only a immature liberal child would fail to see the difference between Israel possessing a nuclear weapon and an insane, messianic regime like Iran.
Mnemosyne
@change:
I am laughing at my computer right now because apparently you have no idea I was referring to Saddam Hussein. Donald Rumsfeld, is it really you?
change
@Mnemosyne:
But why would Iran fear Saddam Hussein in the ’90s or early 2000s? I thought he was harmless and contained, right? That’s what the left told me!
Right?
Mnemosyne
@change:
Gee, I can’t imagine why, if you have a crazy next-door neighbor under house arrest, you might get a little nervous that he might get out even if people who live two states away are reassuring you that it’s perfectly all right.
Clearly the Iranians were crrrraaaazzzzzy for thinking that the guy they’d finally defeated after a 10-year war might want to attack them again.
change
@Mnemosyne:
But Howard Dean said Saddam was “put in a box!”
You just admitted Saddam was still a grave threat to the region in 2003. My work is done. I just exposed liberal hypocrisy, yet again.
Arclite
Frontline has a show on why regulating for profit schools is so important. They hard sell the schools, overchange tuition, sign up people that can’t afford, etc. etc. Student loans are unlike any other kind of debt. It doesn’t go away with bankruptcy.
Check the story here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid
morzer
@change:
I can see that your information mostly comes from cartoons, so I’ll leave you to them.
Incidentally, thanks for the blowjob.
morzer
@change:
No, you exposed your big fat ass, and it had a “Kick me” sign on it in big fat letters. You never made the connection?
Ash Can
CHANGE IS ALL GROWED UP
Mnemosyne
@change:
Funny how much this sounds like Jonah Goldberg declaring victory and running away after Juan Cole pwned him, hard.
Come back soon, Brave Sir Robin.
morzer
@Mnemosyne:
Tunch ate his minstrels!
Mnemosyne
@morzer:
And there was much rejoicing.
morzer
@Mnemosyne:
Also too.
John Bird
Oh, yeah, I’m sure all the private schools with hard science programs are really worried about the government coming after them . . .
Uncle Clarence Thomas
I don’t understand why balloonbaggers criticize other balloonbaggers so fiercely.