Harkin to Continue Ignoring that He’s the Problem
What an enigma American higher education is! It produces simultaneously far too many graduates and far too few. It gets hundreds-of-billions in taxpayer subsidies – subsidies that have almost constantly risen — and yet its main problem is said to be too little public support.
What interesting questions these problems raise!
Don’t, though, ask Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) about any of them. Even though he chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, which has jurisdiction over such huge laws as the Higher Education Act, all he cares about is one thing: slaying for-profit schools. Which is why he has scheduled yet another hearing — the fifth in a seemingless endless series – that will focus solely on for-profit institutions, and will almost certainly feature more lopsided testimony, self-serving speechifying, and, if we’re really lucky, more apparently dirty dealing masquerading as selfless public service.
Why is Harkin seemingly obsessed with for-profit schools while ignoring the really interesting — and urgent — questions about the entire Ivory Tower? Sadly, that is not a great riddle. It is because what ails higher education is Senator Harkin himself, and all the politicians who, for decades, have bought votes with massive aid to schools and students while taking no responsibility for the outrageous price inflation and waste that has fueled. In other words, Sen. Harkin is ignoring the problem because, to deal with it, he’d be the one who’d have to answer the tough questions.
Keep Moving, There’s Still Nothing to See Here
In dribs and drabs the plot thickens in the quiet little saga surrounding the GAO’s brutal and broken August report on for-profit colleges. The latest development is the near-silent transformation of the GAO office that produced the knee-capping report that was later quietly reissued with lots of new, for-profit-exonerating material.
I say “near-silent transformation” because word about it somehow got to the Coalition for Educational Success, a career college advocacy group. Yesterday, CES issued a press release on the matter, and this morning I contacted GAO’s public affairs office about it. To the GAO’s credit, their public affairs folks quickly sent me a copy of a memo announcing the end of the Forensic Audits and Special Investigations (FSI) team. Sadly, it was clear that there would be no public announcement of the change, which is utterly consistent with the behind-your-back way GAO has handled every development in this story. Well, every development save the very public release of the original, fatally flawed report.
Especially concerning is the following passage in the memo, which suggests that the for-profit college report provided the ultimate impetus for giving the FSI a new identity. This despite the FSI having done investigations in numerous other areas:
Since the Forensic Audits and Special Investigations team was formed in 2005 the team’s body of work has resulted in numerous accomplishments and benefits to the Congress and the public. To ensure good work continues and to bring greater management attention to the group and more seamlessly integrate its work with GAO’s program teams as well as the audit and investigative sides of the unit, today I am announcing several changes. These enhancements will also ensure greater attention to the issues that led to the need to produce the errata to the for-profit schools report and by the subsequent inspection.
So why does the group need “greater management attention”? And what exactly are “the issues that led to the need to produce the errata” to the August report?
As a member of the public it sure would be nice to know the answers to these questions, especially since these are the guys who are supposed to be holding the rest of the federal government ”accountable.” For proprietary schools’ employees and investors — the people who were most hurt by the dubious August report — these are thing they absolutely should know. But the GAO insists on telling us that nothing major went wrong while refusing to share information we’d need to confirm that. It’s not only totally unsatisfactory, it only makes you even more suspicious.
Profits Do Oft Disprove Jesters
A new study of Sweden’s nationwide private school choice program reveals that both non-profit and for-profit private schools outperform state-run schools. And, after the most comprehensive set of controls for confounding variables, they do so by an almost identical (and highly statistically significant) margin.
Is there any reason, then, to prefer one form of private organization over the other? Yes. While non-profit private schools have tended to increase the size of their waiting lists in response to growing demand, their for-profit counterparts have done what all commercial enterprises would do in that circumstance: they’ve grown.
For more insights on this crucial distinction, have a look at Peje Emilsson’s presentation from our “Cloning Superman” event, which was broadcast on CSPAN.
If you want more good schools and fewer bad ones, make it easier for entrepreneurs and investors to team up with great educators, and let them earn profits or suffer losses in direct proportion to their ability to serve children.
Dear Defamed: Trust Us, We’re the Government
With the release of a new report analyzing a quietly amended Government Accountability Office study that’s been used to club for-profit colleges, fear of GAO bias has reached a fever pitch. Sadly, the GAO’s response to the report does anything but assuage that fear.
To get a decent sense for the government abuse both surrounding, and possibly perpetrated by, the GAO study in question, it’s worth a quick rehash of events.
Basically, the study was requested by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee who has been waging war against for-profit colleges on the suspicion that the sector is rife with fraud, waste, and abuse. To get data to support his suspicion, Harkin asked the GAO to conduct “secret shopper” research in which investigators pretending to be prospective students visit schools to discover fraudulent admissions and financial aid practices.
In August 2010 the GAO released selected findings in testimony to Harkin’s committee and an accompanying report. The GAO said that it found abuses in all the schools it visited, which Harkin and others suspicious of profit-seekers seized on to assert that the sector is, indeed, teeming with fraud. That the GAO’s report explicitly noted that the sample of schools it visited was non-random and, therefore, its results impossible to apply to all of for-profit higher education was no matter: the rhetoric of those with a bias against for-profit schools was off and running.
In November, while for-profit schools sought unsuccessfully to get all the recorded and other material needed to substantiate the GAO’s findings, the GAO silently slipped a revised version of the report out, one that featured numerous changes, all of which redounded to for-profits’ favor. And it wasn’t just correcting minor oversights: There was lots of recorded dialogue that had been missing from the original report, material that the GAO must have known about before issuing it’s initial, very damaging report.
Which brings us to the present day, and the new report that tears apart the amended version of the GAO study. Using available audio recordings of the shoppers’ visits — and many recordings and other evidence is not available, being held by the GAO and U.S. Department of Education — investigators from the firm of Norton/Norris, Inc., commissioned by the Coalition for Educational Success, report that only a quarter of the GAO’s findings can be substantiated after factoring out missing recordings. In other words, an already crumbling report seems to be utterly collapsing.
So is the GAO apologizing for this, or at least saying they’ll make all their material available? No way, as their statement to Inside Higher Ed makes clear:
“The consultants hired by the Coalition to discredit the report never contacted GAO for explanations and failed to take into account many factors, including the fact that not all information in the report can be found on the audio tapes posted to the Internet,” Chuck Young, GAO’s managing director for public affairs, said in an e-mailed statement. “For example, GAO turned over some videotapes to the inspector general at the Department of Education due to evidence of serious wrongdoing uncovered by investigators. Audio from those visits was not able to be posted. There were also written materials that were examined as part of the work and are not on the tapes. We are reviewing the tapes to see if there were any segments that were not provided to the committee.
“But the bottom line remains that a GAO review team independent from the investigators who did this work examined the report and found no material flaws in the evidentiary support for the overall message of the testimony and consequently our findings did not change. We did issue the errata at their suggestion to clarify our work and provide more precise language. We continue to stand by the overall message of this report.”
You don’t have to suffer from tinfoil-hat paranoia to see real and potential government abuse all over this sorry episode. First, opportunist politicians and others misused the initial GAO report to smear the whole for-profit sector. Then, once the damage was done, the GAO made significant changes to their report without even so much as issuing a press release. And now, as even the amended report is being ripped to shreds, the GAO’s response is basically “you can’t have access to the evidence being used against you, and you don’t need it: We’ve already decided we’re right and you’re wrong.”
Now, are for-profit schools pure and blameless? Absolutely not: Norton/Norris confirmed several of the GAO’s findings, and some findings they questioned are probably accurate. Moreoever, as I’ve pointed out before, many for-profit schools are happy to take students carrying taxpayer dollars despite knowing there’s little chance that those students will ever finish their studies. Of course, that makes those institutions no different from many public and nonprofit private schools about which Sen. Harkin evinces no concern.
Ultimately, though, much more important than the immediate effect of all of this on for-profit schools is the lesson it offers for all Americans: Run afoul of the sensibilities of the wrong politicians – especially if you make a deal with the devil and take government funds — and government can hobble you without ever worrying about due process, transparency, or just plain fairness. All it has to do is make accusations.
GAO an Aggressor in War on For-Profits? At Least Someone Cares
Today, AEI’s Rick Hess and Andrew Kelly have a piece at Inside Higher Ed highlighting serious evidence of dirty-dealing in a highly influential Government Accountability Office report on for-profit colleges. Hess and Kelly’s piece is well worth a read and I’m glad they’re on the case.
Unfortunately, theirs is about the only cry of alarm over apparent bias at the supposedly incorruptible GAO — potentially a huge story — I’ve seen since I wrote the following last week:
Now, though much needs to be determined about why the myriad changes to the report were made, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that people at the GAO have actually been in on the crusade to demonize proprietary colleges. I also, unfortunately, won’t be surprised if no one pays attention to any of this, and the shameless, responsibility-dodging war on for-profits continues unabated.
Sadly, so far my fears have been realized. Other than Hess and Kelly no one, especially in the mainstream media, is giving this story any of the attention it deserves. Apparently, if someone who’s honest about trying to make a buck is being beaten in an alley, it’s easier just to look the other way.
I Thought Higher Education Was about Pursuing Truth?
I have no love of for-profit colleges and universities — they are as greedy at the public trough as any other higher ed sector — but it is becoming increasingly difficult to not get very angry about the treatment they’re receiving in Washington.
Just one day after it was revealed that the GAO had substantially revised a report used back in August to smear proprietary colleges, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) — the driving force, along with the U.S. Department of Education, behind the war on profits — released a new report alleging that for-profit schools are ripping off G.I. Bill-using veterans. At least, that’s what the media stories are suggesting. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to verify the actual content of the report because as of the time I’m writing this, Harkin hasn’t yet made it publicly available — at least not by clearly posting it on his website. Unfortunately, as with the GAO report and almost everything else that’s gone on with this, the strategy seems to be demonize first, let for-profit schools defend themselves later.
Fortunately, you have a chance to enjoy some rational, informed debate about the for-profit college situation. On November 30, Cato hosted a forum on for-profit higher education, with numerous sides of the debate represented. There was no convict-first approach, and the panelists checked demagoguery at the door. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Sen. Harkin and the other grand inquisitors of for-profit schools.
What Part of “Nonrepresentative” Don’t Profit-Haters Get?
For the last few days, for-profit colleges and universities have been suffering an even worse hammering than usual, both in the media and their pocketbooks. The proximate cause: a GAO report released Wednesday that has been portrayed as revealing “systemic” and “pervasive” fraud — and otherwise just seamy behavior — by the for-profit sector.
No doubt there is some bad stuff going on in proprietary postsecondary education. But the assault on for-profits reeks of political bullying of the unpopular kid — the kid who’s just different — as well as the never-ending Washington demonization of anyone who honestly pursues a profit. The waving of the bloody GAO report is case-in-point, and one need look no further than the following statement contained on the report’s very first page:
Results of the undercover tests and tuition comparisons cannot be projected to all for-profit colleges.
You mean, GAO investigators went to 15 non-randomly selected schools in six states and Washington, DC, and the results cannot be construed to be representative of the whole sector? And the GAO also, apparently, meant it when it wrote on page two of the report that “we investigated a nonrepresentative selection” of schools? But, then, how could Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, have stated in a show-trial hearing that “GAO’s findings make it disturbingly clear that abuses in for-profit recruiting are not limited to a few rogue recruiters or even a few schools with lax oversight”?
Oh, right: Truth doesn’t matter to Harkin — only scoring political points. That not only explains how Harkin could say such a thing, but why he has targeted for-profits rather than seeking truth and purity in all sectors of higher education, including the coolest of the cool kids, public colleges. With dismal program completion rates of their own, and their imposition of huge burdens on taxpayers, you’d think they’d be worth some investigating, too.
I encourage you to read the GAO report, and you’ll see that it in no way supports a blanket condemnation of for-profit higher ed. And it’s not just because its findings can in no reasonable way be extrapolated to the whole of proprietary schooling. It’s also because many of the supposedly terrible things it discovers, while perhaps distasteful, are hardly abhorent, such as telling prospective students that they ”can” — not “will” — earn a lot of money in a profession even if that amount is well above the average. And then there’s the report’s worthless comparisons of tuition at for-profit and nearby public instituions. Once again: public colleges are heavily subsidized by taxpayers, so of course their tuition is lower. And these comparisons were also not randomly selected.
After you’ve read the GAO report, you should take in a new paper from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, For-Profit Higher Education: Growth, Innovation and Regulation. It might be a bit too fond of the for-profit sector, which like all of higher education lives far too much off the sweat of taxpayers, but it furnishes lots of terrific data and insights about proprietary higher ed to balance out the ongoing truth-eschewing assaults the sector keeps on suffering.
Why Is For-Profit Education So Difficult in the U.S.?
Matt Yglesias has a post up looking at the PISA scores, and he seems to imply that for-profit schooling has been tried and found wanting in Sweden and the U.S.:
The big difference is that many Swedish charters are run by for-profit firms. We’ve had some experiments with that in the U.S. and it hasn’t worked very well. Nobody’s really found a great way of making consistent profits running K-12 schools in America.
Of course even he notes that Sweden’s schools are highly regulated by the state.
And in the U.S., the difficulty of succeeding in for-profit education just might have something to do with that government monopoly on k-12 education and the $560 billion or so in tax revenues that fund it. Maybe.
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