BUCKWHEAT, FLUMMOXED.

For years, Cold Spring Shops has been calling attention to the mistake many state-supported or non-selective non-profit colleges and universities were making treating the proprietary for-profit colleges as competitors to be emulated.  Yes, early on, there was the possibility that those institutions were expanding the market to students not well served by existing higher ed.  (That was true as well of the clients of correspondence courses advertised in the old Railroad magazine.)  I quickly noted that emulation became the strategy, all in the name of access, of course, and that only exacerbated the U.S. News problem.  "There's also the possibility that the price premium such universities command reflects a flight to perceived quality: the last thing the land-grants and regional comprehensives and mid-majors ought be doing is emulating the online for-profits."

Ultimately, the fiction that admitting unprepared students and calling it access caught up with the higher education sector, and with the student loan administrators.  Brookings associates A. G. Shiro and Richard Reeves got right to the heart of the matter.  "The for-profit college system is broken and the Biden administration needs to fix it."  The report being from Brookings, the fix that immediately came to mind was more regulation.

For-profit colleges have a long history of engaging in manipulative behavior to preserve the flow of Title IV funds to their schools while providing their students a poor education. After the quadrupling of undergraduate enrollment in for-profit colleges from 2000 to 2010, Obama-era regulations led to the closure of some high-profile schools and a slight decline in enrollment overall. Now, four years of Trump administration deregulation along with the COVID-19 recession have created a “perfect storm for the resurgence of the for-profit sector”. The incoming Biden administration must prioritize regulating for-profits in order to protect students and taxpayer dollars.

The Jarrett regency, predictably, interpreted the evidence that there was a lot of borrowing by those unprepared students to attend those fake colleges as an inequitable outcome, most easily solved by buying off constituencies with interest deferrals and loan forgiveness.

Note, in particular, how Buckwheat ducks a question about the regressive effects of those loan forgiveness orders, provided they pass judicial review, on people who paid off their student loans, or didn't make a bad bet on college.  The key to the exchange that follows is precisely that a lot of that bad student loan debt went to matriculants at for-profit fake colleges.  It's not about those gender studies majors at the Ivies or lawyers, physicians, and surgeons.

The inevitable consequence of access-assessment-remediation-retention. Weak students and weak colleges bet on a bailout. https://t.co/BzUVUUcNvy

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) May 23, 2024

Her response is an attempt to make a case in equity.  Borrowers "literally being crushed".  The Jarrett regency hoping to help people "get their lives back on track" after they "took a bet on themselves" and then found repaying their loans difficult.

Well, yeah.  "With somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of entering freshmen requiring remediation, perhaps the for-profits are a symptom of troubles elsewhere in the education system, or perhaps in the broader society."  It's amusing, as well, to see the current administration attempt to scold the for-profit and proprietary colleges for taking advantage of ... the very incentives financial aid, including guaranteed loans, produce.

Although Reason's Greg Beato focuses on the money-suck that higher education has become, with little social and diminished private returns on investment, and the misplaced, to a free-market perspective, emphasis on the shortcomings of for-profit colleges that charge large sums of money (perhaps enlarged by the availability of third-party money) for little effect, he, too, notes the deleterious consequences of access for its own sake.

Perhaps the people who didn't take a bad bet on themselves have a case in equity for not being on the hook for student debt incurred by others.  It came to this years ago.

What’s University Diaries been telling you all these years? If your non-profit university is as much of a joke as the for-profits, you should be slammed just as hard as they’re about to get slammed. If you give your president millions in compensation, graduate few students, give most of your money to athletics, hoard your endowment, stuff your boards of trustees with hedge fund managers or corrupt local merchants, put most of your courses online and make remaining on-campus courses gigantic lectures no one attends, have ghostwritten industry flacks among your researchers — If you are, in other words, a seriously anti-intellectual, seriously money-grubbing sort of jobbie, you’re doing fuck-all for civilization, and no self-respecting government should have anything to do with you.

Fourteen years later, it's the Normies being crushed in order for the pretend institutions getting to go on with bad business.  "[A]s long as there is excess demand for perceived prestige degrees, your chairman, your dean, your provost, your president, your regents are leaving money on the table pushing access-assessment-remediation-retention."

But as long as the Jarrett regency clings to its equity delusions, the bad business will go on and on, with more unprepared students opting to take bad bets on themselves.