Elizabeth Warren conceived the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and President Obama got it enacted into law. This is one of the results:
Today, we announced a lawsuit against for-profit college chain Corinthian Colleges, Inc. We allege that the company lured in tens of thousands of students to take out private loans to cover expensive tuition costs by advertising bogus job prospects and career services. Our lawsuit also alleges that Corinthian used illegal debt collection tactics to strong-arm students into paying back those loans while still in school.
Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is one of the largest for-profit college companies in the United States, operating more than 100 school campuses under the names Everest, Heald, and WyoTech.
Of course, as Daniel Luzer explained back in July, the Washington Monthly played a huge role in this, too.
It started with a piece that Stephen Burd wrote for the November/December 2009 issue of the Monthly. Senator Tom Harkin saw the article shortly after becoming chairman of the HELP committee, and that led to a lot of hearings that exposed Corinthian colleges and the whole for-profit industry. It’s been a long road, but now the hammer is coming down.
I just wanted you to know who you should thank.
I’ll believe it when I see the same efforts applied to the big time rip-offs…the Ivy League, the real estate interests masquerading as universities like Columbia, NYU and the New School in NYC. Warren worked at Harvard for years. She knows damned well what is going on. Anybody with an ounce of sense who has had dealings with the U.S. “higher education” system knows the game.
“Corinthian Colleges?”
That’s like going after Bernie Madoff instead of Mike Bloomberg.
Please.
AG
Sometimes, you just foam at the mouth.
If there’s a scam with the Ivies it’s that you can do better, initially, by going to engineering schools. But Ivies catch up later and do quite well for themselves.
I “foam at the mouth.” do I? Or maybe I don’t. You decide…as you must.
Ivy league universities…and the other so-called “elite” institutions of higher learning…do indeed make more money for their graduates. But they are also making more money for themselves. Lots more, at usurious rates and prices. They also perpetuate the Great American Class Scam by primarily accepting people from the upper classes/wealthy classes. They collect money and power which they use to service the .01% much more than any other sector of the society. In the case of NYC…the only place where I have intimate knowledge of the hows and whys of big-time academia from the inside out…they are now primarily real estate-for-profit corporations that have cooperated with Mike Bloomberg in gentrifying this city to a near-diisastrous level. We’ll see the results of that particular movement soon enough, and it won’t look like New York Magazine or Sex In The City, you can bet on that. It won’t look like Bill De Blasio and his family, either. It will look more like what happens when rising prices gradually leach out the real working classes…including real, working cultural and artistic classes…from a once thriving and well-balanced city leaving only the semblance of real work or art. It’s happening already. The corporatism of NYC has been mightily helped by the corporatism of its universities, and the result is going to be the equivalent of Chef Boyardee fare being sold as high cuisine and compulsive whacking off being sold as real love.
Watch.
The academic system of the U.S. is now just as decayed as are its other institutions, and unless some miracle occurs alla them pretty Ivy League bricks are eventually going to fall just as have its industrial cities.
Watch.
AG
P.S. Have you been to New Haven recently? I have. Whitiness Yale Haven on one side of the park, black Detroit 1964 on the other side. A perfect metaphor for what is happening in American academia today.
Bet on it.
You don’t see it?
What do you do, drive past Princeton when you visit home and admire the ivy?
Please.
Ivy ain’t shit.
I think the real point should be that Corinthian Colleges and their like rob poor people and vets and the US government of really extraordinary sums of money, and Harvard and Columbia may sometimes be bad neighbors and bad employers of non-academic staff and elitists, but they do not rob poor people or vets (especially Harvard with the no-loans policy) or the government. It’s an easy question of priorities.
And congratulations to the Monthly, that was great great old-school great work.
Harvard, Columbia and their like have robbed poor people of their homes and neighborhoods, fool. That is what the word “gentrification” really means. Literally hundreds of thousands of eople who have been rendered useless by a mechanized, digitized society are chased out of their homes by rising prices so that the sons and daughters of the manager and controller classes can settle their technocratized, spoiled little asses into those neighborhoods at usurious rates as they prepare to take over from their baby boomer parents.
Lord.
Why keep trying?
AG
Columbia is said to have evicted 7,000 local residents since 1958. That’s bad, no question about it. They’re supposedly trying to make up for it and if you don’t trust them you could well be right. Don’t see what Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB could do about it, though. It’s neither a financial nor a federal matter.
The CFPB is getting loan forgiveness for loans taken out between 2011 an 2014 by 130,000 Corinthian students who are just as poor as any West Harlem/Morningside Heights residents and normally poorer, since their crappy Corinthian qualifications don’t enable them to get jobs while interest on their debt keeps mounting. These are people threatened with starvation. All Columbia’s victims have to do is find an apartment. I may be a fool but you still haven’t learned anything about real class issues.
A study of Columbia gentrification released last January found that people were not necessarily even being displaced:
But in any case having to move really pales in significance next to being unable to earn a living while crippled by student debt, and 7000 is a smaller number than 130,000.
It’s not just the “evictions,” yastreblyansky. It’s an entire socioeconomic change that makes it impossible for people who do what I like to call “real work”…people who work with their hands, hearts and minds, whether it be sweeping streets, making art or anything and everything in between as opposed to most office workers, academics and professional collators of meaningless digital glitz…it’s a change that makes it economically impossible and culturally uncomfortable to continue to live in the area. Rents go up, food prices go up, shops that cater to the people and cultures that have been living there for generations close are are replaced with hottest-thing-ever, inflation mongering shops and services that come and go with the winds of the always changing, ever “trending” web culture.
As this kind of gentrification happens the working soul of a given neighborhood…is eventually the city in which those neighborhoods grew and flourished…are gradually destroyed. As a result a sort of stylish pall settles over the area and nothing real happens there anymore. It becomes Onanville, in a word. Onanville, just another a neighborhood in Narcissus City.
Columbia, NYU and The New School were at one time great institutions of learning, but they have become little more than a shell of their former selves, inhabited and run by real estate interests who populate their shells like hermit crabs populating the shells of dead crustaceans. Students still come to learn, but most of them find that what they have really learned is that a Masters Degree will get you a job teaching kindergarten in a badly run school (if you are lucky) and that’s just about it. That job…or some other equivalent…is taken because of student debt. Only the children of the wealthy and the truly brilliant can hold out for more. And the teachers? Lowballed on every level if they are not an intrinsic part of the hype scam that maintains the institution’s high tuitions.
There it is, yastreblyansky. Take it or leave it. The observations of one who has lived in several of those neighborhoods and watched them destroyed, also someone who has intimate knowledge of what’s going on in the universities. First-hand knowledge, bet on it.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is just part of what is happening…and has been happening with continuously accelerating speed since the JFK assassination…in the U.S. now. As above, so below, from the highest reaches of government right on down to the corner deli and the local public schools.
Lose the root and the tree dies.
Watch.
AG
Yeah, I’m having a hard time coming up with enough sympathy to send my charity pennies to “victims” of the ivy league.
Several of them now have no tuition policies. Many more schools have enough endowments to follow suit.
What I’d like to see is an end to legacy admissions – make it pure merit, and ensure their admissions process values a poor teenager supporting their family equally with something like boy scouting – and frankly they’ll be quite an asset.
Pfft. I’m you’re going to think big, go after the University of Chicago Department of Economics. That’s the mother of all scams.
I am a very NY-centric kinda guy, Bearpaw. Got my hands full with this city. My people been here since the mid-1600s. We’ve seen it all, from the first farm on the Brooklyn side to the last gasps of the real counterculture. I truly hate to see it go down. You go after the University of Chicago.
And good luck to you.
AG
My first job out of college in 1980 was with a company that wrote loans for the Wilfred Academy of Beauty. I filed stuff.
It was an absolute churn game designed to funnel loans and grants through as many students as possible to Wilfred.
They were thrilled when Reagan privatized collection on government loans because they could then set up a separate company to get paid for collecting the bad loans they wrote.
Wilfred went out of business in the early 1990s after it was found guilty of falsifying applications for federal student loans and misusing federal loan money. That meant that the company I worked for collapsed too since Wilfred was about their only client. The Booman quite coincidentally bought the owners house when he went bankrupt.
But this shit still goes on. Good for Warren. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/nyregion/promised-better-life-by-beauty-schools-graduates-have-lit
tle-training-and-lasting-debt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Yup.
Their kids turned out great, though. One of them was my catcher for several years. Good catcher, too.
It’s gonna take more hammers. Glad that Washington Monthly has been setting up some nails.
There is a lot going on in the financing of charter school buildings and charter schools as well.
Like the collections racket, eventually it moves into a pure FIRE play.
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