Update: Laureate Universities International, to which the Clintons have a direct connection, apparently gets most of its income from its schools overseas. During the period 2010 -2012, and after Bill Clinton received a $4 million plus a year payment from Laureate as an “Honorary Chancellor,” the State Department approved millions of dollars in grants to International Youth Foundation, a non-profit chaired by Laureate’s CEO, Don Becker:
[While] IYF had received government grants (mainly from the U.S. Agency for International Development) as far back as 2001, they “exploded since Bill became chancellor of Laureate,” accounting for the vast majority of the nonprofit’s revenue. In 2010, “government grants accounted for $23 million of its revenue, compared to $5.4 million from other sources. It received $21 million in 2011 and $23 million in 2012.” The link between International Youth Foundation and Laureate has not been previously reported, he said. […]
A Bloomberg examination of IYF’s public filings show that in 2009, the year before Bill Clinton joined Laureate, the nonprofit received 11 grants worth $9 million from the State Department or the affiliated USAID. In 2010, the group received 14 grants worth $15.1 million. In 2011, 13 grants added up to $14.6 million. The following year, those numbers jumped: IYF received 21 grants worth $25.5 million, including a direct grant from the State Department. […]
… Hillary Clinton’s financial disclosure forms in 2012 revealed only that her husband received nonemployee compensation of more than $1,000 from [Laureate] that year. The Clinton Foundation’s donor disclosures showed that Laureate cumulatively gave between $1 million and $5 million through 2014. […]
Laureate plays up its Clinton ties in a big way. Its homepage prominently features a photo of Clinton speaking this month at a new campus in Panama. Other pages detail Clinton’s role at Laureate and the company’s relationship with the Clinton Global Initiative.
I think this provides further damning evidence of the pay-to-play connections between Laureate and the Clintons while Hillary was Secretary of State.
* * *
The for profit college industry is one of the worst scams going, at least if you are one of their students. They have a much lower graduation rate than traditional colleges, and an absurdly high number of their students rely on student loans to fund their education. On average, tuition costs are much more expensive. Many are rife with fraud and deceptive business practices. Their business model relies heavily on federal funding, and many exploit veterans and low income students.
Candidate Hillary Clinton has stated repeatedly on the stump that she will crack down on these for profit higher educational scam artists. However, not so long ago, she was much less concerned about the for profit college industry. In fact, she actively favored one particular for profit college while she was Secretary of State, Laureate International Universities:
[In 2009] Clinton wrote in an email to a top aide that she wanted to add Laureate Education to the guest list for the event. Describing Laureate as “the fastest growing college network in the world,” Clinton said the company was “started by Doug Becker who Bill likes a lot.”
“It’s a for-profit model that should be represented,” she added in the August 2009 email. A senior vice president at Laureate was added to the guest list, a separate email shows.
Former President Bill Clinton several months later became an honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities, a role for which he was paid $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014. Clinton stepped down from the position earlier this year.
That’s right, she did a favor for Laureate, and they, in return just happened to appoint her husband to a honorary position that paid him $16.5 million over four years for whatever honorary chancellors do. To give you an idea just how much Laureate Universities rakes in from their students, let’s look at one of their five schools in the United States, Walden University in Minneapolis, which charges students up to averages $60,000 in tuition and fees per quarter per degrees! That comes to $120,000 per academic year.
Now my daughter attends a prestigious science and engineering school in the Northeast that charges a lot in tuition and fees, also. She pays roughly $60,000 for the entire academic year (i.e., half what Walden charges), which includes tuition, fees, books and on campus room and board. Graduates with a Bachelor’s degree have a 89.4% success rate (either employment in their chosen field, acceptance into a graduate program or join the Military). Average starting salary equaled 62,509 (data for Class of 2014).
The four year graduation rate at her college is 74%. On average, online for profit colleges average only a 22% graduation rate. Hard to imagine that Walden provides an educational experience equal or better than the one my daughter receives. And by all accounts they don’t even come close:
[C]ritics of Laureate’s Walden University in Minnesota claimed professors were inaccessible and that continual delays stretched out the time — and thus money needed — to earn an advanced degree. Three students have filed a lawsuit against Walden, hoping to make it a class-action suit, alleging breach of contract, unjust enrichment, violations of state consumer protection and unfair competition laws.
Of course, Bill was far from the only person to benefit from a connection to the for profit college industry. After Hillary stepped down as Secretary of State, she gave a speech (sound familiar?) that paid her $225,000 to address “Academic Partnerships, a for-profit education company in which Jeb Bush held an ownership stake and on whose board he served.”
Clinton’s newly filed personal financial disclosure shows that she was paid $225,500 on March 24, 2014 by Academic Partnerships. At the invitation-only event in Dallas, Texas, Clinton reportedly said, “today a student doesn’t need to travel to Cambridge, Mass., or Cambridge, England, to get a world-class education.”
Academic Partnerships assists universities in converting their academic degree programs into online versions that can be taken by students around the world.
Yet, she wants us to believe that now when she is elected to the Presidency, she will crack down on an industry that provided her and her husband with such lucrative sinecures. Color me — skeptical, at best. And you wonder why young people, many of them crushed under a heavy burden of student loan debt, and their parents, as well, don’t trust her?
That’s actually $60,000 for a completed degree (assuming 4 years) so actually $15,000/year and $5,000/quarter. That’s actually about the same as the in-state tuition for the University of Alabama, and less than half their out-of-state tuition.
You are right. I misread.
I’m confused – where?
The fees listed are per unit. From that it’s unclear how many units are in question (for a quarter, for a year, for a degree?) Right beneath, however, is a fee per quarter, with a total that makes it clear the calculation is for a complete degree.
I simply misread the data and jumped to a conclusion. My bad.
Take away the federal grants and federal student loans and this scummy industry would disappear overnight. Public monies should remain within public institutions. These private operations not only supply crap education at a high cost to the students, but they’ve raided the public purse which in turn has reduced the funds available to public colleges and that in turn reduces the ability of public colleges to meet the demand and pushes potential students to the private schools. A negative feedback loop from which a whole lot of people are profiting. Shameful on the part of the Clintons to feed at that trough.
The federal student loans are the entire raison d’etre of this industry.
Diploma mills gone upscale, eh? In the 70’s they were trade school scams for poors. The wonders of the internet’s ability to widen the marketplace.
This one is actually one of the best online schools and isn’t a mill – it does grant genuine degrees. Seems to have worse graduation rates than a typical state university, though it’s hard to say how much blame belongs to the school and how much to online education in general.
Some, possibly most, back then were okay and not a scam. They weren’t too pricey and students actually learned a job skills trade. Some community colleges have stepped up with programs to fill some of that long-standing niche. Or even a new niche that has become popular such as culinary schools. We can trace much of it to the decline in OJT by businesses — why should they pay for it when individuals and the public can cover that cost? It does make businesses less stable because they’re less invested in their employees and their employees are less invested in the business.
They had the same problems, but the scale was not so great as far as economic peonage. Recruitment scandals and non-performance.
Much smaller scale, but we’d both have to be more precise in our identification of that that were scams say before 1975 and those that had been around for a while that were okay. I was thinking more along the lines of barber and hairdressing schools. Not “famous” broadcast and become a commercial artist overnight schools. They do tend to pop up as a tech or government regulatory change creates real or imagined skilled worker shortages. ie. deregulate trucking and “famous” truck driving schools mushroom.
didn’t know about this. thanks for telling me.
ditto
Is there a neoliberal scam or grift the Clintons haven’t profited from?
Oh sure. Scams come and go so quickly that no one person can possibly take advantage of more than a few of them.
Damn, Booman, my daughter and my money also go to WPI! Long way from Portland, Oregon….I knew you must be referring to WPI as soon as I read the statistics about graduation rates etc.
Now you know where some of your money went.
Mostly her grandmother’s money. Grandmother set up 529 plans for all her grandchildren. We were lucky in that respect. Otherwise my daughter would not be attending such a pricey school.
Is this a case of art imitating life? Walden University in Minneapolis? Surely someone here has seen Doonesbury comic strips lampooning a so-called Walden University.
The really weird thing right now is that Hillary keeps acting like she’s losing even though she’s well ahead and should rack up enough delegates in Florida on Tuesday to win that day’s delegate count, even if Bernie wins in the midwest. But maybe that’s just how her campaign rolls.
What an obvious bribe! Come with the Cash, Clinton!
Wait until they’re in the White House again. Teapot Dome will be a tempest in a teapot.
I appreciate your humorous historical reference.