IRA STOLL: The War on For-Profit Education.

As I’ve said before, it’s not at all clear that the traditional, not-for-profit model deserves a pass. Plenty of people enrolled in traditional colleges are graduating without marketable skills and with mountains of debt. I suspect that all of this is in part a PR effort by traditional schools to shift the blame.

And there’s plenty of blame to shift: “A bad story? Wait, it gets worse. How did Ms. Munna get to Citi to borrow more money than she could afford? She was referred there by her dear university, NYU. But what she didn’t know was that NYU was in a ‘revenue sharing’ (read: kickback) arrangement with Citibank, where NYU got 0.25 percent of the value of student loans made by Citibank.”

UPDATE: Reader Bob O’Hara writes:

Glenn, the Ira Stoll piece on the war on for-profit education is on target, but even more on target is your comment that traditional non-profit universities often have a predatory relationship with their own students.

To fix this we need to open the books. At public universities it should go without saying that all financial operations should take place in plain view of the taxpaying public. A tool exists to do just that, and Gil Brown of George Mason University has written about it for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

It’s an online open-book accounting system, very easily implemented, that would allow anyone on campus to view all financial transactions within a university. If I were a state legislator with pork-busting ambitions and a sense of educational integrity, I’d push to have every campus in my state put this in place. Who knows what the student journalists of the country might uncover with such a system. (The new carpeting in the chancellor’s office cost how much??)

We had that scandal, I think.