Archive for 2010

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ATTACK ON FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS meets “extraordinary bipartisan opposition” in Congress. I think that whatever scrutiny is applied to employment of graduates should be applied to all schools, whether for-profit or traditional.

UPDATE: Reader Tony Benvin writes:

In your post regarding applying like standards to the examination of for-profit v non-profit schools you would do your readers a favor to distinguish the difference. As a person in the financial services industry I find that a large number of people believe that non-profits must literally not make a profit; they are not aware of the fact that a non-profit is nothing more than a for-profit corporation without stockholders.

Non-profits never make that distinction because the public confusion of non-profits with public charities (which, of course, are decidedly different) works to the non-profit fund-raising advantage. For many people there is no apparent difference between a donation to an Ivy league school’s foundation which charges $50,000/year in tuition and a donation to the Salvation Army which provides social services without charge.

Yes, many “nonprofits” simply pay big salaries to insiders in place of dividends to shareholders. In a related note, several readers have suggested that we eliminate nonprofit tax status for universities and regulate them according to the same standards as publicly traded corporations. Transparency!

SHIKHA DALMIA: ObamaCare Criminalizes Medicine. “There are a great many things wrong with Obamacare, but the biggest is perhaps one that neither party is paying any attention to: It is one huge entrapment scheme that will turn patients and providers into criminals.” That’s okay. They’ll only prosecute people who are unpopular, or whom the authorities have a grudge against. Everyone else is safe!

THIS NEVER TURNS OUT WELL: America’s Dangerous Rush To Shrink Its Military Power. “Just as in the 1930s, the economy is the supposedly humanitarian excuse for reducing the military—although the endless miseries of the world will not be alleviated if, due to an imbalance of power, great and little wars rage across it.”

HANS BADER: TIME FOR BIG CUTS IN EDUCATION SPENDING? “America spends far more on education than countries like Germany, Japan, Australia, Ireland, and Italy, both as a percentage of its economy, and in absolute terms. Yet despite this lavish government support for education, college tuition in the U.S. is skyrocketing, reaching levels of $50,000 or more a year at some colleges, and colleges are effectively rewarded for increasing tuition by mushrooming federal financial-aid spending. Americans can’t read or do math as well as the Japanese, even though America spends way more (half again more) on education than Japan does, as a percentage of income.”