Everything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

This is becoming something of a theme. Trump University is a scandal. It really is. But it's dwarfed by the Clinton for-profit-education scandal.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s attack on Donald Trump over Trump University could invite increased scrutiny of the Clintons’ involvement in a for-profit education scandal in which a company that runs shell colleges paid Bill Clinton $16.5 million to be its pitchman.

While the Clintons were collecting millions, Hillary Clinton’s State Department funneled at least $55 million to a group run by the college company, Laureate Education Inc., according to Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash” as Breitbart reported.

Clinton abruptly resigned from his post as “honorary chancellor” in April 2015 when the disclosure was publicized.

Documents uncovered by Washington-based watchdog Judicial Watch show Laureate Education paid the former president through a “shell corporation” pass-through account that evidently passed State Department scrutiny while Hillary was secretary of state.

Further, in a story showing how for-profit colleges encourage huge student debt, Forbes found the biggest borrower on the for-profit college list is Laureate Education’s Walden University, whose grad students borrowed $756 million in 2014.
Every time I read something and think, "Wow, this guy really should not be President," a little later I find out that the Clintons did the same thing but worse.

1 comment:

David Foster said...

The 'real', 'nonprofit' colleges & universities have also engaged in considerable scamming, often overselling the true value of their degrees, cutting the quality of the education offered, encouraging students to take out loans with little attempt to encourage risk assessment, etc etc.

They have mostly pursued a 'growth at any cost' approach, knowing that more students and more buildings (and when possible, a winning football team) means more administrators and higher pay for those administrators.

While the scamming has generally not been so extreme as that conducted by the worst of 'for profit' universities, the number of students involved and the social influence of the institutions implies that the harm done by irresponsible 'non-profit' universities almost certainly exceed that done by the rogue 'for profit' colleges.