The Public Option by Ganesh Sitaraman & Anne L. Alstott

Author:Ganesh Sitaraman & Anne L. Alstott
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

8

Higher Education

Imagine that you’ve just been hired to head admissions for a for-profit college. Your job is to admit as many students as possible, because your college makes money mostly by tapping student loan programs, Pell Grants, and military aid to pay tuition. You’ve been told that the job is a numbers game: get them in the door, and don’t worry about whether they have what it takes to do college work. And don’t ask too many questions about the quality of education your college provides. That’s not your department. Anyway, students are adults, and it’s up to them to do their due diligence.

Now, maybe you wouldn’t take that job to begin with. The red flags are large and numerous. But imagine that somehow you find yourself working under those conditions. You might, logically enough, develop strategies to target people unlikely to have many other college options.

Hollie Harsh and her fiancé, Brian French, certainly fell into the “unlikely to go to college” category. By the spring of 2012, Hollie and Brian had been addicted to methamphetamines, homeless, and living in a tent for about four years. And yet Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit higher education corporation, treated them as promising applicants. The two had decided to clean themselves up and improve their lives, and Brian took the initiative to go online and do some research on grants. The day after filling out an online form, he got a call from a Corinthian recruiter, who offered Brian and Hollie money to tour Heald College. When the two told the recruiter their story, including that they were homeless, he said it wouldn’t be a problem and signed them up for classes—as well as $30,000 in student loans.

You can tell that this story isn’t going to have a happy ending. Hollie and Brian still didn’t have a place to live, so they moved their tent to campus. They cleaned themselves with water from a jug, unless a classmate offered to let them use their bathroom. After three semesters, Hollie and Brian dropped out, with no degree and a mountain of student debt. Brian later said, “What I say I got from Heald was a $16,000 T-shirt.”1

What’s outrageous is that what happened to Hollie and Brian wasn’t unique or even particularly surprising. Corinthian and other for-profit schools specifically targeted people like Hollie and Brian: individuals with “low self-esteem,” individuals with “few people in their lives who care about them,” individuals who were “isolated.” In other words, they targeted vulnerable people.2

How could Corinthian do this? “Greed,” said former California attorney general (and now U.S. senator) Kamala Harris.3 Greed was certainly part of it. But Corinthian’s actions were made possible by the profit motive that drives a segment of higher education in America. Our system of grants, loans, and tax credits has predictable weaknesses, because it operates via private enterprise. To be sure, many nonprofit schools take their educational mission seriously and admit students according to their capacity to do college work. And some for-profit schools do, too.

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