CT Blue

When I read this article this morning, it struck me that it is in many ways emblematic of what is so wrong with the country at the moment:

Colleges would be barred from spending taxpayer money on advertising, marketing, and recruiting under a Senate bill that targets for-profit institutions.

The 15 largest for-profits, including Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix, spent a combined $3.7 billion, or 23 percent of their fiscal 2009 budgets, on advertising, marketing and recruiting, according to a summary of the bill, proposed by Democratic senators Tom Harkin of Iowa and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Nonprofit colleges spend an average of 0.5 percent of revenue on marketing, the lawmakers said.

Now, there are two things about this proposal that are immediately clear. First, no one in their right mind, except the people who run these for-profit “schools”; could be against it. Second, there is not a chance in the world that it will become law.

First, lets remind ourselves of the business plan of these for-profits. They aggressively recruit students, almost all of whom they induce to take out federally guaranteed student loans. So long as the “student” stays on the hook for a few weeks, the money is secured to the school, which then is perfectly happy to see the “student” drop out, now burdened by debt with an education that adds little or nothing to his or her ability to earn a living or his or her ability to reason. The situation is not much different for those who manage to graduate, except the debt is bigger. We the taxpayers end up footing the bill and get nothing in return for our investment. The for-profit education industry has proven conclusively that the profit motive and an educational mission are not compatible.

So, from the point of view of us humble taxpayers, anything that diminishes the amount of our misspent dollars that goes to these people is a good idea, not to mention that this particular bill might make it more difficult for these schools to destroy the lives of the gullible people that believe their hype.

But it happens that there are a couple of things about this industry that complement the Republican business plan, which is why this bill will never become law.

• The Republicans fervently believe in looting the federal treasury in order to enrich private individuals, who return a relatively small portion (but still huge in the aggregate) amount of that money to their Republicans enablers in the form of campaign donations and other bribes. This bill would interfere with that.
• Republicans believe that an uneducated America is a Republican America. This is one of the reasons they so fervently believe in cutting spending on education, legislating the teaching of myth as history and science, and handing even our primary schools over to the tender mercies of corporations. The resulting ignorance and stupidity of the American people is not a bug, it’s a feature. How else can you get people to believe the garbage that people like Limbaugh spew? Maintaining the for-profit educational industry, with it’s dismal record so far as actually educating people goes, meshes perfectly with Republican interests.

So, you won’t be seeing this bill, or any like it, become law.