Op-ed by staff attorney Whitney Barkley......
"At the 2014 State of the Union address, Sabrina Simone Jenkins, a resident of Charleston, South Carolina, was seated in the First Lady’s box. She was not highlighted in the speech, nor the face of a major policy point, but her presence at the year’s most important political speech deserves attention. Her story is shared by too many American students.
Jenkins is a single mother with a sixteen-year-old daughter, working at the Charleston County Housing Authority. With two degrees, including a Master’s in Human Resource Management, Ms. Jenkins should be well on her way to the middle class(1).
But Ms. Jenkins earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from one of the nation’s for-profit college behemoths. The “exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation” of this industry were the subject of a scathing 2012 report from a Senate Committee led by committee chairman Senator Tom Harkin(2).
Ms. Jenkins has close to $100,000 in student loan debt from her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, an amount that is not atypical for a graduate of a for-profit school. DeVry doesn’t have a campus in South Carolina, so students must get their degree online – paying up to $88,000 for a Bachelor’s degree alone. It’s little wonder that Jenkins student loan burden is almost four times higher than the average South Carolina college graduate. For the state of South Carolina, that debt is astronomically high. According to Project on Student Debt, the average South Carolinian graduates with $27,416 in student loans(3).
The for-profit college industry recruits students like Ms. Jenkins by convincing them that their high tuition prices are worth it, and that they offer flexibility and access other schools don’t. And they spend a lot of taxpayer dollars doing it. In 2009, DeVry University, the source of Ms. Jenkins’ degrees, took 80.9% of its revenues from federal taxpayers, and a vast amount-–almost $523 million--went to marketing and executive salaries, according to the Harkin report."
..............http://www.mscenterforjustice.org/our-work/consumer-protection/profit-colleges