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Last month College Guide wrote about the efforts going on in many states to regulate the way for-profit colleges do business. It looks like Illinois is next.
According to an article by Tom Kacich in the News-Gazette:
The biggest reduction in the House higher education spending plan would come with the elimination of $25 million in MAP tuition assistance to students attending schools such as DeVry University and the Culinary Institute of Chicago. Students attending some Illinois proprietary schools have been eligible for tuition assistance since 1998, according to Katharine Gricevich of the Illinois Student Assistance Commission.
“I find it appalling that the commission would allocate $25 million to for-profit entities in the state of Illinois in the first place when we can’t pay school districts,” sad Rep. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet.
It’s not specifically an effort to reform proprietary colleges so much as just a way to try and save precious state resources.
By preventing for-profit colleges from taking advantage of the Monetary Award Program (MAP), a need-based state grant, Illinois will be able to reduce appropriations for higher education from $2.157 billion (spent last year) to $2.089 billion.
Gricevich pointed out, however, that as a result of this change some 8,000 Illinois students planning to attend for-profit colleges will not have aid for next year.
One state legislator, Daniel Biss, D-Evanston, said (perhaps facetiously) that for-profit colleges could consider offering their own grants to make up the difference.
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Texas Aggie on May 26, 2011 7:43 AM:
It seems to me that the way to grade a school as to whether it is failing or not is by how well its graduates do once they get into the real world, not necessarily by how well they do on a test. While that measure may not work for elementary schools, it certainly works for schools that are supposed to be preparing students for jobs. Given that, if a proprietary school's graduates can't get the jobs for which they were prepared, I see absolutely no reason why that particular school should not be classified as failing and shut down. It certainly should not be getting tax payer funding.
najablah on May 28, 2011 2:46 PM:
I'd say the same should go for federal student loans. Take the law schools for example. It has been well documented in recent years that laws schools use inflated and misleading employment stats to lure in students. The law schools know that the stats are juked and that many of their graduates will never find gainful employment in the legal field. Yet, the schools survive on federal student loans. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal student loan money even though they are providing a net negative service by defrauding these students and consigning them to a lifetime of non-dischargeable debt. All of the schools that can't prove their worth should lose their access to federal student loan money.