The Obama Administration’s Misguided War on For-Profit Colleges

In Forbes, economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University documents the blunders behind the Obama administration’s war on for-profit colleges that wiped out $8 billion in value for shareholders.  Earlier, former Congressman Bob Barr wrote about the topic. Forbes also has articles on how America is saturated with unnecessary college graduates, and how government-subsidized higher education is increasingly becoming a bad bargain for state taxpayers.

As Vedder notes, the government is foolishly attacking for-profit colleges even though non-profit colleges have even worse outcomes in terms of leading to gainful employment for their students.  Moreover, some public colleges have drop-out rates that exceed 90 percent.

At Reason magazine, Nick Gillespie explains how claims that elite colleges use to justify their inflated tuition are based on a statistical fallacy.

We wrote earlier about how college tuition is increasingly a rip-off, since most of the people who have ended up in college due to increasing college-attendance rates in recent years  have ended up in unskilled jobs (such as 5,057 janitors with Ph.D’s or advanced degrees), and since the current college debt bubble dwarfs the housing bubble. (100 colleges now charge $50,000 or more a year, compared to just 5 in 2008-09.)

Image credit: Florida Career College’s flickr photostream.