Maryland’s legislature passed Senate Bill 985 this week which tightens the screws a bit on for-profit colleges by tightening regulation of these institutions. Governor O’Malley supports the bill and is expected to sign it soon. Where are the feds on this? The for-profit college industry doubled spending on lobbying this year. Ah. For-profit colleges are not a bad thing.
But government offering loans for tuition which generates people looking to find opportunistic ways to grab onto that money. Some for profit colleges are probably great, some are not so great. We should figure out which is which. Here is what we do know: many people going to these colleges are not paying back their loans and are not graduating. These numbers are twice as high with for profit colleges, a statistic that should give us all cause for pause.