For-profit college chains recruit veterans to keep GI Bill money flowing - Ames Tribune
LOS ANGELES — Many of the nation’s largest for-profit college chains have seen enrollments plummet amid investigations into questionable job placement rates and deceptive marketing practices. For-profit colleges have collected $8. 2 billion from the latest GI Bill since it went into effect in 2009, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of government data. Those colleges enroll only 8 percent of all U. S. students but 30 percent of the 1. 4 million veterans who have used the most recent version of the GI Bill. To keep the GI Bill money flowing, the industry aggressively targeted veterans, and often hired them to help recruit their brethren returning home from the battlefields, according to internal school memos and interviews with former students and... Army veteran Don’re Walker took one of those recruiting jobs at an ITT campus in Orange County in 2012. He quit less than a year later. Once he understood the school’s high tuition costs — and students’ low probability of transferring credits to traditional colleges — he regularly advised veterans against attending. For-profit colleges grew rapidly during the Great Recession by offering admission to almost anyone with a high school degree, flexible class schedules and promises of job training to displaced workers. As enrollments soared, regulators took notice of high tuition costs and poor student performance. Source: amestrib.com
