Senators Condemn For-Profit Colleges’ Use of Military Tuition Aid

This entry was posted on 06.18.13, in Private Institutions and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Two Democratic senators used a Congressional hearing on Wednesday to condemn for-profit colleges as preying on active members of the armed forces to receive federal tuition aid by increasing enrollments but ignoring academic quality.

At the hearing, before the defense appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island called for stricter accreditation standards and criticized for-profit universities like DeVry as using slick marketing tactics to get a larger cut of federal dollars.

The hearing seemed to revive Senator Durbin’s efforts to pressure the for-profit sector to increase value for military members after he tried last year to reduce the percentage of federal dollars those universities could keep as income.

Now Mr. Durbin focused on improving standards at the universities eligible to receive the $568-million that the U.S. Department of Defense budgets for military tuition assistance.

“This program needs to be improved, and I think it can be,” he said. “We need to take a hard look, starting with accreditation. Some of these schools should not be accredited. There ought to be some policing” within the for-profit sector. <Read more.>

Via Cory Weinberg, The Chronicle of Higher Ed.