I’m against for-profit schooling. It’s possible for a school designed to make a profit to offer its students a quality education, but the lure of the almighty dollar makes the urge to recruit students who don’t have the qualifications to benefit from the school and to scrimp on staff and supplies, because every dollar you don’t spend is another dollar in your pocket, is nearly irresistible. I don’t like it when charter schools are run as for-profit enterprises, and for-profit colleges are notorious for getting most of their money from government-based student financial aid and supplementing that with student loans, then giving their students a substandard education and leaving them in debt.
That means I don’t think much of Laureate Education, a for-profit higher-education company that runs schools around the world, or the fact that Bill Clinton was paid a total of $16.5 million to serve as honorary chancellor of Laureate International Universities from 2010 to 2014.
Laureate Education has 85 campuses around the world. The greatest number are in Latin America, 31, followed by Europe, 23. The U.S. has 8. Some are brick-and-mortar institutions, others are online schools. Laureate spends more than $200 million a year on advertising, uses aggressive student recruiting techniques and sometimes increases enrollment without expanding its faculty or facilities to properly serve the larger student body.
If you want to know more details about Laureate Education, the best article I found is in a Bloomberg publication from 2014. Here’s the key sentence in a very long story.
Laureate has thrived by exporting many of the practices that for-profit colleges adopted in the U.S., such as offering career-oriented courses and spending heavily on marketing. Such strategies helped build what was a booming industry until 2010, when recruiting abuses and mounting student debt spurred a regulatory crackdown by President Barack Obama’s administration.
That pretty much sums it up. The owner saw a flawed, roundly criticized, very profitable U.S. education model and decided to take it worldwide.
What did Bill Clinton do to earn his money?
In this paid position, Clinton has trekked to Laureate’s campuses in countries such as Malaysia, Peru and Spain, making more than a dozen appearances on [Laureate Education’s] behalf.
He probably did a bit more than that, but it’s clear the company hired him to dress up its brand, not because of any expertise he offered the company. He wasn’t alone in selling his political celebrity to the company.
Laureate has bolstered its image with the help of former political leaders such as Condoleezza Rice, Al Gore and Tony Blair, who have made appearances at Laureate schools.
[snip]
Laureate has installed several people from Clinton’s administration in key executive and board positions, including Richard Riley, the former secretary of education; Joseph Duffey, the former head of the U.S. Information Agency; and Henry Cisneros, who served as Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development.
Laureate has a few things in its favor, but a list of its positives amounts to damning the for-profit education system with faint praise. It brought greater access to higher education in places like Latin America where the countries’ public universities couldn’t meet the demand. It purchased some schools that were failing financially and made them economically viable. Some of its schools are reasonably highly rated (though some others have lost their accreditation). And its schools aren’t a complete scam like Trump University, a pure money making scheme which was neither a university nor run by Trump. That’s about it.
Judging from the ways Bill Clinton made money after his presidency, I’d say his position as honorary chancellor at Laureate had less to do with his commitment to the company and more to do with making up for lost time—or, to be more accurate, making up for lost earning potential, from 1978 when he was first elected governor of Arkansas until he left the White House in 2001. That being said, his very profitable flirtation with the for-profit education sector, especially at a time when its questionable practices were being exposed in the U.S., doesn’t speak well for his character.
Hillary’s main connection to Laureate is that Bill is her husband. (If you want to find all kinds of loose linkages between her and the company which can be used to damn her by possible association, there are plenty of right wing websites to give you what you want—or most likely you can go through the comments below and find all the links you need.) Bill severed ties with the company in 2014, probably because of Hillary’s upcoming presidential bid, meaning there’s no current conflict of interest if she becomes president.
The 2016 Democratic Party Platform says it “oppose[s] for-profit charter schools focused on making a profit off of public resources.” It also has a section about cracking down on “predatory for-profit schools” at the post-high school level. There’s no telling how a Hillary Clinton presidency will deal with the for-profit higher-education sector, but the Laureate connection doesn’t do anything to bolster my confidence.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2016.
Interesting. I suppose on the day that Bernie Sanders is making a speech at the Democratic National Convention telling us to vote for Hillary Clinton, it’s safe to admit the Laureate connection “doesn’t….bolster [your] confidence in Ms. Clinton.”
Interesting, too, that just before the convention started we finally got the back story behind the obvious undermining the party machine had been doing of the Sanders campaign. Now Wasserman-Schultz will resign — now that the primary campaign is over and she achieved, through the medium of the DNC, what everyone in that Democratic but un-democratic cabal wanted her to achieve.
So are you voting for Jill Stein, David? Had enough of your party’s hypocrisies, local and national? I didn’t get that impression listening to you spin for Sanchez on the Buckmaster show last week. So don’t try to give us the impression that you have something resembling a conscience helping you make decisions about what to think and what to write….now that saying something negative about Clinton won’t make a damn bit of difference in whether or not she gets the nomination, or whether or not people feel forced to vote for a Wall-Street bought and purchased candidate to prevent Trump from getting into the Oval Office.
What great things the Democratic party is doing for us, right? I’ve seen few things sadder in recent decades than watching them project the Sanders “They’ve all come to look for America” campaign ad before he spoke at the convention — then watching the media cut to Bill Clinton’s face after Sanders told us to vote for Hillary.
They have destroyed the party of the people. 6 months ago I thought the Republics party was all washed up. Tonight I realize that it’s actually the Democratic party that is washed up, along with the lying mainstream media.
What a sad day in America. Hillary has put trumped Nixon in Watergate by cheating within her own party.
“…his very profitable flirtation with the for-profit education sector, especially at a time when its questionable practices were being exposed in the U.S., doesn’t speak well for his character.”
You think?
I would like to suggest that for-profit colleges would not be near the problem that they currently are if public community colleges and four year colleges and universities were fully funded and held accountable to do what they were intended to do.
Good Lord, Rick – how long has it been since anyone was under the impression that Bill Clinton might have a good character? I was teaching elementary school at the time of the Lewinsky debacle. I’ll never forget having to figure out how to steer adolescents — in a Catholic school run by an order of nuns, no less — through discussions of “U.S. current events” during that period. We may not be able to expect politicians to be above reproach in their personal lives, but the narcissism and multiple layers of interwoven, serious errors in judgment revealed in that episode were appalling and unforgivable in someone whom the country had entrusted with its highest office. To many observers it seemed that the character issues were also reflected in a policy agenda too influenced by wealth interests that showed very little understanding of or commitment to the social justice concerns of the party of FDR and LBJ. And now this man and his tarnished wife, after their cronies used the DNC to undermine a primary opponent who was worth 100 Bill and Hillary Clintons, are on the fast track right back into the Oval Office, with a rival on the Republican side of the contest who many believe is capable of bringing on the apocalypse if he is elected.
Should progressives try to rally their base behind what the Clintons represent? They risk destroying their own reputations in doing it.
Sad days for our country.
The Clintons have gotten more passes on prosecution than any political figure in history, except maybe for Ted Kennedy. Why are they allowed to break our laws? She is the Democratic party and now they have tampered with federal elections. Bernie should have sued, but now he crawls in bed with them.
Come on voters, put and end to this nightmare.
IBCWBCIFQAW
Of course, my “You think?’ was directed at Captain Obvious’s struggle to recognize that yes, the Clintons are deceitful, manipulative and hyper-venal. But I agree with you.
The only issue I’m struggling now is my write-in choice or for the first time since ’68 sitting this one out. The struggle with the write-in began last night when my favorite senator, Al Franken did a stand up routine while expressing support for Clinton. I had planned on writing in the Franken-Stein ticket with Jill as my choice for VP.
With just over a hundred days until the election I expect to see more surprises: the August Surprise, the September Surprise, the October Surprise and the November Surprise that collectively take out Clinton and leave us with who?
A loathsome maniac taking the oath of office while pundits shake their heads and the Clintons parse the meaning of “landslide.”
Yes Clinton should not be involved in this stuff. But Trump University was obviously set up for the benefit of the students, yeah right. And the Arizona legislature continues to funnel money to on line school crooks, in the name of choice though. One company has billboards all over the state discussing the wonders of on line, for profit, schools.
“Yes Clinton should not be involved in this stuff. But Trump University…”
Look Francis (and all Clinton apologists) this is a fifth grader’s excuse for ignoring the truth (“I was wrong but Jimmy was worse”). Bill Clinton took $16,500,000 to “trek” to foreign countries supporting a for profit education scam taken down by Obama. That is more, for this single engagement, than most of us earn in 5-10 lifetimes of actual work. Start adding the hundreds of millions in speakers fees and we’re talking real money, more than our families earn in the same time period.
There are none so blind that those who will not see.
The government has always contracted out for services. The private sector does most things more efficiently.
As long as the contracting is properly done and with proper oversight, I don’t see any reason to damn it out of hand just because it’s got that dirty “profit” word in it.
That said, for-profit education has been anything but well regulated and abuses are rampant.
Bill Clinton is and has been an opportunist, most certainly profiteering after he held the office of President. He can get all the money he wants from speaking fees as long as people want to pay him, but I do not like anyone who considers education funds as easy money. Bill’s wife Hillary is and has been calculating, methodical and very patient in her own pursuit of this same high office. They have shared interests politically, but they are not the same person. She is not a vain and stupid sexual guy who from time to time considered adult females as perquisites. If Trump targets Hillary because of Bill, it is a false equivalence. But Trump probably will, because Donald Trump is and has been a nasty piece of work.
Thinking Aloud
Hillary is every bit as calculating and mendacious as her husband. Or do we simply overlook the millions she has “earned” in super-secret speeches to Goldman Sachs and a host of other Wall Street supporters? People aren’t buying into the Perverted Bill scenario; they do see how he has extorted hundreds of millions in speaker fees and favors from the same slime that now support his wife and that’s enough. Oh and Trump (despicable as he is) insults women with his moronic diatribes?
The least offensive comment from Hillary while standing by her man was actually a threat to those accusing him of sexual harassment: ” “I think we’re going to find some other things. And I think that when all of this is put into context, and we really look at the people involved here, look at their motivations and look at their backgrounds, look at their past behavior, some folks are going to have a lot to answer for.”
There is much more to this story. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clinton-friends-lobby-us-most-notorious-for-profit-colleges-shaulis?trk=mp-author-card
The considerable research on Laureate Education is impressive, not withstanding that such enterprise, though in need of oversight, is an excellent prod to public education to get its act together. A rush to charters is good medicine for the sickly job, particularly TUSD, has/is doing for its students. To invoke”anything for the buck” is hypocritical since it appears all you do is go after that “buck.” Ciro
So, you’re just blowing off the $55M Laureate received from USAID(the State Department)? And you don’t care about all the underwater Federal Student Loans that Laureate students got and are now defaulting? This is a scam like Trump U only just more audacious and involving the US taxpayers. The technical term is GRAFT.
Where oh where is the coverage of the outright scammer Trump University, still being investigated for fraud? USAID goes around the world doing well by doing good, but sometimes they don’t do good and in this era I question even the reason for their existence. Much like the CIA, they are money eaters and I would like to see their balance sheet, good things versus stupid things . USAID may be under the umbrella of the State Department, but it has nothing to do with embassies across the world.
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