Jesse Jackson comes out in favor of more debt for black students:
I urge Secretary Arne Duncan to refrain from finalizing the Gainful Employment proposed regulation until Congress is given a full opportunity to evaluate the actual effects of this proposal on minority and lower income students in America who attend career colleges. I call upon Secretary Duncan to hit the pause button and give Congress a chance to make recommendations on possible modifications.
I'll give Jackson the benefit of the doubt here and assume he's just speaking from ignorance. The impact of these schools on minority students is pretty well documented -- they are more likely to attend such schools and less likely to graduate when they do, and they end up with far more debt than at other institutions. Also more debt than white students who attend these same institutions.
The "gainful employment" rule would prevent for-profit colleges from getting lots of taxpayer cash to give students useless degrees they'll spend a lifetime paying for by ensuring that eligibility for federal loans is premised on not producing alumni who spend more than a certain percentage of their salaries on loan debt or high default rates. There's no reason why for-profit schools should be propped up by taxpayer money (up to 90 percent of their revenue) when they're not providing their students with a useful education. Shani Hilton adds:
While it is true that students of color represent a large portion of the students in for-profit programs, this is precisely why they stand to gain the most from gainful employment regulations. The rule would weed out the worst actors in the for-profit industry by cutting off federal aid to programs whose students carry heavy debt and have high rates of loan default, thereby allowing higher quality, better-performing programs to flourish.
This is part of a really sad trend, where "black leaders" are easily co-opted by debt-producing industries, deploying the rhetoric of racial equality in service to a predatory company's bottom line. So you end up with Al Sharpton shilling for LoanMax and Tavis Smiley helping Wells Fargo hock "ghetto loans" to "mud people." The argument seems to be that it would be racist not to shunt people of color into credit markets where they'll be exploited. Bonus points if you then move on to attack the president in vague terms for not having a "black agenda."
