Gabor’s provocative remedy — subsequently published in Fast Company — seems rather timely, especially now in light of a recent Wall Street Journal report highlighting another related problem: The alarmingly high number of default rates on student loans by graduates of for-profit colleges in the USA.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Students who took out government loans to pay for their education at for-profit colleges had a 21% default rate in the first three years they were required to make payments, about three times the level of four-year public and nonprofit institutions, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of government data….
Twenty-two campuses of the Everest College chain, a unit of publicly-traded for-profit Corinthian Colleges, Inc., had three-year default rates of 30% or higher. One of its schools, Everest Institute in San Antonio, Tex., had a default rate of more than 40%. The Everest schools offer programs in areas including medical assisting, massage therapy and criminal justice.
The Kaplan unit of Washington Post Co. had seven campuses at or above the 30% mark and ITT Technical Institute, owned by the publicly-traded ITT Educational Services Inc., had one campus that exceeded the 30% threshold. Of the 5,600 schools whose data are being released Monday, 316 had default rates of 30% or more, and three-quarters were for-profits, the Journal analysis found.
[Image via Fraggle Red.]
