WATCH: John Oliver Exposes Sham of For-Profit Colleges

From AlterNet:

Oliver spends the bulk of the program exposing the misleading tactics of for-profit universities like DeVry University and ITT. These institutions account for 30% of national college loans, even though their students only make up 14% of the total higher education population. The schools prey on low-income and disenfranchised communities, offering them subpar educations at exorbitant prices.

More here, with video.

The for-profit university was disturbing to me from the moment I understood the concept. My original discomfort came from my knowledge, as an educator, that the "product" sold by these businesses is so esoteric and abstract that quantifying and assigning monetary value to it is extraordinarily difficult. So there had to be something wrong with it from the get go. It is a necessarily dishonest venture.
 
Apparently, however, as John Oliver so adeptly illustrates, that's all just the tip of the iceberg with how lame for-profit colleges are.

Really, the biggest problem, as I see it, is our culture's recently embraced confusion about the differences between university study and job training. That's the opening these predator institutions use to rip people off.

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