Bleeding Money, Phoenix University Will Shut Down More than a Hundred “Campuses”

October 17, 2012 in Financial Aid, For-Profit Education, Student Loans, The Corporate University | by | 1 comment

Three weeks ago for-profit college giant Kaplan announced it was closing thirteen campuses. Yesterday the Apollo Group, owner of Phoenix University, announced even larger cuts.

With Phoenix enrollment falling nearly 14% in the latest quarter, the company plans to close 115 of its 227 locations throughout the country.

Although the “campuses” facing closure are mostly among Phoenix’s smaller locations, the retrenchment reflects a dramatic reversal for Apollo and the industry as a whole. Apollo profits are down more than half from a year ago, and Phoenix enrollment has declined by more than 70,000 students from its peak.

As I noted when reporting on the Kaplan closures, for-profit students represent a bit more than a tenth of the students enrolled in American higher ed institutions, but they account for a quarter of student-loan borrowers and half of student loan defaults. Because the vast majority of for-profit college revenue comes government-backed student loans, these defaults are a significant drain on taxpayer money.

The government has been slow to regulate for-profit colleges as the scope of their malfeasance has become clear, but the regulatory pace has been picking up in recent months. At least as important, students are wising up about for-profits’ defects, and abandoning the schools in droves.

That’s good news, for them and for the rest of us.

Debate Non-Drinking Game

October 16, 2012 in Students | by | 6 comments

On Twitter a few minutes ago, I posted a list of ten topics I’d like to see discussed at tonight’s presidential debate, but don’t expect to. Since everything’s more fun when there’s something on the line, I’ve made the list into a contest — guess which ones will make it in, and whoever comes closest wins.

Here’s the list:

1. Poverty.
2. Climate change.
3. Reproductive rights.
4. LGBTQ issues.
5. Student debt.
6. The drug war.
7. Voter suppression.
8. Labor issues.
9. The DREAM Act.
10. Infrastructure.

I’ll be the final arbiter of what qualifies as a reference to each topic, and I’ll figure out a tiebreak algorithm in case nobody gets it exactly right. Post your guesses here or on Twitter.

Winner gets a blogpost by me on the subject of your choice, plus a physical prize to be named later.

Fisher v Texas, The Oral Argument

October 15, 2012 in Access, History, Litigation | by | Leave a comment

The typical Supreme Court oral argument lasts an hour, with the lawyer for the petitioner (whoever brought the suit) taking the first thirty minutes, and the lawyer for the respondent (the other party) taking the second. Each attorney stands at a podium when it’s his or her turn, and gives a presentation on their case to the nine justices. Or tries to.

That half hour isn’t just their time for making arguments, it’s also the justices’ time for questioning, and they can — and do — interrupt at any moment, for any reason. As an attorney arguing in front of the Supremes, you’re trying your best to get through the material you want to get through while also responding to any idea that pops into any justice’s mind. It’s a bit like batting in the World Series, but with every player on the opposite team hurling balls at your head.

It’s kind of awesome.

I’ve attended SCOTUS oral arguments only once, for a zero-profile case that a friend of a friend was arguing. (I took a road trip one other time and slept out all night trying to get in for Lawrence v. Texas, but a local college’s RA had brought her whole floor and we missed the cut.) The case I saw presented was a boring, technical, marginal one ultimately decided in a 9-0 decision, but seeing it argued in person was thrilling, strange, and — because I knew one of the attorneys — nerve-wracking even to watch.

The Supreme Court is, according to the Constitution, the final interpreter of the Constitution itself. If you don’t like what they decide, you’ve got to pass a constitutional amendment overturning them (something that’s ridiculously hard to do and hasn’t happened in four decades) or just sit tight and wait until they change their minds. And because there are only nine justices, and because they have so much discretion, changing one of their minds can change the course of history.

Supreme Court oral arguments are as close as an ordinary American can ever hope to get to watching the actual internal machinery of the federal government in operation. Whatever you think of that government, whatever you think of the institution of the Court itself, it’s impossible to observe it closely and not come away with a staggering sense of historical contingency.

Fisher v. Texas, the college admissions case SCOTUS heard argued last week, is a big deal. A win for the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, could mean an end to affirmative action in higher education in the United States, a major transformation in the country’s colleges and universities, and an altering of the life opportunities of the next few generations of Americans. In arguing this case, the Supremes were arguing over not just higher education policy but over what kind of country we are, what principles will guide us going forward. They were arguing about the nature of race and the meaning of fairness, and because they’re the Supreme Court of the United States, they get to decide how those concepts operate in American law.

This is a big deal and a big, complicated case, and over the next week or so I’ll be making my way through the oral argument transcript, analyzing the most important (and weirdest) moments.

See you tomorrow for part one.

It’s True: The FBI Urged Martin Luther King to Commit Suicide

October 13, 2012 in History, Organizing, Race, Violence | by | 2 comments

Earlier this morning, the UberFacts Twitter account posted the following tweet:

I learned about it a little while later because of a weird spike in my traffic — though the story is well documented and has appeared in a number of scholarly works it’s not particularly well known, and a post that I wrote about it earlier this year happens to show up near the top of Google’s searches for various phrases relating to it.

Anyway, like I say, it’s true. The FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover’s top deputy, sent Martin Luther King a blackmail package in November 1964 along with a letter urging him to kill himself to avoid the shame of the public disclosure of “your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self.”

The letter was timed to arrive shortly before King was scheduled to travel to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Fisher v Texas Update

October 12, 2012 in Access, Litigation, Race | by | Leave a comment

The transcript of Wednesday’s oral argument was released that afternoon, and it’s fascinating reading. So fascinating, in fact, that I think I’m going to make a project of writing about it next week — a series of posts excerpting and discussing the most interesting exchanges.

In the meantime, I wanted to just highlight a couple of things.

First, the justices were clearly paying attention to the “standing” issue — the question of whether Abigail Fisher has a case she’s properly situated to bring before the Court. You can’t just decide to sue the government because you don’t like something they did. (If you could, everybody would be suing all the time, and the court system would collapse.) You have to show that you’ve been harmed in a way that the courts can fix, and the standards for what kinds of harm count in which circumstances are narrow and complicated.

I’ll go into this in a little more detail next week, but given the way I broke down the case’s possible outcomes in my last post, it’s worth underscoring that the Supremes may just rule that Fisher wasn’t harmed, or can’t be made whole, and show her the door. If that happens, we’ll go through all this again with another lawsuit brought by a better plaintiff at some point in the next few years — possibly with a different lineup of justices on the Court, and almost certainly with Elena Kagan able to participate fully.

Second, Justice Sotomayor was a pretty strong questioner in this, her first campus affirmative action case. Given that she got into Princeton as an affirmative action admit, and that she once described herself as “a perfect affirmative action baby,” that’s perhaps not surprising. But it seems to me that the impact of Sotomayor’s advocacy, and her life experience, may be felt more in the next phases of the process than it was in oral arguments. Sonia Sotomayor would not be sitting on the Supreme Court today if affirmative action didn’t exist, and that fact renders the Court’s dilemma in this case more concrete than it otherwise might be.

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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