Hastings featured prominently in the groundbreaking May 27 Huffington Post piece "How the Congressional Black Caucus Went to War with Itself Over Wall Street," which described his "epic argument" with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) in 2011. Waters blasted Hastings
"for sponsoring a measure that was seen as a gift to shady for-profit colleges. What was more embarrassing than selling out, Waters told her assembled colleagues, was selling out cheap to nickel-and-dime scammers like the for-profit college industry. If you're going to sell your soul, she admonished, have some self-respect and sell high. (Hastings didn't dispute the conflict, but he did dispute Waters' point. 'It would be a mistaken premise,' he says, smiling. 'There are a hell of a lot of for-profit schools.')"
Key members of the unelected Black Misleadership Class are also beholden to Wall Street's for-profit federal educational money conduits. The National Urban League got a $1 million check from now-doomed Corinthian Colleges after president Marc Morial wrote a favorable op-ed in the Washington Post. Morial then joined Corinthian's board of directors, a sinecure that is worth between $60,000 and $90,000 a year in cash and deferred stock.
Al Sharpton, the MSNBC host and presidential pit bull, reciprocated the University of Phoenix's sponsorship of his TV special Advancing the Dream with a puff piece on the for-profit giant's online offerings, featuring the NFL's Larry Fitzgerald, a Phoenix student and booster. Phoenix University excels all others in funneling Black people's educational dollars directly to Wall Street via the Apollo Group, a $5.36 billion corporation with ties to the super-predatory Carlyle Group.
For-profit education has diverted many billions of dollars that Black students never actually possessed for even one moment-- but will owe for much of the rest of their lives -- into the accounts of the fabulously wealthy.
"The National Urban League got a $1 million check from now-doomed Corinthian Colleges after president Marc Morial wrote a favorable op-ed in the Washington Post."
Kai Wright, a brilliant young Black journalist, reported that Black enrollment in for-profit bachelor programs grew 264 percent between 2004 and 2010, compared to enrollment growth of only 24 percent at traditional four-year institutions. Blacks flocked to colleges of all kinds at 35 percent higher rates in the first decade of this century, with most of the increase at for-profits.
If Corinthian and its ilk are to be denounced and indicted -- as they should be -- then so should the vast bulk of the U.S. educational establishment, which through malignant neglect and outright hostility set Black people up for cruel exploitation by for-profit criminals.
One exception is historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), now reeling from a funding crisis set in motion by Obama administration "reforms" in student aid, which led to dramatic decreases in student enrollment. HBCU's and community colleges attempt to serve much the same demographic that is so grievously exploited and damaged by for-profit vultures. Therefore, these two step-children of American education are the logical starting points for building a publicly funded, virtually free higher educational system, sustained by a lion's share of the $32 billion in federal moneys that annually pass through for-profits on the way to Wall Street. (Total federal spending on HBCUs is currently less than $1.5 billion a year, and California's community college system, the nation's largest, is in constant crisis.)
Nobody can claim that the feds don't have the money; Washington spends it lavishly on edu-criminal enterprises. Most importantly, history shows conclusively that most of established U.S. public and private higher education is institutionally incapable of serving anything approaching sufficient numbers of darker and poorer Americans -- who are then corralled by scurrilous aid-snatchers and dream-breakers.
The for-profits should be put out of business with all deliberate speed, but it would be a further crime to shift that portion of federal aid to schools that have never demonstrated a willingness or competence to serve the demographic so cruelly exploited by the likes of Corinthian. The federal dollars that made Phoenix and Ashford Universities the top sources of Black baccalaureate degrees (for whatever that's worth) should not be diverted to institutions that are manifestly hostile to Black people, based on enrollment figures.
America needs more than just a free education; its excluded classes need a new system, free of the class and race bias that pervades the current higher educational order.
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