It is now widely acknowledged that many for-profit colleges engaged in unsavory practices to maintain the flow of taxpayer dollars. By marketing to veterans and low-income students eligible for the maximum amount of federal financial aid, owners grew their schools rapidly, while overcharging and under-delivering along the way. In many cases, these…

This report is the fourth in a series examining the troubled history of for-profit higher education, from the problems that plagued the post-World War II GI Bill to the reform efforts undertaken by the George H. W. Bush administration. The abuses by trade schools and the resulting student loan defaults that plagued the industry during the Reagan…

As the Post-9/11 GI Bill nears its fourth year, with more than 550,000 veterans enrolled in thousands of institutions, advocacy groups, lawmakers, and President Obama warn that veterans are vulnerable in a higher-education marketplace eager for their GI Bill dollars--with some purveyors, particularly for-profits, recruiting aggressively. The…

The Post-9/11 GI Bill took effect on August 1, 2009, increasing the education benefits available to military service members who served after September 10, 2001. A previous National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) study used national data collected in 2007-08 to profile military undergraduate and graduate students who received benefits…

Since the late 19th century, the proprietary school sector in the United States has undergone four major cycles of scandal and reform: the emergence of the commercial college sector in the 1870s, the progressive era of the early 20th century, the fallout of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill), and the period following the 1972…