Cutbacks in public technical school and university programs have created new opportunities for for-profit colleges, which have skillfully used public money to churn displaced workers and other students through their machinery, leaving them worse off than before, according to the findings of a two-year investigation of 30 for-profit colleges released this week by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
The report from Harkin, chair of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, confirms what Michael Rosen, president of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 212 at Milwaukee Area Technical College, has been witnessing in recent years. Laid-off workers desperate for a new career, Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans hoping to re-start their lives, and recent high school graduates have all been frustrated by long waiting lines for programs at public technical schools and universities. Rosen has been a passionate critic of public technical-college cutbacks, the distortion of technical education as it falls under increasing corporate influence, and the growth of for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan and others.
“The losers are students who are paying four to five times as much for a public education, but wind up with an inferior education that doesn’t help them in today’s job market,” Rosen says. “In this economy, we are seeing layoffs in every occupation—whether flight attendants or factory workers—so the number of people looking for training has increased, but the funding for technical schools has decreased. This leaves some people out [unable to find the program they want in public institutions], and these people are preyed upon by for-profit colleges.”


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