The Young Invicibles held a media event on Capitol Hill last week during which the student advocacy group and four Democratic Senators called for stronger regulation of the for-profit sector. Dymond Blackmon, a former student, spoke at the event. He said he racked up more than $90,000 in debt while earning an associate degree from the International Academy of Design and Technology, which is owned by Career Education Corp., a for-profit chain. Read more...

A consumer advocacy group on Monday sued the U.S. Department of Education over the agency’s refusal to release documents showing how the federal government awards bonuses to debt collection companies it hires to recover defaulted student loans. The National Consumer Law Center charges in its lawsuit that the department violated the Freedom of Information Act by withholding records relating to the performance and incentive pay for the government’s contracted debt collectors. Read more...

Migrant workers involved in the construction of New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus faced harsh conditions, The New York Times reported. In interviews with dozens of workers, the newspaper found that conditions were “starkly different” from those articulated in the university’s “statement of labor values," with the migrant workers reporting that they had to pay fees to recruitment agencies of up to a year’s wages (and had never been reimbursed, contrary to NYU’s stated policies), that they worked 11- to 12-hour days, six to seven days a week, and that they were not permitted to hold on to their own passports. Read more...

Roughly 9 percent of the $511 billion spent in 2011 in the United States on higher education went to financing interest payments or to corporate profits, according to a new analysis from the Center for Culture, Organizations and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) commissioned the report, which found that $45 billion in higher education spending that year was for interest on individual student loan debt or on colleges' borrowing, or went to profits made by for-profit college companies. Read more...

By Clifford Adelman. Forty years ago, I was assigned to teach “Open Enrollment English” at the City College of the City University of New York.  The course was classified as remedial, and credits were non-additive. Walking sprightly and empty-headed into the class, I found one-third of them were off the boat from Hong Kong, one-third off the boat from San Juan, and most of the other third off boats from Palermo, Porto and Gdansk (remember: this was 1970). The first writing assignment produced three different versions of English, and I had no idea where they came from -- or how. Read more...

By Jorge Klor de Alva. The debate on the Department of Education’s proposed “Gainful Employment” rule has fixed attention on the failure by both sides to resolve one of the nation’s most important problems: How to effectively serve the education needs of America’s new traditional students. Read more...

By Gloria Cordes Larson. There has been extensive hand-wringing about what can be done to help young graduates succeed in today’s tough labor market – especially in the spring, as high school seniors decide on their college offers, and college seniors prepare to graduate and face the world. Unemployment and underemployment rates among recent college graduates in the United States – largely a result of the recession’s lingering damage – are too high. Read more...