In 2005, Yasmine Issa was a 24-year-old homemaker, raising twin toddlers in Yonkers, New York. Having just divorced, the newly single mom, with no college degree or professional training, was also in need of a job.
So, like 2.8 million others, Issa enrolled at a for-profit postsecondary school – the kind that you see advertised on TV and highway billboards – called the Sanford-Brown Institute in White Plains.
The program, for people training to become ultrasound technicians, included 12 months of classes, a 6-month internship and the assistance of their career services center, all for around $32,000. Issa used her savings and child support payments to pay for half of the training and took out a federal student loan of $15,000 to pay the rest.
What Issa didn’t realize, until she’d finished the program and spent five months unsuccessfully searching for a job, was that the Sanford-Brown ultrasound program was not accredited by the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonographers (ARDMS).
Without a degree from an ARDMS accredited program, which she could have obtained for half the price at a New Jersey community college, Issa was left with no job prospects and thousands in student loan debt, which was now accruing interest.
Issa related these facts late last month at a senate committee hearing on the ticking time bomb that is for-profit education. But, believe it or not, Issa’s testimony was not the day’s most distressing.
That honor belonged to Steven Eisman, the portfolio manager whose foresight about the subprime mortgage crisis was profiled in Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short.
“Until recently,” the matter-of-fact financier began his testimony. “I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong.”
What followed was a chilling account of how the for-profit education sector has managed to capture billions of taxpayer dollars while, in many cases, bankrupting the students it was meant to educate.