Is For-Profit Education the Next Subprime Mortgage Crisis?

Picture 1By Olivia Scheck

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.

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Government Isn’t The Problem, Private Enterprise Is: The Global Terrorism Of Al Qaeda, BP And Goldman Sachs

by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)  oil-spill pelican


Today there are three forms of terrorism threatening the world: political, financial and environmental terrorism. These three forms of terrorism are responsible for the destruction of human lives, livelihoods, property and the environment to a degree that rivals the ravages of war.

All three forms are executed by global, private-enterprise, non-state agents. Our inch-deep media have bestowed the moniker of terrorism on only one of these forms — the political-religious Al Qaeda variety — while leaving the other two off the hook.

This is a little like calling Ted Bundy a crazy serial killer and Jeffrey Dahmer a highly sensitive connoisseur of human protein.

Just consider the many attributes these three forms of terrorism have in common. All three are partly funded by tax dollars — via tax credits and subsidies, tax-payer bail-outs, and taxpayer-funded wars that serve as recruitment drives for political terrorists. All three expound a crazed fundamentalist faith affirming the rectitude of their respective causes. All three feel entitled to huge rewards for their destructive behaviors. All three leave it up to regular folks to clean up after them. All three are unapologetic about their activities (adding insult to injury, some may issue a belated apology to their victims). And all three display a bizarre indifference to human suffering, despite their rhetoric to the contrary.

Moreover, all three forms of terrorism have been enabled by one gaping sinkhole in the social fabric: they appear to have been aided, abetted and promoted by a lamentable lack of government oversight. In all three cases, the problem isn't too much government: it's too little government.

Here's a brief recap of the three forms of terrorism and their main achievements so far.

Political terrorism. Achievements: the death of 2,976 Americans in NYC on 9/11, and many other deaths in London, Madrid, Bali, India, and Iraq. Motive: anger at America's interference in the Middle East, including US backing of Israel against Palestinians and support of repressive Arab regimes, and US wars against Islamic states. Main agent of terrorism: Al Qaeda. Weapons: airplanes, suicide bombs, car bombs, IEDs, websites.

Financial terrorism. Achievements: Loss of 100 million jobs worldwide. Millions suffering from food insecurity. Wrecked economies. Many small business closings. A great loss of family homes. Motive: profit. Main agent of terrorism: Goldman Sachs. Weapons: speculative bubbles, debt securitization, unsafe derivatives, campaign contributions, regulatory capture, bad mortgages.

Environmental terrorism. Achievements: Bhopal, Exxon Valdez oil spill, Nigerian oil spills, Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Motive: profit. Main agent of terrorism: BP. Weapons: unsafe drilling practices, indifference to worker safety, 1960s clean-up technology, useless contingency plans, campaign contributions, takeover of regulatory agencies, misinformation about climate change, managerial indifference to risk and the environment.

Now let's take a look at the three main agents of terrorism in turn and see what government should be, but isn't, doing about them. In this order: Goldman Sachs, Al Qaeda and BP.

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Women’s Freedom – A Short Introduction to Why I Care

Womensrights Why have so many stopped fighting for women’s rights? We fight for “human” rights and discuss them as if they were a natural element of being human; groups lobby and defend, almost diabolically and with much vitriol, the rights of “animals” (species that are not human). Yet women’s rights, that better half of our species, remain a neglected element of secular discourse. It surprises me that so few of those who consider themselves secular humanists do anything concerning this important issue. This does not mean that many secular humanists do not think it important but there is a great divide between simply thinking it important and doing something to make it so. Not only do I think it important, I believe in my lifetime the liberation of woman, all over the world, for all time, is the single most important goal that we must defend, increase and enhance. The other goals which many of us long for, freedom of speech, lack of coercion, and so on, all are part of, and tributaries within, this pathway. By fighting for women, we fight for free speech and liberty; by defending their rights, we defend human rights; by finding the cause for their oppression we cease the cycle of violence and poverty within families around the world. Reports have suggested that a decrease in women’s freedom correlates to an increase in religious fanaticism. This does not mean that once women are free, all over the world, religious dogmatism, backward political regimes and patriarchal bullying will be banished from the earth; but there is little debate that the fight in itself will lead to a greater amount of freedom, more happiness and will result in woman no longer being the fodder for the religious wrath of backward mullahs and reverends.

According to estimates, which have more than likely increased, 70 percent of the two billion poor are women; two thirds of illiterate adults are women; employment rates for women are declining after increasing (yes, of course, the world wars are now over). At the same time many women are forced into veils and burqas, burnt for merely looking at men, stoned to death or buried alive for adultery, forced into sex, pregnancy and delivering HIV-infected children because they were raped, but if they were to report it, they would either be raped again, executed, exiled from their village or town or family. While this happens, the fashion industry booms with make-up and high-heels and plastic models and girls as thin as the paper they are pictured on, presenting us with yet another contrast to whether women really are in control of their bodies even in supposedly liberated societies. That is an issue unto itself, which I am not focused on, but it certainly should give us pause considering the areas we are dealing with. Modern writers, in the secular West, tell women to go back to the kitchen, obey the husband, be a mother, tie an umbilical cord around the house and hang themselves from it. “Feminine is good,” says women’s rights author, Nikki van der Gaag, “feminism is bad.” A lot of feminist views, philosophy and political goals truly deserve scorn, since they replace one tyranny with another; are subject to faith-based, dogmatic adherence rather than calculated sex equality. The vengeful world of patriarchal accident has given birth to a malicious view toward its women. As this highlights, the malicious desire is one of control – but I do not wish to instil Orwellian fears in big governments and little men.

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Monday Poem

1st Zucchini

Today I spied our first zucchini
which has followed its saffron flower
like a compliant stud swelling in shade
within a forest of coarse stubbled stems
under a tent of broad leaves
green as the second color of Christmas
a nativity here of the first order
all six inches of it looking to a future of sacrifice
in a sauté mingled with garlic and onions
growing now in the nest of nature
at the whim of god
. . . for want of a satisfying
rational explanation
…………………
by Jim Culleny
July 4th, 2010

Fire in the belly

100_6297 Am I an elitist? Am I looking down from the perspective of a middle-class ivory tower when I write about education and the need to reform our education system in innovative ways to help graduate more students who are better equipped to compete in the new global economy? I’ve certainly sometimes been accused of that over the last 7 months of writing for 3 Quarks. It’s a criticism that gives me pause. My children can read above grade level, aren’t having discipline issues, aren’t struggling with math; is this why I can afford the luxury of worrying about whether or not they are having their right-brained skills nurtured, whether or not they are being encouraged to not shy away from failure, but instead to use it to learn and grow? One of the comments suggesting this went “We can't even motivate a large percentage of children to finish high school, and now we are suppose to prepare the (obviously elite) students to work toward better life goals.”

First of all, I think that this comment misses my larger point: if school were less about rote memorization and instead involved a more integrated, creative curriculum, perhaps we would be better able to motivate more children to finish high school. But the comment does I think hint at a darker criticism: that I’m spouting some liberal, white, elite fantasy that is totally inapplicable to the kinds of educational issues that many schools, teachers and children face in this country, particularly in poor, urban areas.

I don’t agree, and I think to make that claim is to just throw in the towel rather than continuing to advocate for the right of every child to have the best possible education. Consider the Lyons Community School, a middle/high school in Brooklyn.

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Ambiently breaking reading conventions: Colin Marshall talks to experimental poet Tan Lin

Tan Lin is a poet, professor of English and creative writing at New Jersey City University and author of the books Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01 and Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource). His latest book, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, uses its form to escape the notions, conventions and structures of the traditional reading experience. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [download and show notes] [iTunes link]

Lin1 I read Seven Controlled Vocabularies sequentially, front cover then the pages in the order they were bound, then the back cover, but it does seem I could have read in any order I wanted. Is there an optimal reading strategy for this book?

No, I think it’s about dispersing reading into a number of different environments. One of them, of course, is to do with bibliographic controls that establish various genres, like architecture or film. Also, it connects to online reading practices. People have argued — I think Nicholas Carr most recently — that online reading is much more distracted, conversions of information into short-term working memory and then into long-term memory are disrupted. The book is designed, in some sense, for a kind of skimming. Once you insert pictures into a book, I think you’re in a different sort of textual environment. The book is supposed to open up and free a little bit of space around linear reading practices.

I know this is a huge question to get into, but what is the prime way you’ve made it prompt readers to get around their usual, deeply, deeply, deeply ingrained reading practices?

Maybe the deeply ingrained reading practices have to do with how people read books. But on the other hand, you’re always free to skim, to highlight, to jump around in a book. Again, in an online environment, these things are multiplied exponentially. This book plays with those notions. In some ways, it’s about translating a book into a different kind of reading environment. Part of it has to do with social networking. Part of it has to do with the commodification of attention, perhaps. Part of it has to do with basic online reading practices. There doesn’t seem to be an ideal way to read this. Maybe there’s a distracted skimming going on throughout the book that’s encouraged, but also the insertion of, say, bibliographic controls — oh, this is about architecture, or, oh, this is about poetry, or this is about photography — those help to stabilize the reading practices.
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Sunday, July 4, 2010

Independent Streak

ID_NC_MEIS_DECLA_AP_001 Morgan on the Declaration of Independence, over at the Smart Set:

One of the most amazing thoughts in that most amazing of documents, the Declaration of Independence, comes in the second half of the second paragraph. The lines directly follow the more famous ones about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They address the question of (for lack of a better term) revolution. The case is stated thusly: “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

In essence, it argues that the American people have a right to make up a new form of government, of whatever sort they like, any time the old forms of government seem like they aren't working. Needless to say, this is an incredibly bold and incredibly dangerous proposition to put forth. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the document, was — along with his colleagues — perfectly aware that he was opening a massive can of worms with this principle of revolution and self-rule.

That's why the next sentence in the Declaration comes right in to qualify the situation, to dampen down the radical impact of these thoughts. Jefferson writes, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” We have a right to abolish any government and to establish a new one under any principles we fancy, but it is a right that only a fool would actually exercise.

It is an almost impossibly tricky line to establish, the one between revolution and prudence.

The Iranian Threat

by Noam Chomsky:

ScreenHunter_05 Jul. 04 19.57 The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed Services in March 2010 that “the Iranian regime is the primary state-level threat to stability” in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of US global concerns. The term “stability” here has its usual technical meaning: firmly under US control. In June 2010 Congress strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding US offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 “bunker busters” used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators,” the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. “US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he said. “The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,” accelerating under Obama.

More here.

Understanding past could help restore U.S.-Arab ties

Ussama Makdisi in the Houston Chronicle:

Ussamamakdisi As the bloody events of last month have demonstrated, the Arab-Israeli conflict constantly upstages and undermines even the best-intentioned American diplomacy in the Arab world. The quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq and the tension between the United States and Iran do not help.

But another important reason for the lack of progress is an evident tin ear in this country when it comes to listening to Arabs — and to a domestic political and cultural landscape that stereotypes them as a people without a meaningful history. The success this spring of extremists on the Texas State Board of Education in blaming “Arab rejection of the state of Israel,” “Palestinian terrorism” and “radical Islamic fundamentalism” rather than objectively studying the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict is only the most recent example of a bleak outlook that promotes fear rather than engagement with others.

The perverse irony of where we are today is that a century ago Arabs had a largely positive view of the United States. Most of us are unaware that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, many Christian and Muslim Arabs were inspired by America. American missionaries were the primary catalysts for this early perception. In 1820 they set out to convert the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, but it was only when these evangelicals relinquished their religious fantasies in favor of establishing now legendary institutions of higher education across the Middle East that they had a decisive cultural impact on the Arab world.

Arabs appreciated this adaptation, just as they appreciated the lack of U.S. imperialism in the region, the possibilities afforded by emigration to the United States, and Wilsonian principles of self-determination.

The point of knowing this history is not to indulge in romanticism or in nostalgia for a bygone era. Rather, it is to lay the basis for a genuine, historically informed dialogue between Americans and Arabs.

More here. [Thanks to Najla Said.]

How America got its name

From The Boston Globe:

IdeaartAmerica__1278098092_1276 Each July 4, as we celebrate the origins of America, we look back ritually at what happened in 1776: the war, the politics, the principles that defined our nation. But what about the other thing that defines America: the name itself? Its story is far older and far less often told, and still offers some revealing surprises. If you’re like most people, you’ll dimly recall from your school days that the name America has something to do with Amerigo Vespucci, a merchant and explorer from Florence. You may also recall feeling that this is more than a little odd — that if any European earned the “right” to have his name attached to the New World, surely it should have been Christopher Columbus, who crossed the Atlantic years before Vespucci did.

But Vespucci, it turns out, had no direct role in the naming of America. He probably died without ever having seen or heard the name. A closer look at how the name was coined and first put on a map, in 1507, suggests that, in fact, the person responsible was a figure almost nobody’s heard of: a young Alsatian proofreader named Matthias Ringmann. How did a minor scholar working in the landlocked mountains of eastern France manage to beat all explorers to the punch and give the New World its name? The answer is more than just an obscure bit of history, because Ringmann deliberately invested the name America with ideas that still make up important parts of our national psyche: powerful notions of westward expansion, self-reinvention, and even manifest destiny.

And he did it, in part, as a high-minded joke.

More here.

The Willpower Paradox

From Scientific American:

Senay_880 Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs—and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that addicts cannot will themselves into healthy sobriety—indeed, that ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and its principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.

It’s a tricky concept for many and must be taken on faith. But now there may be science to back it up. Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness—and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation and goal-directed actions. In short, he identified some key traits needed not only for long-term abstinence but for any personal objective, from losing weight to learning to play guitar.

More here.

Sunday Poem

The Long Woman Bathing

Although he cannot admit it even to himself,
these are the years whose possibility he has always dreaded.

The man in the room listens to cars and rain, unfolded
maps that have failed him, lines tracing absence along the dark
…..intersate.

If a friend were to call him on the telephone,
the man would drawl, “It's like I'm being stalked in a dream.”

In the grey light of the television it happens that he awakens
on the floor and studies his overcoat hanging, remembering the old
…..self.

He is twenty again and running in the museum from room to white
…..room
where he finds her in the Bonnard, the long woman bathing in the
…..lilac water.

And were it possible at any moment he might cry out:
I refuse her ghost, I refuse to dart like a deer in the open.

by Maurice Kilwein Guevara
from
Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Preventing Lesbianism and “Uppity Women” in the Womb? No.

3830123744_7c4d47bbd7 Lindsay Beyerstein over at her blog Focal Point over at Big Think:

Alice Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, and Anne Tamar-Mattis made headlines this week with a post on Bioethics Forum entitled “Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb?” The headline made it sound as if someone wanted to treat lesbianism in general. Predictably, the post touched off an online moral panic.

If you read more carefully, you find that this is a debate over how to manage an inherited error of metabolism called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Patients with CAH lack an enzyme that converts androgen precursors into cortisol. Even in utero, their adrenal glands are pumping out androgens, which can cause girls to be born with male-looking genitals. As I explained earlier, the potential medical consequences of virilization go far beyond cosmetic appearance or even gender presentation. In severe cases, the patient may need multiple painful surgeries to create separate vaginal and urethral openings. Dreger and her colleagues dismissed dex as “fetal cosmetology” until they were called to the carpet by authors from Harvard who forced them to acknowledge the medical consequences of severe masculinization. The ill-effects include incontinence, kidney damage from recurrent UTIs, vaginal narrowing that interferes with menstruation and the future ability to have PIV intercourse. Girls may need multiple painful surgeries to correct these abnormalities.

If a pregnant woman takes the steroid dexamethasone, the drug can shut down the fetus's adrenal glands and allow the genitals to develop normally. (By “normally,” I mean the way they would have developed without the disease.)

Doctors have been using dex to prevent ambiguous genitalia in girls with CAH for about 30 years. Nobody disputes that the drug is very effective at preventing or diminishing masculinization, but there's not unequivocal experimental evidence that dex is safe over the long term. It's not that there haven't been follow-up studies. There have been many. By and large, they've been unable to establish harmful effects of prenatal dex. However, skeptics worry that these studies are too small or too badly designed to detect the risks if they exist. Every drug has side effects, but these have to be balanced against the benefits of treatment, and we do know that dex works really well at preventing serious birth defects.

Time for Sex at Dawn!

44672-30205Christopher Ryan answers some questions about modern sexuality in Psychology Today (via Andrew Sullivan):

1. Why is long-term sexual monogamy so difficult for many couples?

Several factors conspire to make long-term sexual monogamy difficult for people. As a species, we’ve evolved to be sexually responsive to novelty. From a genetic point of view, the lure of new partners (known to scientists as the Coolidge effect) combined with less responsiveness to the familiar (the Westermarck effect) motivated our ancestors to risk leaving their small hunter/gatherer societies to join other groups, thus avoiding incest and bringing crucial genetic vigor to future generations.

Another problem is that most people in the West marry because they’re “in love,” which is a temporary, blissfully delusional state we should enjoy, but not expect to last forever. As the German poet, Goethe put it, “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing. A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”

2. Why do you specify “sexual monogamy?” Isn’t all monogamy sexual?

Biologists distinguish sexual monogamy from social monogamy. As DNA testing has grown cheaper in recent years, we’ve learned that most species formerly classified as “monogamous” (primarily birds) are socially monogamous, but not sexually so. In other words, they form pairs that cooperatively care for that season’s brood of young, but the male may well not be the biological father. Applied to humans, we argue that a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity can increase marital stability and thus lead to greater social and family stability.

Germany, Not France, Delights in Multicultural World Cup Squad

Mesut-ozilFrom a little while ago, Robert Mackey in the NYT blog The Lede:

That a German player named Mesut Özil scored the goal that sent his nation through to the second round of this year’s World Cup is a sign that something fundamental has changed about what it means to be German. A country which, until quite recently, refused to give citizenship even to the German-born children of immigrants now finds itself represented by a squad of 23 players so ethnically diverse that 11 of them could have chosen to play instead for other nations.

The Telegraph’s Duncan White explained that the new Germans are drawn not just from neighboring countries that traditionally supplied Gastarbeiter to German industry, but also from across the globe:

While there have been several Polish-Germans of Silesian background to have played for Germany (including Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski in this squad), Joachim Löw’s team also has players of Bosnian-Serb, Brazilian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, Polish, Tunisian and Turkish descent.

As my colleague Rob Hughes reported in The Times, it is important not to get carried away with the melting pot narrative:

Not all Germans embrace with open arms this son of Turkish descent who reads the Koran before games. But there are 1.7 million people of Turkish origin in Germany, and with the national team, the Mannschaft, becoming a league of many nations, there could be more nights like this, more new heroes like Özil.

Something like the inverse of this story is playing out across the Rhine in France.