I did everything they told us to do. Go to school. Get training. Build a better life. That’s the pitch these for-profit colleges sell to people sleeping in their cars, people working two jobs, people who still believe the promise.
Here’s what actually happened. Five hundred colleges have 40% or higher nonpayment rates on federal student loans. Four hundred and twenty-four of them — eighty-five percent — are for-profit schools. Schools like UEI College, where Lisa Collenbaugh paid nearly twenty thousand dollars for a ten-month computer systems certificate. The coursework was easy. The school couldn’t even find her an externship. She dropped out. She still owes ten thousand three hundred eighty-nine dollars and forty-seven cents. For nothing.
And here’s the goddamn racket: these schools don’t survive on tuition. They survive on us. On the federal loan program. UEI gets between 79% and 85% of its revenue from federal aid. Miller-Motte gets 86%. American InterContinental University gets 89%. They hover just below the 90% legal cap because that’s the line where the government cuts them off. They’re draining the spigot to the legal limit, and they don’t give a shit what happens to the kid on the other end.
Eileen Connor at the Project on Predatory Student Lending said it plain: if the federal student loan program didn’t exist, these schools wouldn’t exist. No bank would lend to a program where the student can’t pay it back. That’s not education. That’s fraud with a catalog.
And the accountability? Suspended since COVID. The new test from the Republican One Big Beautiful Bill Act only checks earnings, not debt — so a school that charges too much for too little can still pass. The schools take the money. The student gets the bill. The taxpayer backs it. And the politicians who wrote that gap into law know exactly who they’re protecting.
You cannot call this a system that helps working families. It’s a transfer machine that moves federal dollars upward into corporate accounts and debt downward onto people who trusted the pitch. Burn it down.
Source story: Federal data flags 500 colleges with student loan nonpayment at 40% or higher.