The problem with shilling for for-profit education is that sooner or later, and the way things have been going it's usually "sooner," you're going to find yourself in bed with
shady characters.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is running for president in 2016, has a strong record of supporting for-profit colleges, namely Corinthian Colleges, which shut down all of its remaining campuses in April. Rubio has accepted contributions to the tune of $27,600 throughout the past five years. The last donation filed with the Federal Election Commission was for $2,700 on April 30, Bloomberg reported.
Last year, Rubio also sent a letter requesting that the U.S. Department of Education would exercise “leniency” on Corinthian Colleges by not halting federal aid while it was being investigated.
Well, sure. Because when your whole education pitch is that we need to encourage for-profit, under-scrutinized schools in order to something something something, of course you're going to ask that the government go easy on the maybe-crooked ones.
In a speech this month in Chicago, he said the rules for colleges’ accreditation needed to be loosened for “innovative, low-cost competitors” to succeed.
At this point I find the Republican obsession with turning education into a privatized industry to be more tiring than anything else. All right, we've tried it; it doesn't work. It doesn't cost less. It doesn't achieve better results. There are certain national
things, universal things that every citizen in the country needs, that can indeed be done better by the cold gears of government than by a private company seeking to turn little Timmy into a profit center. This is not communism, it is simply
government.