National

Trade Schools Have to Find Grads Jobs, or Lose Financial Aid

Published

11 years ago

July 1, 2015

This July 8, 2014 file photo shows an Everest Institute sign on an office building in Silver Spring, Md. In the two decades since trade schools started popping up on U.S. stock exchanges to maximize profits, allegations of misconduct have been rampant. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Exotic dancers hired as admissions counselors. Recruiters told to seek out “impatient” individuals who have “few people in their lives who care about them.” Military personnel still recovering from brain damage told to sign on the dotted line.

In the two decades since trade schools started popping up on U.S. stock exchanges to maximize profits, allegations of misconduct have been rampant. On Wednesday, new rules go into effect for any school with a career-training program. Graduates have to be able to earn enough money to repay their student loans, or a school risks losing access to financial aid. In general, annual loan payments shouldn’t exceed 20 percent of a graduate’s discretionary income or 8 percent of total earnings.

It’s a modest step, consumer advocates say, that will probably succeed in shutting down the most obviously fraudulent programs, often criminal justice and medical training programs that can cost as much as $75,000 but aren’t sought after by employers. Still, the government’s new definition for “gainful employment” is unlikely to change what’s become a complicated, enduring problem in the U.S.

Too many poor kids, mostly minorities, are reaching adulthood with little education, no prospect of attending a four-year traditional college and not enough time, money or knowhow to figure out an alternative path through a local community college. What these students do have is eligibility for government-backed student loans and grants, making them targets for predatory lending schemes that look much like tactics used by subprime lenders during the housing crisis.

Meanwhile, there remains little appetite in Congress and the White House to wade into the business of deciding which diplomas and schools are worthwhile. House and Senate Republicans have proposed blocking enforcement of the regulations, while the White House said it’s backing off from the idea of developing its own college ratings plan.

“This is a civil rights issue, plain and simple,” said Maura Dundon, senior policy council at the Center for Responsible Lending, which estimates that 28 percent of black students studying for a four-year degree are enrolled at a for-profit college compared to only 10 percent of white students.

For-profit schools say they are meeting a need of students looking for job training.

“Who else in higher education is educating these students? I have yet to get a cogent answer to this,” said Noah Black, a spokesman for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, or APSCU, a group that represents the $30 billion-a-year industry and sued unsuccessfully to block the regulations.

Republicans in Congress have swung behind the industry, saying the Education Department’s debt-to-earnings ratio doesn’t make sense.

“If every graduate in the University of Tennessee’s political science program were to come work on Capitol Hill, then that program would be shut down,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, who chairs the committee that oversees education and labor issues.

Well intentioned or not, the unfettered rise of for-profit colleges since the 1990s is costing taxpayers. For-profit schools consistently take in more federal loan money than nonprofit schools, despite enrolling a smaller number of students. Yet, for-profit students also account for 47 percent of all federal student loan defaults, according to a 2012 Senate investigation.

In addition to loan defaults, state and federal investigations have turned up widespread allegations of fraud and deceptive business practices, particularly in the case of the now-defunct for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges. The findings have been so startling that last month the Education Department launched a major consumer bailout program and appointed a “special master” to oversee debt relief for students.

Certain Corinthian-related programs, including those at Heald College, were deemed so unfair and predatory that the Education Department set up a website to make the process of debt relief easier for those students. Officials estimate bad debt resulting from Heald College at about $542 million.

The total could climb. The Education Department estimates it loaned some $3.6 billion in the past five years to Corinthian students before the government forced it to sell or close its campuses.

Other for-profits too are showing signs of trouble: ITT Educational Services, Education Management Corp., University of Phoenix, Career Education Corp., Kaplan and DeVry University are among those that have disclosed to shareholders that they are or have been subjects of investigations by state or federal authorities.

“These are our taxpayer dollars that form federal student loans, that are used to educate people and supposedly place them in jobs. When did that cease to be a public trust?” said Jack Conway, the state attorney general in Kentucky and the leader of a working group of 37 states investigating for-profit schools.

The latest regulations have so far survived two challenges in court, but include what reform advocates say is still a big loophole: The regulations only consider graduates of a program and whether they can find employment. The rules don’t consider how many students attend a school and drop out, either because they were never qualified in the first place or because they realized the program wasn’t going to get them a job.

White House officials said the rules are the toughest viable legal option at a time when many lawmakers are defending the industry. They estimate the regulation will affect some 841,000 students enrolled in training programs that won’t result in employment.

“This industry is well-funded, has powerful backers in Congress and has worked relentlessly to avoid even the most commonsense measures,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “But today, despite their efforts, new safeguards for students become a reality.”

APSCU’s Black said the administration’s focus on employment makes the regulations unfair. Nonprofit public and private colleges churn out numerous degrees that don’t immediately translate into jobs, he said.

“By whose metric are these worthless degrees?” he asked.

___

Follow Anne Flaherty on Twitter at https://twitter.com/annekflaherty.

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OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology – City Limits

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — “Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.”

Published

4 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology - City Limits

Every indicator in New York City’s housing market is pointing in the wrong direction.

Rents are at historic highs. Foreclosure notices are climbing in Black and brown neighborhoods that never fully recovered from the last crisis. Deed theft, the predatory stripping of generational wealth from families who built their equity over decades, continues to devastate communities from Brownsville to Jamaica.

On top of all these factors, there were more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sitting completely empty as of April last year. That number grew by 8,000 units in a single year, with the sharpest increases hitting Brooklyn and Queens hardest.

Brooklyn and Queens. My neighborhoods. Your neighborhoods.

You would think that news of 57,000 empty affordable apartments in the middle of a housing emergency would produce outrage, emergency hearings, and demands for accountability. Instead, New Yorkers got a collective shrug from opinion leaders.

Read that again: 57,000 families could be housed in those apartments. Households currently paying market rent, doubled up, couch-surfing, or one missed paycheck away from the street could have relief. And silence from the city’s housing leadership, activists, and coalitions.

In my experience as chair of the Subcommittee on Affordable Housing in the Assembly, that is not advocacy. That is surrender.

These are the same voices, the same institutions, the same political class that successfully lobbied to effectively ban short-term rentals in New York City through Local Law 18. At its peak, Airbnb had roughly 20,000 listings in New York City, nearly a third the number of apartments currently sitting vacant and padlocked in the rent-stabilized system. The campaign against those listings was relentless, loud, and wrapped in the language of affordability and housing justice.

Where is that energy now?

Where are the press conferences about landlords warehousing stabilized units while families sleep in shelters? Where is the legislation with teeth? Where is the outrage that was apparently plentiful when a Black homeowner in Bed Stuy wanted to rent out her spare bedroom to make ends meet?

Because that is exactly who Local Law 18 hit hardest. Not the corporate bad actors. Not the hedge funds. The struggling homeowner, disproportionately Black, disproportionately in Brooklyn and Queens, who used their home as a small economic engine to survive in a city that grows more expensive by the month.

Those families were told their activity was destabilizing the housing market. Those families were fined, delisted, and legislated out of a livelihood. And now we learn that 57,000 stabilized units are sitting empty while rents spiral and foreclosures mount, and the response from housing advocates is essentially: that’s just how big numbers work.

This is not sound policy. This is politics. And the communities paying the price know the difference.

I have spoken with homeowners across Central Brooklyn who are barely holding on. They bought their homes, sometimes one generation removed from the Great Migration, and they have watched the equity they built become both their greatest asset and their greatest vulnerability. Predatory lenders, deed theft schemes, and rising property taxes all circle that equity like wolves.

Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.

Everyone in this fight knows what needs to happen but will not say it out loud: Local Law 18 needs reform. Common sense reform. The kind that distinguishes between an investor running a ghost hotel and a homeowner renting a room. The kind that actually targets bad actors instead of penalizing the most economically vulnerable property owners in the city.

I hear it in private conversations with elected officials, with housing attorneys, with planners. The consensus is there. The political will is not, because the same advocacy groups and political donors who pushed the original law are still in the room, and nobody wants to take their call.

What this moment requires is courage, not calculation.

Every month that passes with 57,000 empty stabilized apartments is a month of families in crisis, of shelter costs ballooning, of neighborhoods destabilizing. Every month that Local Law 18 remains unreformed is another month a Black homeowner in Flatbush or Hollis faces impossible choices that wealthier New Yorkers simply never have to make.

You cannot ban the small and ignore the large. You cannot mobilize armies of lobbyists against a homeowner’s spare bedroom while shrugging at tens of thousands of warehoused affordable units. You cannot claim to stand for housing justice and then tell 57,000 families worth of empty apartments that the math just works out this way.

The hypocrisy has to stop. Politics have to give way to people. And the officials and advocates who have the power to fix this, who know what needs to be done, have to decide which side they are actually on.

Because from where I stand, in the communities I have served for decades, it is very clear who is being left out in the cold.

Dr. Annette Robinson is a former member of both the State Assembly and City Council in Brooklyn.

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Black History

Oakland Protesters Rally to Defend Haitian Immigrants and TPS

The Haiti Action Committee traces its roots to the international movement that emerged following Haiti’s 1991 military coup, which overthrew the nation’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Political violence sent thousands of Haitians fleeing the country, while U.S. policies resulted in refugees being intercepted at sea, repatriated, or detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Published

4 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

Activists Gerald Smith and Romaine Charite at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland near City Hall protest in support of Haitian immigrant rights. Photo by Carla Thomas

By Carla Thomas

Protesters gathered in downtown Oakland near City Hall at 14th Street and Broadway on Thursday, Aug. 13, calling for protections for Haitian immigrants and an end to deportation policies affecting Haitian communities across the United States.

Organized as a call to action by the Legalization for All Network and supported by the Haiti Action Committee and other community organizations, the demonstration carried a clear message: “Defend TPS! Legalization, Not Deportation!”

Participants focused attention on the termination of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haiti and immigration policies protesters described as continuing attacks on Haitian immigrants under the Trump administration.

Haitian Romaine Charite of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization urged demonstrators to stand with Haitian families and led chants:

“When Haitians are under attack, what do we do? We fight back.”

Injustice to one is an injustice to us all.”

“Dump Trump!”

Charite and other protesters condemned the federal government’s treatment of Haitian immigrants, describing the policies as an attack on a population already facing extraordinary hardship.

Haiti’s TPS designation was terminated effective July 27, 2026, removing temporary deportation protections and work authorization for hundreds of thousands of Haitian beneficiaries who lacked another legal basis to remain in the United States.

Gerald Smith, a protester and former member of the Black Panther Party during the 1970s, said Haitians were being unfairly targeted and warned that ending TPS would have a devastating impact on Haitian families and communities.

“These policies are racially motivated and unfair,” Smith said. “Everyone deserves the right to self-determination and protection from persecution.”

The Haiti Action Committee cited the continuing political, economic and humanitarian crisis in Haiti as evidence that returning large numbers of immigrants to the country could place already vulnerable people at greater risk.

The Oakland gathering, which drew about 20 participants, reflected a decades-long history of Bay Area activism surrounding Haitian democracy, refugee rights and U.S. immigration policy.

Those policies sparked protests involving Haitian communities, Black activists, artists, college students, churches, labor organizations and human rights advocates. Prominent figures, including dancer and activist Katherine Dunham, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and TransAfrica leader Randall Robinson, joined campaigns challenging the treatment of Haitian refugees.

In 1992, Haiti Action Committee joined other Bay Area organizations in a dramatic demonstration on San Francisco Bay. Boats carrying Haitian participants were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard while supporters gathered along the waterfront and reportedly chanted, “Let Them Land!”

More than three decades later, protesters have returned to the streets of Oakland, centering on protecting Haitian immigrants, opposing deportation and pressing for immigration policies that provide families with a pathway toward permanent legal residency.

For more information, visit Haitisolidarity.net.

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Community

First 5 Alameda County Celebrates First Year of Measure C’s Implementation

Measure C, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.

Published

4 days ago

August 20, 2026

bpusa-syndication

Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas (left) with Community Advisory Councilmember and childcare provider Nancy Harvey. Photo by Carla Thomas.

By Carla Thomas

First 5 Alameda County marked the first anniversary of the impact of Measure C with a community celebration Friday, Aug. 7, at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, highlighting more than $135 million invested to strengthen early childhood education, families and caregivers across Alameda County.

The celebration brought together families, educators, caregivers, advocates, elected officials and community leaders for an evening of music, cultural performances, and children’s activities.

“Oakland is on the move,” said Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, commending all the advocates who helped win the victory for early childhood education and their providers.

First 5 Alameda County CEO Kristin Spanos said, “In the first 10 months of Measure C being available after the Board of Supervisors adopted the 5-year plan, we’ve had over $135 million put directly into the community supporting children and providers with emergency grants, investments, and stipends.”

First 5 Alameda County, the public agency responsible for administering Measure C, focused on quickly moving voter-approved dollars into local communities while developing partnerships, accountability measures, and infrastructure intended to create long-term impact.

Alameda County District 5 Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas: “We’re celebrating the first year of getting money into families’ pockets and childcare providers’ pockets. This is about deploying very vital resources over the course of five years. It’s a billion-dollar impact.”

Community Advisory Council member Nancy Harvey said, “We are totally excited. It was a 10-year fight, and we fought tooth and nail. We had so much support from County Supervisors Nate Miley and Nikki Fortunato Bas, the unions, and the late Supervisor Wilma Chan. This is a historic event – people are watching Measure C all over the nation.”

Harvey explained that small childcare providers received a $40,000 grant, and larger providers received a $50,000 grant.

Childcare advocate and provider Lisa Zarodney of Livermore said, “When I got my emergency funds, I was about to close. The stipend allowed me to continue through 2026 and get all the babies on my wait list.”

In business for 27 years, Zarodney said she is now caring for the children of past clients.

“I couldn’t continue my legacy, my dream, and my passion without the funding from Measure C.”

Harvey emphasized that he next leg of the fight is to ensure workers have a sustainable wage.

“We are now pushing to raise the wage of workers to $25 to keep doors open and people employed,” she said.

First 5 Alameda County’s vision is to build an integrated and equity-centered early childhood system supporting children, families, and communities regardless of race, income, or neighborhood. As administrator of Measure C, the agency has worked to expand access to early care and education, strengthen family stability, and support the providers and caregivers families rely upon.

Through Measure C and partnerships with initiatives including the Oakland Children’s Initiative, First 5 Alameda County has sought to reduce fragmented services and better coordinate public resources.

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