Workforce Investment Act Becomes $3 Billion Handout to Predatory "Colleges"

No bills get through Congress these days without an overwhelming amount of money to be made by both sides of the corporate aisle.  Such a bill sailed through last month without so much as racial slur at the President, something quite unheard of in the age of an ostensibly-black Commander in Chief.

The legislation is called the Workforce Investment Act, and it's worth $3.1 billion to corporate higher ed profiteers who convert government retraining assistance to building corporate empires that offer nothing in return except tens of thousands in additional debt to the unemployed people who can least afford it.

Congress has been on this fool's errand of retraining for jobs that don't exist since the 1960s, when policy elites decided that job creation programs were too expensive and too divisive, in that most white folks preferred to keep minorities dependent on handouts, rather than to allow them into the middle class with real job opportunities.  Such a policy allows for black folks to be contained and castigated at the same time for being lazy louts.  A win-win for both race and class supremacy.

A clip from the NYTimes article:

". . . .Millions of unemployed Americans like Mr. DeGrella have trained for new careers as part of the Workforce Investment Act, a $3.1 billion federal program that, in an unusual act of bipartisanship, was reauthorized by Congress last month with little public discussion about its effectiveness. Like Mr. DeGrella, many have not found the promised new career.

Instead, an extensive analysis of the program by The New York Times shows, many graduates wind up significantly worse off than when they started — mired in unemployment and debt from training for positions that do not exist, and they end up working elsewhere for minimum wage.

Split between federal and state governments — federal officials dispense the money and states license the training — the initiative lacks rigorous oversight by either. It includes institutions that require thousands of hours of instruction and charge more than the most elite private colleges. Some courses are offered at for-profit colleges that have committed fraud in their search for federal funding. This includes Corinthian Colleges Inc., which reached an agreement last month with the federal Education Department to shut down or sell many of its campuses. . . ."