Duncan Creates Race to Bailout Online Diploma Mills

Race to the Top was a $4.35 billion bribery scheme to fund the corporate education reform movement for a few years.  We are living with the consequences today with Common Core, test based teacher evaluation, state education department austerity to pay for technology, and the proliferation of segregated charter "broken windows" chain gangs to behaviorally sterilize poor children.

Now Duncan has announced another corporate welfare plan, this time to bailout the for-profit Corinthian College.  Taxpayers will pay off the student loans for Corinthian students that amount to $3.5 billion.  You know, those student loans that students can never bankrupt on, the ones that have created a whole new generation of indentured corporate servants.  

Why must the federal government bailout Corinthian and pay off the student debt?  Because the feds allowed the scumbags who operated Corinthian to continue their predatory practices for years and years without oversight or accountability, as the $3 million a year CEOs bought yachts and built palaces. 

Why aren't Corinthian bigwigs on the hook for the student debt?  That's an easy one--the corporate crumbs at Corinthian DECLARED BANKRUPTCY.  

This is just the beginning.  Most of the $1.2 trillion in student debt is owed to the same kind of online matchbook colleges that are offering nothing in return for a lifetime of debt.

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. . . Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced Monday that the Education Department would forgive the federal loans of tens of thousands of students who attended Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit college company that closed and filed for bankruptcy last month, amid widespread charges of fraud.

Mr. Duncan also said the department planned to develop a process to allow any student — whether from Corinthian or elsewhere — to be forgiven their loans if they had been defrauded by their colleges.

A special master would be appointed within three weeks, department officials said, to create procedures to apply for relief that are “durable, not just for Corinthian but beyond.”

Taxpayers could pay a huge price for forgiving so many federal loans; the government has never before opened debt relief to such a potentially large pool of students. The department estimated that if all 350,000 Corinthian students over the last five years applied for and received the debt relief, that cost alone could be as much as $3.5 billion.

In a news conference call on Monday afternoon, Mr. Duncan emphasized the plight of students who took on huge debt and ended up with a degree that meant little to employers, or no degree at all. . .