31 min.
American Correspondence Schools in Context
In 2015 and 2016, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, two large for-profit schools providing online education, closed their doors. About the same time, others, including the University of Phoenix and DeVry Institute, experienced drastic losses in enrollment. The downfall of these schools was the result of a targeted campaign by the Obama administration and leading congressional Democrats, who charged the schools with unfair practices such as misleading promotions, low graduation rates, and high student-loan defaults (Grasgreen 2015).
In response, some educational scholars defended for-profit education. Richard Vedder (2018) emphasized its flexibility, innovation, and competition. Jayme Lemke and William Shughart II (2019) observed that when compared with community colleges, these for-profit schools’ graduation rates were not that much different, and for-profits provided courses that students could not obtain at community colleges.…