Are Even Dems Getting Tired of Anti‐Profit Crusade?
Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) held his fifth -- and perhaps final -- Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee show-hearing lambasting for-profit colleges. As usual, it was a decidedly one-sided affair, with no profit-defenders apparently invited to testify, and Republican committee members boycotting. Perhaps the only interesting thing that occurred was Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who has never given any indication he doesn't support Harkin's obsessive whale hunt, saying the proceedings could have benefitted from more than one point of view. According to MarketWatch, Franken lamented that “it would have been nice to have someone here to represent the for-profit schools.” Now, he might have only wanted a for-profit rep there to receive the beating, but even that would have been preferable to no rep at all.
Could this indicate that even Senate Democrats are getting tired of Harkin's tedious grandstanding against for-profit colleges, especially now that the Education Department has issued its "gainful employment" rules? Maybe, and there are lots of Dems in the House who have opposed the attack on for-profit schools for some time. But don't expect this to be over quite yet: Harkin still gets a lot of negative media coverage for proprietary schools with each hearing, while the scandals surrounding people he's had testify; the decrepit GAO "secret shopper" report that turned out to be hugely inaccurate; and potentially dirty dealings behind the gainful employment rules seem only to get real ink from Fox News and The Daily Caller. And Harkin keeps indicating that he will introduce legislation -- doomed to failure though it may be -- to curb for-profits even further.
Of course, what should be the biggest source of outrage in all of this is that while Harkin fixates on for-profit schools, Washington just keeps on enabling all of higher education to luxuriate in ever-pricier, taxpayer-funded opulence. Indeed, as a new Cato report due out next week will show, putatively nonprofit universities are likely making bigger profits on undergraduate students than are for-profit institutions. Of course, they don't call them "profits" -- nonprofits always spend excess funds, thus increasing their "costs" -- but that's probably just plain smart. Be honest about trying to make a buck, and Sen. Harkin has shown just what's likely to befall you.
