By Jackson Himmult

 It’s not that surprising to hear people make jokes about for-profit colleges like Devry, University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, and the like, and the illegitimacy of the type of education they offer. They’re all over the television with their inspiring commercials that claim to have the ability to change people’s lives. But there has to be something behind these universities—they look too damn good. Within the past few years the number of students enrolling into these colleges has spiked from 365,000 to 1.8 million, and they don’t show any signs of slowing down in enrollment. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows that not only did these for-profit colleges use deceptive, meretricious marketing techniques, but they also charge gross amounts of money for their degrees compared to other universities and technical schools that are legitimate. What does this mean for the rest of the 200 plus million people who populate the States? Taxes.

That’s right. Just within 2009, students going to these for-profit colleges used over $24 billion in tax payer money for an education that probably will get them nowhere. All it does is perpetuate the wealth of the people behind these corporate colleges. And as astounding as that sounds, it’s only within this past year that the government even published anything about it. In fact, because these corporate colleges have been around for so long and represent such a vast amount of the taxpaying budget, it’s become irresponsible to shut them down because all that money will go nowhere.

It’s become a virtual circle. And thus that becomes an even larger problem for the state of education within the States. With all these students going to corporate colleges that invariably rob them only to give them a piece of paper that represents nothing but a waste of time, energy, and money, what does that say for the education system? That a percentage of our population can get duped into thinking that college is the gateway into happiness and that the rest of the population knows the illegitimacy of these corporate colleges and just don’t care enough to do anything about it—except to blindly pay taxes that are drained into them. Either stupid or apathetic, no one side is guiltless in this mass scam on society.

Even if we do have the education and common sense to recognize how crooked these colleges are, there’s absolutely little that we can/have done to stop them. And perhaps it’s too late to even stop them. What the GAO found seems to prove how pedagogy should never be intertwined with the pecuniary, otherwise you get places like Devry and ITT Tech—corrupt institutions that represent a massive trickster. Except the punch-line isn’t that funny. It’s actually kind of sad.

GAO’s report came out August 4, 2010. Nothing’s happened. No legislation has been passed to prevent these colleges from continuing to dupe society. It’s as if they just don’t care. That’s unacceptable. Idiocracy, that 2006 movie starring Luke Wilson and directed by Mike Judge, should not be the model for how we construct our society, and yet it’s started to become a reality day after day. I can’t turn on the news without hearing something new wrong with another school district’s policies. So what’s the problem? No governmental intervention.

Common Sense is not just an abstract ideal that individuals should strive for, but they should go to the library some time and check it out—you know, that book by Thomas Paine. He made the point to distinguish society and government, and that societies are invariably a reflection of the people that populate it, and are thusly riddled with problems and fault. That’s the role of governments—to intervene when society cannot self-govern itself. Thomas Jefferson pointed out that if man could exist without governmental intervention, then we would have long ago have realized such an idealism. But that’s not the case. People make mistakes, cyclical, mundane, repetitive mistakes, and any sort of government is an institution that’s been entrusted with the power to sustain stability within.

Even Adam Smith, that crazy economist who is the godfather of laissez-faire government, stated that the government should only have three duties. Defense (both internally and externally), the production of certain beneficial technologies (like roads), and education. That’s it!

Paine, Jefferson, and Smith—extremely wise men— wrote about these topics, suggested logical and reasonable ideas that would make sense to implement, and yet their words are disregarded. Why? Probably because no one has read them. Or, if they were taught them, their teachers probably attended a for-profit college and have absolutely no idea what they’re doing and resent society because they paid too much for their truly execrable education.

 Source: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-948T