Those of you who watch Real Time with Bill Maher know that John Kline of Minnesota’s 2nd District is the winner of Maher’s “Flip a District” campaign. Maher and his viewers chose Kline largely because of the issue of student loan debt. As chair of the House Education Committee, Kline opposed the Federal Student Loan Forgiveness Act and proposed a bill which would raise the interest rate of federal Stafford loans. He also takes serious campaign contributionsfrom for-profit colleges, which receive about 90% of their money from federal financial aid and cost taxpayers billions every year.
What do you think of Maher’s choice? Can this district actually be flipped? I’ve never heard of Kline before this, so I’m especially interested in what Minnesotans think of him.
Does anyone know what the criteria an educational institution must meet in order for their students to qualify to receive financial aid from the government? Why not revoke their qualifications for these “for profit” schools?
“Financial Aid” is given to the student to attend the school of their choice. “For Profit” schools are just another name for private colleges as opposed to public schools. So MIT, Harvard, and Yale are private schools but the SUNY system, Florida State, and UCLA are public schools.
I’m pretty sure that the private college I attended was non-profit.
The for-profit schools are the University of Phoenix, DeVrys University, and (more local to Kline’s Minnesota district) Globe Business College, Brown Institute, and Rasmussen College. These are the types of schools that are promising students that their degrees will get them high-paying jobs, so what the heck, it’s okay to acquire thousands of dollars in debt because you’ll be sure to erase it real soon when you land that high-paying business analyst job (a.k.a. administrative assistant).
Hell, you can get a federal student loan to go to a barber college or beautician school.
It should also be noted that their graduation rates are dismal. These colleges lure poor, unprepared students with misleading ads that promise good jobs after graduation, but in reality they leave students with poor job prospects and thousands of dollars in debt.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. You can certainly get a good education and a good job with a degree or certificate from one of those places but the admissions people don’t give a shit who gets let in. And they have a whole department of people who specialize in helping prospects fill out the forms to get their loans. The school gets their money and they don’t fucking care after that. Loads of students with no business being their are doomed to failure.
They really should make it so that schools with drop out rates that are too low have to give some of the tuition back but I am not sure how to make that practical. At least then they might be more judicious on who the allow in.
Maher is blowing smoke - Kline is a lock for his district. But by all means let them waste time and money trying to unseat him. “I borrowed money and now those meanies expect me to pay it back” is not a message likely to resonate with Kline supporters.
It’s not my district, but it is kind of indicative of how far out of touch people like Maher are with anyone who disagrees with them.
Real Time is one of my favorite shows, but I thought this whole “flip a district” thing was just stupid. I would generally fast-forward through it. He was surprisingly soft-ball with Colin Powell last week, and the interview was overly long.
Still love the show and never miss it. I sometimes laugh so hard it hurts. And I like that makes a point to have lots of conservatives on his show. He’s liberal, but will skewer either side when they deserve it.
He does have a a few “unorthodox” views, though, and when he gets onto one of them, it’s like listening to a Truther. Fortunately, that is very rare.
I for one am glad that someone’s bringing attention to the fact that the chair of the House Education Committee is in bed with for-profit colleges, and obviously cares little for education.
Besides, federal student loan debt costs taxpayers $32 billion a year and as we can see, a lot of that is simply wasted. As defenders of American taxpayers, isn’t that something Republicans should be enraged about?
It seems to me Steve King of Iowa would have been a far better target. Certainly more fun for Maher’s show. King says something stupid almost every week. It looks like Kline, other than being in bed with some nasty people, is not at all funny.
I once worked at a student loan processing company. The most egregiously fradulent one I remember was the correspondence school for semi-truck driving. There you could study textbooks, do homework and mail it in, take quizes by mail, etc., at a very high price, all financed by a government-guaranteed student loan. To prepare for a career in the high-paying field of over-the-road truck driving.
Then after about 18 months of this, never having actually been inside the cab of a real semi-truck, students would walk into the hiring office of a big truck driving company, show their ‘diploma’, and apply for a job. After the people there got done rolling on the floor laughing, they would tell the student that they didn’t meet the qualifications for hiring. Then they would send them down the road to another trucking company, so the staff there could get a good laugh too.
After a few weeks of this, it would begin to sink in to theses graduates that their ‘diploma’ was basically worthless toward getting a job. About that time, they would get the letter from the loan company, reminding them that their after graduation exemption period had ended, and it was time to start making monthly payments on their student debt. A lot of them felt cheated, and angry, and sent in very creative responses to those notification letters. And many of them didn’t (couldn’t) pay back those loans – with significant consequences to their financial rating.
That loan guarantee company eventually went bankrupt, because it made it so easy to pull such scams on students. Of course, the people who operated such ‘schools’, the banks who issued these loans, and the people who ran the loan guarantee company all made good profits from this. About the only ones who suffered were the students who fell for such scams, and the US taxpayers who had guaranteed these loans.
Kline is unlikely to be unseated, but you never know. I think it’s a bad issue to pick. I don’t think anyone has the right to have their debt to the taxpayers forgiven. I’d much rather forgive people who got behind on their taxes because they had a family to feed than kids who borrowed $50,000 for a useless degree.