From the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, March 12, under the headline, "The Troubling Appeal of Education at For-Profit Schools":
Some two million Americans are enrolled in for-profit colleges, up from 400,000 in 2000. Those students, most of them working adults getting short-term certificates, are disproportionately nonwhite and female. They graduate with more debt than students who have attended public and nonprofit institutions, and are more likely to default on their loans.
It's amazing how the Times manages to attack the for-profit colleges for enrolling students who are "disproportionately nonwhite and female." If the opposite were the case, and the students were disproportionately white and male, the Times would probably attack the colleges for racism, sexism, and exclusivity. For the colleges, it's a no-win situation; they get attacked for any deviation from the demographic norms, in any direction.
If anyone ought to know from "the troubling appeal of education at for-profit schools," it is the Times itself, a for-profit company (at least ostensibly) that owns something called "The School of the New York Times," draped with language — "faculty," "courses," "applications," "certificate in content marketing," "admissions," "tuition," "student journeys" — stolen from actual, real educational institutions. But the "school" isn't accredited by any accreditation agency; in some respects it is more like Trump University: "we are not in a position to offer refunds. All sales are final." The "tuition" for these "student journeys" — between $6,990 and $7,990 for a 15 to 17 day trip, not including airfare — is more than a whole year of full-credit courses costs at some community colleges. The same Sunday newspaper that carries the book review also carried a full-page house ad for the student journeys. If the Times really thinks this is "troubling," as the book review headline and article — by a Times news reporter — contend, maybe they should get out of the business, or at least stop using the newspaper's journalism to attack others who are competing in the same business.