For-Profit Universities Found Ripping Off Veterans

Sen. Kay Hagan sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee: for the U.S. Senate. On July 30 she released the finding from a study conducted and survey about for-profit universities in our country.

She explained that there has been an explosion of growth in the number of students attending these institutions, most of them online, and other students in default who do not even graduate, making it a necessary investigation.

“One thing that came to light very quickly was the deceptive and corruption that our veterans and G.I.s were receiving from these for-profit universities,” said Sen. Hagan in a telephone interview with Patch.

She shared a story where there was actually one of the institutions that came onto the property of the wounded warrior barracks facility at Camp LeJeune and enrolled a wounded warrior into a class. Later that veteran could not even identify what class he had been signed up for. Once the G.I. bill dollars are used, they cannot reuse them, so the soldier had lost the ability for those funds.

"The report shows that $32 billion of taxpayer monies went into the for profits,” said Hagan. “23% of that was spent on advertising and marketing and recruiting.”

The public university system in NC only spent 1.3% of their total budget on marketing, advertising and recruiting. What Sen. Hagan's bill does is to prohibit the use of money coming in from federal taxpayer dollars being spent on marketing, advertising and recruiting.

The students that attend the for-profits, attending the classes at the institution, 96% of those students had to take out student loans, even though 13% of the students account for over half of the loan defaults.

"It’s proof of how those funds can be better utilized in other places, " said Hagan.

The $2.5 million settlement being led by the Attorney General from Kentucky and the agreement to turn the GIbill.com website over to the Veterans Administration is what Sen. Hagan joined alongside back in June.

"It has been managed by a company that mimicked the layout and format of the official G.I.bill website," said Hagan. "This tactic led veterans to believe that their benefits could only be used at the listed schools on their site – which were 15 for profit universities."