Hearing will air lawmakers’ objections and calls for robust changes
California faces a reckoning in how it regulates for-profit colleges and trade schools at a time when more students are turning to an educational industry with a long history of fraud allegations.
The Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, the troubled state agency charged with policing and licensing those schools, is scheduled for what is shaping up as a contentious legislative oversight hearing next week, with lawmakers calling for robust changes in how it operates.
“The bureau is in need of significant improvements at a time when students are suffering immensely” in economic changes brought on by the global pandemic, Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, told EdSource. “Everything is on the table.”
California’s for-profit colleges enroll roughly 260,000 students, according to a recent report by the Campaign for College Opportunity, an advocacy group. Many of them are low income and members of underrepresented groups who rely on student loans to pay tuition. The study found that of students who entered a for-profit school in 2004, 43% defaulted on their loans within 12 years.