Feds move to fire an incompetent watchdog

From Finally, the feds move to fire an incompetent watchdog over for-profit colleges

Much of the world turns on paper credentials. But the fact that these often aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on has been spotlighted by the accreditation scandal in the for-profit college business. Scores of campuses have been given a seal of approval by accreditation agencies despite coming under state or federal investigation for fraud.

The federal government is preparing to bring down the hammer on one of these toothless watchdogs. …

The ACICS case underscores the drawbacks of governmental outsourcing of its regulatory authority to outside agencies, especially self-regulatory bodies. These bodies often are dependent for revenue on the very institutions they oversee, which tends to file down their sharp teeth when confronted with the need to bite down hard on a fee-paying target. The phenomenon typically leads to abuses going unaddressed[.]

Giggity. Here's hoping they take a gander at the ABA.

Bitter loser whines in Op Ed

Hat tip to Nando for Law school fundraising: Solicitations will be bitterly denied.

A shiny wit named Bob Larson writes he is aggrieved to be solicited by his alma mater. Dude should have studied harder and networked more. Should also have matriculated at Minnesota; as Scott Bullock could have predicted, employers were underawed by his stint at the William Mitchell Intellectual Property Law Clinic.

</sarcasm>

Read this, boys and girls.

Going to law school has irreparably damaged my career. It took years to slog through law school, wallow in unemployment, find an employer who would take a chance on a guy branded with those scarlet letters — J.D. — and finally make my way back into my undergraduate field. Years that I should have spent gathering expertise and accomp-lishments, contributing to a 401(k) and building my professional network.

So much for the JD Advantage™; it truly is a worse-than-useless piece of shit. You could find thousands of Bob Larsons on LinkedIn and probably thousands more, including yours truly, who don't list their JD at all.

Do your school, the environment, and yourself a favor: if you don't want to be solicited then ask to be removed from their mailing list.

Lender wants to roll your student loans into your mortgage

From realtor.com:

The BurkeyLoan, developed by financial company Burkey Capital, is expected to hit the market this fall with a seductive and unique sales pitch: to help college grads become homeowners by rolling their student debt into a 30-year fixed mortgage.

OK, not YOUR loan:

The target borrower will be the crème de la crème of college grads (think doctors or lawyers instead of store managers). They'll be in the top 20% or so of earning households, have stellar credit, and have at least three to four years of work experience where they raked in at least $150,000 a year, according to the company.

They'll also need to work in fields, such as medicine, where if they lost their jobs, they could easily find another.

Ahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa. With that qualification you'll need to be a Supreme Court clerk.

Not to be outdone by Burkey loans, the gummint will start to make Turkey Loans™ to 145-LSAT types who seen loyers on TV and want to matriculate at the local toilet 'cause they good at arguing. Granted, these TLs will be non-dischargeable and haunt you like a ghost for 25 years, but try explaining the distinction to a water head who will never pass the bar, anyway.

May 2016

Or meh 2016 as I call it. Go back and read the comparable 2011 entries and see how much growth there has been in five years (spoiler: nil). Then, compute how many students graduated in the interim.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm

Not seasonally adjusted	May	2015	1,116,500
	March	2016	1,120,100
	April	2016	1,118,900
	May	2016	1,120,300	3,800
Seasonally adjusted	May	2015	1,119,700
	March	2016	1,124,000
	April	2016	1,123,400
	May	2016	1,123,500	3,800
Change from Apr-16 to May-16				100