Deceased--Bunny Yeager

Bunny Yeager
March 13th, 1929 to May 25th, 2014

"Bunny Yeager, photographer of Bettie Page pinups, dies at 85"

by

David Colker

May 26th, 2014

The Los Angeles Times

Bunny Yeager had success as a model in Miami in the 1950s, but she wanted to be a photographer. She saw her chance when she met the little-known Bettie Page, who had modeled for under-the-counter photo sets that specialized in sadomasochism.

Yeager took a somewhat more wholesome, holiday-themed photo of Page — nude except for a Santa hat — and in 1955 sent it off to fledgling magazine Playboy. "I figured because they were new they might pay attention to an amateur, and that's what happened," she told the London Telegraph in 2012.

The photo launched her career as one of the most successful pinup photographers, often with Page — who became an international sex symbol — as her model.

Yeager, 85, died Sunday in a nursing facility in North Miami. The cause was heart failure, said her agent, Ed Christin.

In recent years, along with a revival of interest in Page, who died in 2008, there was much renewed appreciation for Yeager's photography. Her work was the subject of several gallery and museum shows, such as the "Bunny Yeager: The Legendary Queen of the Pinup" exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2010.

Yeager worked with numerous models over the years, but said that Page was uncommonly cooperative.

"It was like us doing a dance together," Yeager said in an interview last year in the Sun Sentinel newspaper in Florida. "I would snap my fingers and she would do exactly what I told her to do: 'Stand on your toes. Kick your leg in the air. Jump in the air.'"

There were pictures of Page frolicking on the beach in Key Biscayne, dressed in a bikini that Yeager designed and made. Another locale was a wild animal park in Boca Raton, Fla., where many of the animals were not caged. Page, dressed in a leopard-print swimsuit, was shown sitting among real cheetahs.

Yeager came to be admired for her use of natural light, sometimes enhanced by flash even in daylight, to make a model's skin look luminous. But unlike nude photographers whose depictions of women were hyper-sexual and pumped up, Yeager found sensuality in a more natural look.

"Bunny has that good understanding of how to photograph the female body. At the same time, she knew how to captivate men's sexual fantasies," Miami gallery owner Harold Golen told the New York Times in 2011 when the gallery hosted an exhibition of Yeager's work. "Her women are real. None of them are spray-tanned. Their breasts aren't ballooned. They have curves and a bit of cellulite."

The 1950s and 1960s were Yeager's boom years, with her working for several magazines. She appeared on the quiz show "What's My Line" and had a few roles in movies, including as a Swedish masseuse in the 1968 Frank Sinatra detective film, "Lady in Cement."

The statuesque, blond Yeager was also known for taking pictures of herself, using a timer. But with no full nudity in those.

In the 1970s her career as a photographer ground nearly to a halt. Magazines were getting more graphically anatomical. That was over the line for Yeager, who prided herself on making models comfortable and earning their trust. "You had magazines like Penthouse ... kind of smutty," she said in the Sun Sentinel interview. "They had girls showing more than they should."
"I'm not doing it to titillate anybody's interest," she continued. "I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it's a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together."

She was born Linnea Eleanor Yeager on March 13, 1929, in Wilkinsburg, Pa. She gave herself her nickname after seeing the 1945 movie "Week-End at the Waldorf" in which Lana Turner played a character named Bunny Smith.

The inspiration for her photography also came from a movie star — she spotted a magazine pictorial of Rita Hayworth. "She was posing on a bed in what looked like a slip," she told the Miami Herald in 2013. "It was probably a nightgown, I know that now, but it wasn't like any nightgown I'd ever worn."

For fun, Yeager started taking pictures of friends in slightly risque poses. But nudity was out of the question. "Where would we even get something like that developed?" she asked.

When she was 17 her family moved to Florida, where she won local beauty contests and got ample work as a model. In 1953 she enrolled in a photography night class at a vocational school. For one of her assignments, she took model pals — dressed in leopard-print swimsuits — to the same animal park where she later shot Page. One of her photos ended up on the cover of Eye magazine and her career began.

Yeager was married twice, and even became a Girl Scout leader. "Nude photographer and Girl Scout leader, that was Bunny," Christin said.

When her work was rediscovered after so many years of little work as a photographer, Yeager was thrilled. "It's exciting to find out that I'm appreciated by so many people," she told the Miami Herald in 2011. "The phone hasn't stopped ringing. People want to see me.

"It's like my life is starting all over again."
Yeager is survived by daughters Lisa Packard of North Miami and Cherilu Duval of Hamilton, Ohio. Yeager's first husband, Arthur Irwin, died in 1977. Her second husband, Harry Schaefer, died in 2000.

"Bunny Yeager, Pinup Portraitist, Dies at 85"

by

Margalit Fox

May 25th, 2014

The New York Times

Bunny Yeager, a model-turned-photographer whose images of a scarcely clad Bettie Page, embodying feral sexuality and winsome naïveté all at once, helped propel Ms. Page to international stardom as a midcentury pinup queen, died on Sunday in North Miami, Fla. She was 85.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said her agent, Ed Christin.

Ms. Yeager, who took up her art by accident, was one of the world’s most celebrated photographers of female nudes and near-nudes of the 1950s and ’60s. She is widely credited with helping turn the erotic pinup — long a murky enterprise in every sense of the word — into high photographic art.

Her work appeared in Playboy, for which she shot a string of centerfolds, and in a spate of postwar men’s magazines whose names — Cavalier, Escapade, Nugget, Fling, Sunbathing, National Police Gazette, Figure Quarterly — recall a bygone era of salacious innocence.

Ms. Yeager’s work, which fell dormant in the 1970s and remained so for decades as many of those magazines folded, has lately enjoyed a renaissance.

In 2010, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh mounted a show — the first museum exhibition of her career — of Ms. Yeager’s self-portraits. As artfully sensual as anything she shot from behind the camera, they prefigure the work of self-photographing artists like Cindy Sherman.

Other exhibitions followed, including “Bunny Yeager: Both Sides of the Camera,” on view last year at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale.

Ms. Yeager was played by Sarah Paulson in the 2005 film “The Notorious Bettie Page,” which starred Gretchen Mol in the title role.

For all the luminous women Ms. Yeager photographed over the years, she remained best known for her work with Ms. Page, whom she shot a thousand times during their brief collaboration in 1954.

“Oh, she was beautiful!” Ms. Yeager told The Miami Herald last year. “When I told her I thought I might want to photograph her nude, she said, ‘Funny, I sunbathe nude and I have a tan like this all over.’ And she did, everywhere, even behind her knees and all the places you wouldn’t think.”

More than 250 previously unpublished photos by Ms. Yeager are collected in the coffee-table book “Bettie Page: Queen of Curves,” with text by Petra Mason, to appear in October.

Ms. Yeager’s images, shot most often with a Rolleiflex or a Speed Graphic camera, are characterized by their imaginative compositions and exotic locales. A famous photo of Ms. Page depicts her, clad in a leopard-print swimsuit, beside a live cheetah.

Other stylistic hallmarks include a luminosity that seemed to pulsate from every image. A longtime Miami resident, Ms. Yeager shot frequently in the brilliant South Florida light and used a flash even in the daytime.

But the most conspicuous hallmark of her work was her use of vibrant, natural-looking models, who exuded a confident female sexuality that — at the moment the shutter clicked, at least — did not appear destined for the male gaze.

“I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests,” Ms. Yeager said of her work in an interview last year. “I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.”

Ms. Yeager’s compositions are also memorable for the singular outfits she made for her models out of frugal necessity. For the image that propelled her and Ms. Page to celebrity, published in the January 1955 issue of Playboy, Ms. Yeager sewed the Santa hat worn by her winking, tree-trimming subject. She was not obliged to sew anything else.

Linnea Eleanor Yeager was born on March 13, 1929, in Wilkinsburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh. At 17, she moved with her family to Miami and there, Linnea, a self-described shy young woman, reinvented herself. She adopted the name Bunny from Lana Turner’s character in the 1945 film “Week-End at the Waldorf” and enrolled in modeling school.

Tall, slender and photogenic, Ms. Yeager was soon one of the most sought-after models in the city. She won a string of local beauty pageants, including, The Tampa Bay Times reported in 2011, Queen of Miami, Miss Personality of Miami Beach and Miss Trailer Coach of Dade County.

Ms. Yeager took up photography as a way to economize: Duplicating her portfolio was expensive, and she vowed to learn to make her own prints. Enrolling in a night-school photography class in her early 20s, she sold her idiosyncratic first homework assignment — the model Maria Stinger posed with cheetahs — to the men’s magazine Eye.

In 1954, Ms. Yeager met the raven-haired Ms. Page, who had come to Miami from New York, where she was known for the bondage imagery shot by the brother-and-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw.

After shooting Ms. Page as a suitless Santa — a demure image compared with Ms. Page’s previous work — Ms. Yeager set her sights on Playboy because, she said, “I heard they paid more than anybody else.” Playboy bought the picture for $100.

Ms. Yeager’s first husband, Arthur Irwin, known as Bud, died in the 1970s; her second husband, Harry Schaefer, died about 15 years ago. Survivors include two daughters, Lisa Irwin Packard and Cherilu Irwin Duval, and four grandchildren.

Her books include “How I Photograph Myself” (1964), about self-portraiture; “Bunny Yeager’s Flirts of the Fifties” (2007); “Bunny Yeager’s Bouffant Beauties” (2009); and, in 2012, “Bunny Yeager’s Beautiful Backsides.”

Bunny Yeager [Wikipedia]

Bunny Yeager's home page


Bunny Yeager...pinup photographer

Another argument for a "liberal education"

 

"'There's Nothing Liberal About Specializing in Philosophy'"

by

Nick Romeo

May 9th, 2014

The Atlantic

Online courses and crushing student debt are contemporary phenomena, but the arguments they inspire are often variations on older debates. Attacking and defending a liberal-arts education is an old American tradition, one that dates back to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. In a new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, traces the history of these debates in American culture. We spoke recently about how history can clarify contemporary questions about the future of higher education in America.

If you could drop Thomas Jefferson into today’s educational landscape, what would he think about rising student loan costs and an increasingly vocational approach to higher education?

Jefferson would be appalled by the retreat from public responsibility for higher education. He tried to pass taxes to support people without money receiving an education, and he failed. At the same time, he would probably say it’s predictable. This is how wealthy people protect their advantages: by limiting access to higher education to their own children. This creates what Jefferson called an “unnatural aristocracy,” people who have unearned privileges. He would think it’s very sad that people are going into debt to finance educational exploration. He would worry about the possibility that talented people without financial means would be left out of higher education. In terms of a vocational approach, Jefferson was a great believer in studying things that didn’t seem to be immediately profitable.

Ben Franklin criticized the elitism of higher education. He described Harvard as a finishing school where the rich learn obsolete skills and knowledge. What do you think Ben Franklin would make of the current debates about higher education?

Franklin probably would have had more sympathy for the anti-college groups today saying, “You don’t need colleges. Go off and learn stuff on your own. You want to be a programmer; you can do that on your own. You want to start a company, you can do that in all these other ways.” Someone with a lot of smarts and chutzpah who goes off and educates himself in his own way—Franklin would admire that. But he was also someone who found narrowness appalling. Someone like Peter Thiel, who is asking kids to leave college for a hundred thousand dollar fellowship, is encouraging them to become ever more narrow, so that they can develop an app to order pizza more quickly or access pornography more easily. All this talent driven into narrower and narrower spheres—Franklin would have found it depressing. Increasing specialization makes us less capable citizens and less able to adjust to changes in the marketplace. Many studies show students choose schools based on their selectivity, the prestige factor. And the vanity of prestige, just wanting to be better than someone else, he hated that.

Many kids in the freshman class at elite schools are from families in higher tax brackets. Are we still rewarding unearned privilege rather than merit?

I think this is a huge problem. A lot of the indices we use for admission favor the wealthy, but we are looking at changing that. We’d like not to favor people who have been trained through expensive classes to do well on testing day, but rather to find people with authentic potential. We try to spend a lot of time finding students who might not find us because they think we are too expensive. Often these students could come here for free and graduate with no loans and do just as well as someone who had all the advantages. We’re also trying to expand our reach with [online courses], and with this platform we’ve reached over 600,000 students in just a year and a half. In the previous hundred years we haven’t offered content to that many people.

Why should a student attend a brick-and-mortar school if they can get similar knowledge at a lower cost from online courses and other online resources?

I think it’s to work and live and play beside other people who are also going through a similar process of learning. Being surrounded by other students and professors who are engaged in research is a hothouse environment for expanding your cultural and intellectual horizons. I’m not naive enough to deny that people also like to be on residential campuses because they often have nice amenities. Taken to an extreme, that’s a real problem. Schools that are trying to entice students with swimming pools and rock bands, I hope they lose their customers. What they’re offering students is a taste of luxury before they have to start working. I think in the future more people will get online credit and certification before coming to a place like Wesleyan for a few semesters rather than four years. Multiplying access points is crucial as long as you’re providing access to a broadening rather than a narrowing of the mind.

So many brochures are full of bromides about the power of a liberal-arts education to expand horizons and transform worldviews. How would you define these intangible benefits?

Well, there are so many bromides, and I think that’s because we are trying to describe something that’s not immediately transferable into cash or some other quantitative measure. I like to say to students that I hope that in college they find out what they really love to do. It’s important not only that they discover what they love to do but also that they develop their skills in that area. This should be measurable. You should see your skills grow in ways that matter not only to professors, but also people who are off-campus. I do think there should be some practical payoff to a broad education, and that’s why I call what I’m describing in the book a pragmatic liberal education. I don’t think it’s just about having a wonderful mind that you explore on Sundays by yourself. It’s also important to become more productive at things that other people recognize as valuable.

A standard defense of a liberal arts education is that it prepares you to succeed in any number of domains because you gain the critical thinking skills to succeed in a range of disciplines. What do you think of this defense of liberal arts?

Well that's key. But you can’t just tell students to go study German literature or philosophy and then figure out how to transfer it once they graduate. That process needs to start earlier. If you're studying German literature, you should be able to explain to someone in computer science what's valuable about it. And the computer scientist should be able to do the same thing to the German literature student. I teach Great Books courses, and if students can't explain why Virginia Woolf or Baudelaire matters in terms relevant to their own lives, I don't think they understand the book. It gets back to that anti-specialization theme. I don't think there's anything “liberal” about specializing in philosophy compared to specializing in business. We don’t want specialists with just technical training. When you have a liberal education, you’re not just a technician. You’re able to move among fields. We don’t want you just to be an academic expert to please a professor. That’s just making believe you’re a mini-professor and you want to grow up to be a big professor.

W.E.B. Dubois thought only the “talented tenth” should receive liberal education. Is only a minority of the population sufficiently gifted to benefit from a liberal education?

Increasing the Value of a Liberal Education

It’s a big question. I think the American response since Jefferson and Franklin is that it may be the case that not everyone has the intellectual capacity to benefit from it, but everyone should have access to it because it’s very hard to predict who would benefit from it. It’s very easy to predict that people with power and money will try to restrict access so as to protect their own power and money. Broadening access will create some inefficiency. Some people may not get much out of it and will move toward technical training, but others who you might not have expected to benefit will flourish. Giving people access to a liberal education is really essential for citizenship, and that should start before college. Learning critical thinking so people can’t just pull the wool over your eyes should be part of everyone’s education.

Aristotle suggests in The Politics that every subject can be approached from either a liberal or a vocational standpoint. What matters is why you study something, not what you study. So you could study finance in a liberal spirit, or you could study English literature in a purely vocational one. Would you agree with this?

Absolutely. I have some fights with my colleagues because they want to protect certain disciplines and not others. I come to this from Dewey, but it’s in Aristotle too. It’s not the discipline that makes it part of liberal education, it’s the way you approach it. A liberal arts school is not about having lots of classics professors and no economics professors. It’s about teaching the subject in such a way that it broadens students’ perspectives rather than closing them down into specialization. At Wesleyan, for example, I’ve been trying to bring in engineering as a way of thinking and problem solving. Not just as a trade school. I’ve met with some real resistance, but you can teach engineering as part of a liberal education, just as you can teach it as part of technical training.

Education in past centuries was often influenced by religious and civic ideas of virtue. Schools tried to create better people. Is character formation still a legitimate aspiration for a liberal arts college?

It’s a really important part of the college experience. That’s why, when schools try to appeal to the desire for luxury, it’s an educational failing as well as a moral one. I’ve always worked at small institutions, and you can see characters being formed. You can watch students become selfish, narcissistic, narrow people, or you can try to open them up to service, cooperation, and leadership. When things go wrong, when there are instances of dishonesty or violence within the campus community, these are moments to talk to students about their responsibility for one another. If they take responsibility for making their environment a better place to live, that will become part of their lives after they graduate. It’s also important for students to learn how to fail. Often students at elite schools have never had the experience of failing, and that’s a deprivation. These are things that are hard to learn online. 

The death of the "liberal arts"

Technology, technology, technology. That's all is heard--the latest new gadget. Just design, draft, manufacture, and convince the populace that life would be miserable without the new gadget....that's all that matters--WRONG. Knowledge of the world and the ability to communicate [verbally and written] is just as important.

"Who Killed the Liberal Arts?"

And why we should care

by

Joseph Epstein

September 17th, 2012

the weekly Standard

When asked what he thought about the cultural wars, Irving Kristol is said to have replied, “They’re over,” adding, “We lost.” If Kristol was correct, one of the decisive battles in that war may have been over the liberal arts in education, which we also lost.

In a loose definition, the “liberal arts” denote college study anchored in preponderantly Western literature, philosophy, and history, with science, mathematics, and foreign languages playing a substantial, though less central, role; in more recent times, the social science subjects—psychology, sociology, political science—have also sometimes been included. The liberal arts have always been distinguished from more specialized, usually vocational training. For the ancient Greeks, the liberal arts were the subjects thought necessary for a free man to study. If he is to remain free, in this view, he must acquire knowledge of the best thought of the past, which will cultivate in him the intellectual depth and critical spirit required to live in an informed and reasonable way in the present.

For many years, the liberal arts were my second religion. I worshipped their content, I believed in their significance, I fought for them against the philistines of our age as Samson fought against the Philistines of his—though in my case, I kept my hair and brought down no pillars. As currently practiced, however, it is becoming more and more difficult to defend the liberal arts. Their content has been drastically changed, their significance is in doubt, and defending them in the condition in which they linger on scarcely seems worth the struggle.

The loss of prestige of the liberal arts is part of the general crisis of higher education in the United States. The crisis begins in economics. Larger numbers of Americans start college, but roughly a third never finish—more women finish, interestingly, than do men. With the economic slump of recent years, benefactions to colleges are down, as are federal and state grants, thus forcing tuition costs up, in public as well as in private institutions. Inflation is greater in the realm of higher education than in any other public sphere. Complaints about the high cost of education at private colleges—fees of $50,000 and $55,000 a year are commonly mentioned—are heard everywhere. A great number of students leave college with enormous student-loan debt, which is higher than either national credit card or automobile credit debt. Because of the expense of traditional liberal arts colleges, greater numbers of the young go to one or another form of commuter college, usually for vocational training.

Although it is common knowledge that a person with a college degree will earn a great deal more than a person without one—roughly a million dollars more over a lifetime is the frequently cited figure—today, students with college degrees are finding it tough to get decent jobs. People are beginning to wonder if college, at its currently extravagant price, is worth it. Is higher education, like tech stocks and real estate, the next big bubble to burst?

A great deal of evidence for the crisis in American higher education is set out in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Its author, Andrew Delbanco, the biographer of Herman Melville, is a staunch defender of liberal arts, as he himself studied them as an undergraduate at Harvard and as he teaches them currently at Columbia. The continuing diminution of the liberal arts worries him. Some 18 million people in the United States are now enrolled in one or another kind of undergraduate institution of higher learning—but fewer than 100,000 are enrolled in liberal arts colleges.

At the same time, for that small number of elite liberal arts colleges—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago, and a few others—applications continue to rise, despite higher and higher tuition fees. The ardor to get into these schools—for economic, social, and snobbish reasons—has brought about an examination culture, at least among the children of the well-to-do, who from preschool on are relentlessly trained to take the examinations that will get them into the better grade schools, high schools, colleges, and, finally, professional schools. Professor Delbanco is opposed to the economic unfairness behind these arrangements, believing, rightly, that as a result, “the obstacles [to getting into the elite colleges] that bright low-income students face today are more insidious than the frank exclusionary practices that once prevailed.”

Whether students today, despite all their special tutoring and testing, are any better than those of earlier generations is far from clear. Trained almost from the cradle to smash the SATs and any other examination that stands in their way, the privileged among them may take examinations better, but it is doubtful if their learning and intellectual understanding are any greater. Usually propelled by the desires of their parents, they form a meritocracy that, in Delbanco’s view, as in that of the English sociologist Michael Young whom he quotes, comprises a dystopia of sorts, peopled by young men and women driven by high, but empty, ambition. “Are these really the people we want running the world?” Delbanco asks. Unfortunately, they already are. I am not the only one, surely, to have noticed that some of the worst people in this country—names on request—are graduates of the Harvard and Yale law schools.

Attending one of a limited number of elite colleges continues to yield wide opportunities for graduates, but fewer and fewer people any longer believe that someone who has finished college is necessarily all that much smarter than someone who hasn’t. With standards lowered, hours of study shortened, reports appearing about how many college graduates can no longer be depended upon to know how to write or to grasp rudimentary intellectual concepts, having gone to college seems to have less and less bearing on a person’s intelligence.

Studies cited by Delbanco in his footnotes claim an increase among college students in cheating, drinking, and depression. In their book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska argue that the gain in critical thinking and complex reasoning among the majority of students during college years is very low, if not minimal. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education drawn from their book, Arum and Roska write:

    Parents—although somewhat disgruntled about increasing costs—want colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain independence, and attain a credential that will help them be successful as adults. Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholarship and professional interests. Administrators have been asked to focus largely on external institutional rankings and the financial bottom line. Government funding agencies are primarily interested in the development of new scientific knowledge. .  .  . No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduates’ academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence.

What savvy employers are likely to conclude is that those who graduate from college are probably more conformist, and therefore likely to be more dependable, than those who do not. Paul Goodman, one of the now-forgotten gurus of the 1960s, used to argue that what finishing college really meant is that one was willing to do anything to succeed in a capitalist society. In getting a college degree, Goodman held, one was in effect saying, I want in on the game, deal me a hand, I want desperately to play. Education, meanwhile, didn’t have a lot to do with it.

Not everywhere in higher education have standards slipped. One assumes that in engineering and within the sciences they have been maintained, and in some ways, owing to computer technology, perhaps improved. Relatively new fields of learning, computer science chief among them, have not been around long enough to have lost their way. Medical and legal education are probably not greatly different than they have traditionally been. Chiefly in the liberal arts subjects do standards seem most radically to have slipped.

Early in the 19th century, Sydney Smith, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, remarked that if we had made the same progress in the culinary arts as we have made in education, we should still be eating soup with our hands. Apart from eliminating corporal punishment and ­widening the educational franchise, we can’t be sure if, over the centuries, we have made much progress in education. At the moment there is great enthusiasm about “advances” in education owing to the Internet. Two teachers at Stanford, for example, put their course on Artificial Intelligence online and drew an audience of 160,000 students from all around the world. But science, which deals in one right answer, is more easily taught without a physical presence in the room, and probably works better online than humanities courses, whose questions usually have many answers, few of them permanently right. The Washington Monthly, in its May-June issue, has a special section called “The Next Wave of School Reform,” a wave that, in the words of the editor, aims to “improve students’ ability to think critically and independently, solve complex problems, apply knowledge to novel situations, work in teams and communicate effectively.” The problem with these waves of school reform, of course, is that a new one is always needed because the last one turns out to have tossed up more detritus on the shore than was expected.

The fact is that we still don’t know how to assess teaching—trial by student test scores, except in rudimentary subjects, isn’t very helpful—and we remain ignorant about the true nature of the transaction between teacher and student that goes by the name of learning. In undergraduate education, we may even have retreated a step or two through the phenomenon known as grade inflation and through the politicization of curricula.

The division between vocational and liberal arts education, which began during the 19th century with the advent of the land-grant state universities in the United States, is today tilting further and further in favor of the vocational. Even within the liberal arts, more and more students are, in Delbanco’s words, “fleeing from ‘useless’ subjects to ‘marketable’ subjects such as economics,” in the hope that this will lend them the practical credentials and cachets that might impress prospective employers.

Delbanco reminds us of Max Weber’s distinction between “soul-saving” and “skill-acquiring” education. The liberal arts, in their task to develop a certain roundedness in those who study them and their function, in Delbanco’s phrase, “as a hedge against utilitarian values,” are (or at least were meant to be) soul-saving. Whether, in the majority of students who undertook to study the liberal arts, they truly were or not may be open to question, but what isn’t open to question is that today, the liberal arts have lost interest in their primary mission. That mission, as Delbanco has it, is that of “attaining and sustaining curiosity and humility,” while “engaging in some serious ­self-examination.” A liberal education, as he notes, quoting John Henry Cardinal Newman, “implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of our character.”

Delbanco warns that it won’t do to posit some prelapsarian golden age when higher education approached perfection. Surely he is correct. A good deal of the old liberal arts education was dreary. The profession of teaching, like that of clergyman and psychiatrist, calls for a higher sense of vocation and talent than poor humanity often seems capable of attaining. Yet there was a time when a liberal arts education held a much higher position in the world’s regard than it does today. One of the chief reasons for its slippage, which Delbanco fails directly to confront, is that so many of its teachers themselves no longer believe in it —about which more presently.

I mentioned earlier that the liberal arts were for a good while my second religion. Here let me add that I had never heard of them until my own undergraduate education had begun.

When I was about to graduate from high school as an amiable screw-off, ranked barely above the lower quarter of my class, my father, who had not gone to college, told me that if I wished to go he would pay my way, but he encouraged me to consider whether my going wouldn’t be a waste of time. He personally thought I might make a hell of a good salesman, which was a compliment, for he was himself a hell of a good salesman, and a successful one. I eschewed his advice, not because it wasn’t sound, but chiefly because I felt that, at 18, I wasn’t ready to go out in the world to work.
In those days, the University of Illinois was, at least for residents of the state, an open-enrollment school. If you lived in Illinois, the school had to take you, no matter how low in your high school class you graduated. Lots of kids flunked out, and my own greatest fear on the train headed from Chicago down to Champaign-Urbana, in white bucks and reading The Catcher in the Rye, was that I would be among them.

Most of my friends, Jewish boys from the rising lower-middle class, went to the University of Illinois to major in business. “Business major” nicely rang the earnestness gong. Yet the courses required of a business major struck me as heart-stoppingly boring: accounting, economics, marketing, advertising, corporation finance, also known as “corp fin,” which sounded to me like nothing so much as a chancy seafood dish. I was especially nervous about accounting, for I had wretched handwriting and a dis- orderly mind, which I viewed as two strikes against me straightaway. Wasn’t there something else I might study instead of business? A fellow in the fraternity that was rushing me suggested liberal arts. This was the first time I had heard the phrase “liberal arts.” What it initially stood for, in my mind, was no accounting.

In my first year at the University of Illinois, I had slightly above a B average. I attained this through sheer memorization: of biological phyla, of French irregular verbs and vocabulary, of 17th-century poems. I also discovered, in a course called Rhetoric 101, that I had a minor skill at prose composition, a skill all the more remarkable for my excluding all use of any punctuation trickier than commas or periods.

After this modest success, I decided that I was ready for a more exotic institution, the University of Chicago, to which I applied during my second semester at Illinois. What I didn’t know then, but have since discovered, was that my demographic cohort, those people born toward the middle and end of the Depression, were lucky when it came to college admission, for our small numbers made colleges want us quite as much as we wanted them. In short, I was accepted at the University of Chicago, though I would never have been accepted there today, and that is where I spent the next, and final, three years of my formal education.

The University of Chicago had a reputation for great teachers, but I managed, somehow, to avoid them. I never sat in a class conducted by Leo Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Norman Maclean, David Greene, or Edward Shils. (Of course, great teachers, like great lovers, can sometimes be overrated. Later in life, I met a few men and women reputed to be great teachers and found them pompous and doltish, their minds spoiled by talking too long to children.) I attended a lecture by David Reisman, who was then Time magazine-cover famous, and was impressed by what then seemed to me his intellectual suavity. I sat in on a couple of classes taught by Richard Weaver, the author of Ideas Have Consequences, but left uninspired. I was most impressed by teachers from Mittel-Europa, Hitler’s gift to America, whose culture seemed thicker than that of the native-born teachers I encountered, and could not yet perceive the commonplace mind that sometimes lurked behind an English accent.

I took a course from Morton Dauwen Zabel, who was the friend of Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and Edmund Wilson. Although not a great teacher, Zabel was an impressive presence who gave off whiffs of what the literary life in the great world was like. I took a summer course from the poet and critic Elder Olson, who kept what seemed a full-time precariously long ash on the end of his cigarette, and who, after reading from The Waste Land, ended by saying, “How beautiful this is. Too bad I can’t believe a word of it.”

The students at the University of Chicago were something else. In his book, Delbanco, defending the small classroom, refers to something he calls “lateral learning,” which refers to what a college student learns in class from his fellow students. He cites Cardinal Newman and John Dewey on this point, and quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne:

    It contributes greatly to a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

A great many of my fellow students in the College at the University of Chicago seemed to come from New York City, several others from academic families. They appeared to have been reading the Nation and the New Republic from the age of 11. Their families argued about Trotsky at the dinner table. A few among them had the uncalled-for candor of psychoanalysands. I recall a girl sitting next to me at a roundtable in Swift Hall volunteering her own menstrual experiences in connection with a discussion of those of the Trobriand Islanders.

Some among these University of Chicago students had an impressive acquaintance with books. One morning in Elder Olson’s class in modern poetry, Olson began quoting Baudelaire (mon semblable,—mon frère!) and a student next to me, named Martha Silverman, joined him, in French, and together, in unison, the two of them chanted the poem to its conclusion. This was one of those moments when I thought it perhaps a good time to look into career opportunities at Jiffy Lube.

“I invariably took the first rank in all discussions and exercises, whether public or private, as not only my teachers testified, but also the printed congratulations and carmina of my classmates.” So wrote Leibniz about his own classroom performance. Reverse everything Leibniz wrote and you have a fairly accurate picture of my classroom performance at the University of Chicago. None among my teachers there ever suggested that I had intellectual promise. Nor should they have done, for I didn’t show any, not even to myself. I made no “A”s. I wrote no brilliant papers. I didn’t do especially well on exams. I was not quick in response in the classroom.

Only years later did I realize that quickness of response —on which 95 percent of education is based—is beside the point, and is required only of politicians, emergency-room physicians, lawyers in courtrooms, and salesmen. Serious intellectual effort requires slow, usually painstaking thought, often with wrong roads taken along the way to the right destination, if one is lucky enough to arrive there. One of the hallmarks of the modern educational system, which is essentially an examination system, is that so much of it is based on quick response solely. Give 6 reasons for the decline of Athens, 8 for the emergence of the Renaissance, 12 for the importance of the French Revolution. You have 20 minutes in which to do so.

At the University of Chicago I read many books, none of them trivial, for the school in those years did not allow the work of second- or third-rate writers into its curriculum. Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, or their equivalents of that day, did not come close to making the cut. No textbooks were used. You didn’t read “Karl Marx postulated .  .  .”; you read Karl-bloody-Marx. The working assumption was that one’s time in college is limited, and mustn’t be spent on anything other than the first-rate, or on learning acquired (as with textbooks) at a second remove.

Nor did Chicago offer any “soft” majors or “lite” courses. I remember, in my final year, looking for such a course to fill out a crowded schedule, and choosing one called History of Greek Philosophy. How difficult, I thought, could this be? Learn a few concepts of the pre-Socratics (Thales believed this, Heraclitus that), acquire a few dates, and that would be that. On the first day of class, the teacher, a trim little man named Warner Arms Wick, announced that there was no substantial history of Greek philosophy, so we shall instead be spending the quarter reading Aristotle and Plato exclusively.

How much of my reading did I retain? How much does any 19- or 20-year-old boy, whose hormones have set him a very different agenda, retain of serious intellectual matter? How much more is less than fully available to him owing to simple want of experience? What I do remember is the feeling of intellectual excitement while reading Plato and Thucydides and an almost palpable physical pleasure turning the pages of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as he made one dazzling intellectual connection after another. I can also recall being plunged into a brief but genuine depression reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

The idea behind the curriculum at the College of the University of Chicago was the Arnoldian one, abbreviated to undergraduate years, of introducing students to the best that was thought and said in the Western world. Mastery wasn’t in the picture. At least, I never felt that I had mastered any subject, or even book, in any of my courses there. What the school did give me was the confidence that I could read serious books, and with it the assurance that I needed to return to them, in some cases over and over, to claim anything like a genuine understanding of them.

I was never more than a peripheral character, rather more like a tourist than a student, at the University of Chicago. Yet when I left the school in 1959, I was a strikingly different person than the one who entered in 1956. What had happened? My years there allowed me to consider other possibilities than the one destiny would appear to have set in grooves for me. I felt less locked into the social categories—Jewish, middle-class, Midwestern—in which I had grown up, and yet, more appreciative of their significance in my own development. I had had a glimpse—if not much more—of the higher things, and longed for a more concentrated look.

Had I not gone to the University of Chicago, I have often wondered, what might my life be like? I suspect I would be wealthier. But reading the books I did, and have continued to throughout my life, has made it all but impossible to concentrate on moneymaking in the way that is required to acquire significant wealth. Without the experience of the University of Chicago, perhaps I would have been less critical of the world’s institutions and the people who run them; I might even have been among those who do run them. I might, who knows, have been happier, if only because less introspective—nobody said the examined life is a lot of laughs—without the changes wrought in me by my years at the University of Chicago. Yet I would not trade in those three strange years for anything.

I turned out to be a better teacher than student. In fact I took to saying, toward the close of my 30-year stint in the English department at Northwestern University, that teaching provides a better education than does being a student. If he wishes to elude boredom among his students and embarrassment for himself, a teacher will do all he can to cultivate the art of lucid and interesting presentation and the habits of thoroughness. Thereby, with a bit of luck, education may begin to kick in.

Yet even after completing three decades of teaching, I am less than sure that what I did in the classroom was effective or, when it might have been effective, why. Of the thousands of inane student evaluations I received—“This guy knows his stuff” .  .  . “Nice bowties” .  .  . “Great jokes”—the only one that stays in my mind read: “I did well in this course; I would have been ashamed not to have done.” How I wish I knew what it was that I did to induce this useful shame in that student, so that I might have done it again and again!

Student evaluations, set in place to give the impression to students that they have an important say in their own education, are one of the useless intrusions into university teaching by the political tumult of the 1960s. Teaching remains a mysterious, magical art. Anyone who claims he knows how it works is a liar. No one tells you how to do it. You walk into a classroom and try to remember what worked for the teachers who impressed you, or, later in the game, what seemed to work best for you in the past. Otherwise, it is pure improv, no matter how extensive one’s notes.

As a testimony to the difficulty of evaluating the quality of teaching, Professor Delbanco includes a devastating footnote about student evaluations. One study found that students tend to give good evaluations “to instructors who are easy graders or who are good looking,” and to be hardest on women and foreign teachers; another, made at Ohio State University, found “no correlation between professor evaluations and the learning that is actually taking place.” As Delbanco notes, the main result of student evaluations is to make it easier for students to avoid tough teachers or, through harsh reviews, punish these teachers for holding to a high standard.

I was not myself regarded as a tough teacher, but I prefer to think that I never fell below the line of the serious in what I taught or in what I asked of my students. What I tried to convey about the writers on whom I gave courses was, alongside the aesthetic pleasures they provided, their use as guides, however incomplete, to understanding life. Reading Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Willa Cather, and other writers I taught was important business—possibly, in the end, though I never said it straight out, more important than getting into Harvard Law School or Stanford Business School. When I taught courses on prose style, I stressed that correctness has its own elegance, and that, in the use of language, unlike in horseshoes, close isn’t good enough; precision was the minimal requirement, and it was everything.

How many students found helpful what I was trying to convey I haven’t the least notion. If anything I said during the many hours we were together mattered to them, I cannot know. Not a scholar myself, I never tried to make scholars of my students. A small number of them went on to do intellectual work, to become editors, critics, poets, novelists; a few became college teachers. Did my example help push them in their decision not to go for the money? Some of the brightest among them did go for the money, and have lived honorable lives in pursuit of it, and that’s fine, too. A world filled with people like me would be intolerable.

When I taught, I was always conscious of what I thought of as the guy in the next room: my fellow teachers. During my teaching days (1973-2003), I could be fairly certain that the guy in the next room was teaching something distinctly, even starkly, different from what I was teaching. This was the age of deconstruction, academic feminism, historicism, Marxism, early queer theory, and other, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, one-idea lunacies. A bright young female graduate student one day came to ask me if I thought David Copperfield a sexual criminal. “Why would I think that?” I asked. “Professor X thinks it,” she said. “He claims that because of the death in childbirth of David Copperfield’s wife, he, Copperfield, through making her pregnant, committed a crime.” All I could think to reply was, “I guess criticism never sleeps.”

While not wishing to join the dirge-like chorus of those who write about the fate of higher education in our day, Andrew Delbanco does not shy from setting out much that has gone wrong with it. He highlights the importance everywhere accorded to research over teaching among faculty. He notes the preeminence of science over the humanities, due to the fact that science deals with the provable and can also lead to technological advancement, and hence pays off. (He mentions the sadly mistaken slavishness of the humanities in attempting to imitate science, and cites the advent of something called the “literature lab” as an example.) He brings up the corruption implicit in university presidents sitting on corporate boards, the fraudulence of big-time college athletics, some of whose football and basketball coaches earn more than entire academic departments, and much more.

Delbanco, a secular Jew and a man of the Vietnam generation, is nonetheless ready to allow the pertinence of the earlier Protestant view of higher education in the liberal arts:

    The era of spiritual authority belonging to college [when it was under religious auspices] is long gone. And yet I have never encountered a better formulation—“show me how to think and how to choose”—of what a college should strive to be: an aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others.

College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be gives a clear picture of all the forces, both within and outside the university, working against the liberal arts. Yet Delbanco lets off the hook the people who were in the best position to have helped save them—the teachers, those “guys in the next room.” Much could be said about teaching the liberal arts before the Vietnam generation came to prominence (which is to say, tenure) in the colleges: that it could be arid, dull, pedantic, astonishingly out of it. But it never quite achieved the tendentious clownishness that went into effect when “the guys in the next room” took over.

Not that the ground hadn’t been nicely prepared for them. Universities had long before opened themselves up to teaching books and entire subjects that had no real place in higher education. Take journalism schools. Everyone who has ever worked on a newspaper knows that what one learns in four years in journalism school can be acquired in less than two months working on a newspaper. But as journalism schools spread, it slowly became necessary to go through one in order to get a job on a large metropolitan daily. Going to “journ” school became a form of pledging the fraternity. Everyone else in the business had pledged; who are you, pal, to think you can get in without also pledging? And so journalism schools became mainstays of many universities.

Then there is the business school, especially in its MBA version. Business schools are not about education at all, but about so-called networking and establishing, for future employers, a credential demonstrating that one will do anything to work for them—even give up two years of income and pay high tuition fees for an MBA to do so. As with an American Express card, so with an MBA, one daren’t leave home without one, at least if one is applying for work at certain corporations. Some among these corporations, when it comes to recruiting for jobs, only interview MBAs, and many restrict their candidate pools to MBAs from only four or five select business schools. Pledging the fraternity again.

Soon, the guys in the next room, in their hunger for relevance and their penchant for self-indulgence, began teaching books for reasons external to their intrinsic beauty or importance, and attempted to explain history before discovering what actually happened. They politicized psychology and sociology, and allowed African-American studies an even higher standing than Greek and Roman classics. They decided that the multicultural was of greater import than Western culture. They put popular culture on the same intellectual footing as high culture (Conrad or graphic novels, three hours credit either way). And, finally, they determined that race, gender, and social class were at the heart of all humanities and most social science subjects. With that finishing touch, the game was up for the liberal arts.

The contention in favor of a liberal arts education was that contemplation of great books and grand subjects would take students out of their parochial backgrounds and elevate them into the realm of higher seriousness. Disputes might arise from professor to professor, or from school to school, about what constituted the best that was thought and said—more Hobbes than Locke, more Yeats than Frost—but a general consensus existed about what qualified to be taught to the young in the brief span of their education. That consensus has split apart, and what gets taught today is more and more that which interests professors.

Columbia still provides two years of traditional liberal arts for its undergraduates. The University of Chicago continues to struggle over assembling a core curriculum based on the old Robert Hutchins College plan. St. John’s College, both in Annapolis and in Santa Fe, has, from its founding, been devoted to the cult of the liberal arts, even to the point of having its students study medieval science. The hunger among students for the intellectual satisfaction that a liberal arts education provides is not entirely dead. (At Northwestern, a course in Russian novels taught by Gary Saul Morson attracts 600 students, second only to the recently canceled notorious course in sex education offered by the school.) But the remaining liberal arts programs begin to have the distinct feel of rearguard actions.

The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.

[Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Essays in Biography.]

Value of theology

"Study Theology, Even If You Don't Believe in God"

This lost liberal art encourages scholars to understand history from the inside out.

by

Tara Isabella Burton

October 30th, 2013

The Atlantic

When I first told my mother—a liberal, secular New Yorker—that I wanted to cross an ocean to study for a bachelor’s degree in theology, she was equal parts aghast and concerned. Was I going to become a nun, she asked in horror, or else one of “those” wingnuts who picketed outside abortion clinics? Was I going to spend hours in the Bodleian Library agonizing over the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin? Theology, she insisted, was a subject by the devout, for the devout; it had no place in a typical liberal arts education.

Her view of the study of theology is far from uncommon. While elite universities like Harvard and Yale offer vocational courses at their divinity schools, and nearly all universities offer undergraduate majors in the comparative study of religions, few schools (with the exceptions of historically Catholic institutions like Georgetown and Boston College) offer theology as a major, let alone mandate courses in theology alongside other “core” liberal arts subjects like English or history. Indeed, the study of theology has often run afoul of the legal separation of church and state. Thirty-seven U.S. states have laws limiting the spending of public funds on religious training. In 2006, the Supreme Court case Locke v. Davey upheld the decision of a Washington State scholarship program to withhold promised funding from an otherwise qualified student after learning that he had decided to major in theology at a local Bible College.

Even in the United Kingdom, where secular bachelor's programs in theology are more common, prominent New Atheists like Richard Dawkins have questioned their validity in the university sphere. In a 2007 letter to the editor of The Independent, Dawkins argues for the abolishment of theology in academia, insisting that “a positive case now needs to be made that [theology] has any real content at all, or that it has any place whatsoever in today's university culture.”

Such a shift, of course, is relatively recent in the history of secondary education. Several of the great Medieval universities, among them Oxford, Bologna, and Paris, developed in large part as training grounds for men of the Church. Theology, far from being anathema to the academic life, was indeed its central purpose: It was the “Queen of the Sciences” the field of inquiry which gave meaning to all others. So, too, several of the great American universities. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alike were founded with the express purpose of teaching theology—one early anonymous account of Harvard's founding speaks of John Harvard's “dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches”, and his dream of creating an institution to train future clergymen to “read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue, and resolve them logically.”

Universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton no longer exist, in part or in whole, to train future clergymen. Their purpose now is far broader. But the dwindling role of theology among the liberal arts is a paradigmatic example of dispensing with the baby along with the bathwater.

Richard Dawkins would do well to look at the skills imparted by the Theology department of his own alma mater, Oxford (also my own). The BA I did at Oxford was a completely secular program, attracting students from all over the religious spectrum. My classmates included a would-be priest who ended up an atheist, as well as a militant atheist now considering the priesthood. During my time there, I investigated Ancient Near Eastern building patterns to theorize about the age of a settlement; compared passages of the gospels (in the original Greek) to analogous passages in the Jewish wisdom literature of the 1st century BC; examined the structure of a 14th-century Byzantine liturgy; and read The Brothers Karamazov as part of a unit on Christian existentialism. As Oxford's Dr. William Wood, a University Lecturer in Philosophical Theology and my former tutor, puts it: “theology is the closest thing we have at the moment to the kind of general study of all aspects of human culture that was once very common, but is now quite rare.” A good theologian, he says, “has to be a historian, a philosopher, a linguist, a skillful interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, and probably many other things besides.” In many ways, a course in theology is an ideal synthesis of all other liberal arts: no longer, perhaps, “Queen of the Sciences,” but at least, as Wood terms it, “Queen of the Humanities.”

Yet, for me, the value of theology lies not merely in the breadth of skills it taught, but in the opportunity it presented to explore a given historical mindset in greater depth. I learned to read the Bible in both Greek and Hebrew, to analyze the minutiae of language that allows us to distinguish “person” from “nature,” “substance” from “essence.” I read “orthodox” and “heretical” accounts alike of the nature of the Godhead, and learned about the convoluted and often arbitrary historical processes that delineated the two.

Such precision may seem—to the religious person and agnostic alike—no more useful than counting the number of angels on the head of a pin. But for me, it allowed me access into the fundamental building blocks of the mentality, say, of a 12th-century French monk, or a mystic from besieged Byzantium. While the study of history taught me the story of humanity on a broader scale, the study of theology allowed me insight into the minds and hearts, fears and concerns, of those in circumstances were so wildly different from my own. The difference between whether—as was the case in the Arian controversy of the fourth-century AD—the Godhead should be thought of as powerful first, and loving second, or loving first and powerful second, might seem utterly pedantic in a world where plenty of people see no need to think about God at all. But when scores of people were willing to kill or die to defend such beliefs—hardly a merely historical phenomenon—it's worth investigating how and why such beliefs infused all aspects of the world of their believers. How does that 12th-century French monk's view of the nature of God affect the way he sees himself, his relationship with others, his relationship with the natural world, his relationship with his own mortality? How does that Byzantine mystic conceive of space and time in a world he envisions as imbued with the sacred? To find such questions integral to any study of the past is not restricted to those who agree with the answers. To study theology well requires not faith, but empathy.

If history and comparative religion alike offer us perspective on world events from the “outside,” the study of theology offers us a chance to study those same events “from within”: an opportunity to get inside the heads of those whose beliefs and choices shaped so much of our history, and who—in the world outside the ivory tower—still shape plenty of the world today. That such avenues of inquiry have virtually vanished from many of the institutions where they were once best explored is hardly a triumph of progress or of secularism. Instead, the absence of theology in our universities is an unfortunate example of blindness—willful or no—to the fact that engagement with the past requires more than mere objective or comparative analysis. It requires a willingness to look outside our own perspectives in order engage with the great questions—and questioners—of history on their own terms. Even Dawkins might well agree with that.

For-profit colleges in the spotlight again

"The Reform of For-Profit Colleges: Can They Give Up Their Predatory Ways?"

by

Chadwick Matlin

September 20th, 2012

The Atlantic

On the first day of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities annual convention, a storm worked its way towards the convention center. More than a thousand people milled inside Rosen Shingle Creek, one of the golf resort/convention centers that are endemic to central Florida. The attendees had come for the annual congress of for-profit colleges, hosted by the sector’s trade association and central lobbyist. Its theme: “Opportunity for all.”

That night, a self-described “futurist and demographer” took the stage to deliver the keynote address. Kenneth Gronbach is a big man with a bigger voice, going after laughs more than longitudinal studies. Gronbach calls himself a “generational marketing expert,” and has written a book called The Age Curve. Subtitle: “How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Storm.”

Gronbach’s presentation began with a joke: “How many people are really excited to listen to a demographer for an hour?” A little manic, Gronbach paced the stage, taking audible sniffs as he caught his breath and delivered the next slide. “We’re going to concentrate not on money and stuff, but on people,” he said. But for Gronbach people are opportunity, and opportunity is money.

Gronbach spoke for nearly an hour, touching on everything from Honda motorcycles to how Generation Y requires “transparency, integrity, sense of green, humanitarian, fairness, cyber, and empathy” in the workplace. At one point he said, “I don’t think we could invent a better immigrant than a Latino.”

APSCU had brought Gronbach to the convention to try and help its member schools — all for-profit colleges that cater to 13 percent of American higher education students — better understand their target audience. Who were these students that needed vocational certificates and degrees? How best to get them to enroll, and how best to get them to graduate? As Gronbach promised, “Generation Y is going to change everything. They are going to change your lives.”

For the people in charge of for-profit schools, they already have. They’ve made them very rich. Between 1998 and 2008, for-profit enrollment increased 225 percent by one count, nearly eight times the rate of the rest of higher education. During the bleakest days of the Great Recession, stock prices soared as students went back to school in a bad job market. In 2009, publicly traded for-profits were $3.2 billion in the black, before taxes. But now for various reasons — a rebounding economy, harsh media coverage of the sector’s abuses, and tighter federal regulation — enrollment is down across the sector. A talk like Gronbach’s was meant to pep up morale.

“The antiquated college system is a rotary phone,” Gronbach said before lauding the private sector schools for being more nimble than traditional schools. That’s where their advantage lay, he said. “If you do it right, you’ll be wearing diamonds as big as radishes.”

Soon, a loud hiss started to drown him out, working its way across the room. It was the rain, moving across the thin roof, pounding, hissing, pleading to be let in. The storm had come.

Feeding Off the Government

If you care about understanding the country’s student loan situation, the best place to start is with for-profit colleges. For the past ten years there has been no sector that’s relied on student loans more than for-profit schools, and no sector that’s used them more to its advantage.

For-profits include brands you’ve heard of — University of Phoenix, Kaplan, DeVry — and small mom-and-pop outfits you haven’t — Fountainhead College of Technology, National Tractor Trailer School, and Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology. Overall, it’s estimated over 4 million students attend for-profits annually.

In a more innocent time we called these schools career colleges; their express purpose is to prepare people to take on a job they wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. They offer certificates, associate’s, bachelor’s and grad degrees, like any other school, just with more of a focus on the outcome than the process. It is all about school equating to a job. In that sense for-profits are the rare party in higher education that acknowledge what college has become: a commodity.

Take, for instance, Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a network of over 100 for-profit schools across the country. Founded in 1995 and IPO’d in 1999, Corinthian has grown by purchasing other schools and creating its own campuses where it sees demand. Unlike many for-profits, Corinthian focuses on campus-based learning, with three main brands spread across the country: WyoTech, Heald, and Everest, each with its own specialties. WyoTech has a host of automotive repair courses. Heald offers associate’s degrees in business administration. Everest’s medical assistant certificates are very popular, at around $16,000 a pop. About 90,000 students attend one of the Corinthian schools.

The people signing up for the courses are, by and large, the ones for whom a traditional college setting isn’t ideal. They’re usually older, poorer, busier, or some combination of the three. And yet they’re spending more money on college. By some counts, 96 percent of for-profit students take out loans, and nearly all of them are drawing from federal financial aid. In comparison, only 13 percent of students going to community college take out loans, because community colleges are a fraction of the cost.

So why go to for-profits? Because they offer the luxuries of convenience and efficiency. Matthew Mastrogiovanni, a 44-year-old logistics administrator went to an Everest campus in South Plainfield, New Jersey to change his career and get certified in its 9-month electrician program. Mastrogiovanni’s whole family had been to Everest — his wife completed the Medical Insurance Billing and Coding program, and she only went because she was so impressed with the sales pitch when she brought their son in to register for a pharmacy technician program. For Mastrogiovanni, who works night shifts but wanted a career change, it was their testimonial plus Everest’s “very flexible schedule,” that appealed. He said Everest had told him the electrician field was booming with jobs — “and it is booming if you’re 18 and you’re living at home with mom and dad,” he said. He faults Everest for not specifying that the jobs wouldn’t pay him what he needed as a middle-aged guy with a family. Since graduating almost a year ago, he’s had only one job interview, and he found it on his own. He still works in logistics for a stock room company. His electrician program cost more than $19,000. He’s had to put his loans in deferral as he pays off the Everest loans for the rest of his family.

The schools justify their extra cost by offering accelerated programs and more robust distance-learning options that can accommodate a more demanding lifestyle. This, they’ve determined, is what the rest of higher education isn’t offering — and it’s what’s worth at least an extra $10,000.

This is all made possible because the federal government has made it possible with its financial aid program. For-profits long ago realized that the most sustainable business model is the one that feeds off of the government’s largesse. Going up against community colleges is a lot easier than going up against Harvard, especially when the federal government can foot a large part of the bill. The market has confirmed their suspicions. By one count, the sector burned through $32 billion of federal funds in 2009-2010, a quarter of the DOE’s student aid allotment. In 2010, the federal government spent $509.3 million in Pell grants just for Corinthian’s 113,818 students. But Pell grants don’t have to be paid back; the sector’s $32 billion is comprised largely of loans. Ultimately, it’s students who are on the hook.

The readily available funding from student grants and loans has created an entire industry — and one that many now consider a predator against the very population that the loans were meant to empower. It’s an unintended consequence of legislation: our ideals demanded we provide loans so people can afford to go to school before they can actually afford to go to school, but the market’s demands created an opportunity to profit.

Without federal financing, the for-profit sector would be a fraction of the size and its students would be much less in debt. But far fewer Americans would have diplomas. It’s a trade-off: If we as a country want to ensure there’s a path to upward mobility, we have to help finance the way. But financing comes with risk, and some students are going to be left behind rather than thrust ahead.

This is what makes the political debate over for-profits’ role in higher education so warped. Here’s a sector that should be a liberal cause. It serves America’s neediest population, and uses tens of billions in public funds to do it. But its emphasis on the private over the public sector and its unabashed interest in pursuing profit aligns it with Republican orthodoxy. In a different Washington this would lead to bipartisanship. In our Washington it leads to scorched earth campaigns.

As a case study, take Senator Tom Harkin’s crusade against for-profit colleges. For two years he and his staff worked on a report on for-profit colleges’ questionable practices and heavily indebted students. It is the most comprehensive third-party report available on the sector, and much of the preceding data comes out of their work.

Harkin’s team found that for-profit students carry a lot of debt, and aren’t good at paying it off. An executive summary:

    “Independent students,” the report says, “leave for-profit schools with a median debt of $32,700, but leave public colleges with median debt of $20,000, and private non-profit colleges with a median debt of $24,600.”

    The “Department [of Education] estimates that 46.3 percent of all dollars lent to for-profit students who entered repayment in 2008 will default. The comparable number for 2-year public and non-profit colleges is 31.1 percent.”
 
    To cap it off, the report found that somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of students left school without getting a diploma. Going into debt but not getting a degree is probably the worst outcome for any college student — the student assumes much of the cost without attaining most of the benefit.

Since 2012, that Harkin report has been a scarlet letter for the industry, which is why for-profits treat it like it’s Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and think it ought to be banned. Steve Gunderson, APSCU’s chief executive and thus the industry’s chief promoter, described it as “ideology drives reality.”

Gunderson and others I spoke with think Harkin and his team are opposed to the very idea of for-profit higher education, and so trying to change their minds is futile. They think Harkin’s report manipulates data, composes an incomplete snapshot, and uses select cases of malfeasance to build an overly-broad narrative about the industry. Chief among the criticisms is that opponents don’t take into account that for-profits are serving students far more likely to drop out of school or have trouble repaying debts, because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is difficult for high schools to educate the students society has left behind, so why should it be any different for for-profit colleges?

Before wading through education statistics — and there’s a swamp of them — it’s best to pack a machete.

For-profits make easy targets. They’re more expensive than community colleges, less established than storied elites, and less glamorous than mid-tier schools with gleaming athletic facilities. They’re also some of the few schools that still explicitly traffic in an increasingly outdated American Dream: come from adversity, go to school, get a job, become financially stable. And then of course there’s that emphasis on profit, something that’s anathema to the platonic ideal of American education, if not the modern reality.

For-profits, in other words, are weeds amidst the ivy, thriving in the cracks and growing faster than they can be cut down. They keep growing for a reason — they’ve adapted to modern higher education better, and sooner, than nearly any other bloc of schools. They may not be pretty, but they’re here to stay.

But poor results and abuses throughout the sector have forced the Obama administration to try and regulate the colleges. For the past few years the Department of Education has tried to ensure for-profits don’t manipulate students into enrolling, and then leave them unable to make their loan payments after graduation.

The regulations have already changed for-profits, and even they admit it’s largely been for the better. But now there’s a new debate taking place, and it’s one that demonstrates just how hard it is to force colleges to be accountable for how much debt their students have after they leave. The rise and regulation of for-profits can help explain how, for some, college went from being a gateway to the middle class to being an obstacle along the way; and what we can, or should, do about it.

The Hot Breath of Federal Regulators

Inside the exhibitor hall of the APSCU convention in Florida, it was initially difficult to see an industry chastened. As the attendees slurped their ceviche shooters, the exhibitors hawked their wares. A company called Tribeca Marketing Group had someone in full, spray-painted Statue of Liberty regalia, like a street performer who had mistaken suburban Orlando for Times Square. Pyramid Financial Solutions claimed they were expert at “Turning Tuition into Profit.” Gragg Advertising — “Memorable Creative, Measurable Results” — had a virtual golf course.

But this was not the exhibitor halls of years past. As Goldie Blumenstyk at the Chronicle of Higher Education noted, gone were the mermaids of 2012 and the live cattle of 2011. As Blumenstyk writes, “Mr. Gunderson said the group had asked vendors to exhibit with ‘conduct appropriate for the higher-education sector.’”

Left behind were a bunch of companies hyping their morality. It was especially apparent in “lead generators” — a class of companies unique to for-profits that help the schools find potential students. Lead generators have largely gained a reputation as unscrupulous vultures, willfully leading students who don’t know any better to a college even if it isn’t a good fit. Traditional colleges buy leads, as well (the College Board sells its massive address book of kids who take the SATs). It’s just that for-profit lead generators are recruiting some of the most at-risk high school graduates in America.

But these days, ethics are in. One of the convention’s sponsors, Beelineweb.com, took out an ad on the back of the program that read, “We’ve been doing organic since last century.” When I asked another lead generator, Education Dynamics, which runs sites like GradSchools.com and EducationConnection.com, what was special about their leads, a woman named Anya Bierzynski corrected me: “They aren’t leads to us. They’re highly vetted student inquiries.” Behind her, Shannen Doherty starred in a commercial for one of Education Dynamics’ sites.

And then there was Andy Beedle. Armed with a philosophy PhD from UConn, he taught at Trinity and Grand Valley State Universities before decamping for the world of admissions marketing. Beedle now works for Norton/Norris, an admissions consultant that offers an “EnrollMatch” program that helps colleges “stay compliant yet with enough flexibility to connect with today’s students in the most ethical and effective ways!”

“What’s been great is having this industry get thrown under the bus has made the people who were engaging in unethical practices, the light’s being shown on them now in pretty good ways. Our business model has to be about producing graduates. And those graduates have to get jobs,” he told me.

The new mood was also apparent outside the exhibitor hall. There was a “Compliance/Financial Aid” track of breakaway panels that included: “Detecting Potential Default Scenarios,” “Transparency and the Prospective Student: Effectively Using Disclosures to Achieve Positive Outcomes and Mitigate Future Disputes,” and “Adventures in Veterans’ Compliance: How to Stay Compliant in a Changing Environment.”

This is what happens when an industry feels the hot, bureaucratic breath of federal regulators on its neck. It wises up.

For-profits have long been regulated by the feds. In 1992, Congress imposed restrictions on for-profits, two of which still resonate. The first required that at least 15 percent of for-profits’ revenue came from non-federal dollars. The sector could not exist entirely off the welfare state. That’s since been relaxed to only be 10 percent of a college’s revenue (what’s commonly called the 90/10 rule). These days the average for-profit bases more than 80 percent of its revenue on federal grants and loans, and that’s without factoring in various loopholes. Without federal grants and loans making it easy for poor students to go to school, the bottom would undoubtedly fall out of vast numbers of for-profit colleges.

The second restriction limited the sector’s most pernicious recruiting tactic: paying its recruiters based on how many students they could enroll. By rewarding recruiters on quantity rather than quality, the universities were able to make a quick buck, but students were left paying for something they couldn’t use to their advantage. It was salesmanship, not education, and it was the kind of thing that gave for-profits such a bad name.

By 2002, the industry had convinced George W. Bush’s Department of Education to add 12 loopholes into the law, essentially reversing the recruiter regulations that had already taken effect. Recruiter salaries could be adjusted as long as they weren’t 100 percent based on whether or not the recruiter had netted a good haul. “Incentive compensation,” as the industry calls it, proliferated again.

By 2009, as the Obama administration began to make student debt an issue, there was another effort to stop for-profits from rewarding indiscriminate promises. But the industry was too occupied elsewhere to worry about incentive compensation. And so it was outlawed.

Now, everyone — including the industry itself — praises it. “I think incentive compensation for enrollment is a bad thing. I think incentive compensation for graduation makes all the sense in the world and we oughta be fighting for it,” Steve Gunderson, APSCU president, says. In a fractious corner of education, the one thing everyone can agree on is that there shouldn’t be any reenactments of Glengarry Glen Ross.

What everyone can’t agree on is whether colleges — any college — should be accountable for how indebted their students are. The federal government, spurred by the for-profit sector’s myriad abuses, thinks for-profits should be. The for-profits cried double standard, noting it’s absurd to even imagine the federal government going after private non-profit colleges for this. Too many liberal arts majors coming out of Brown with $60,000 in debt and no immediate job prospects? Sanction a college that’s been around since 1764! (For statutory reasons, the Department of Education doesn’t have the power to regulate schools specializing in liberal arts.)

All of that spurred action, and what followed was a remarkable glimpse into the country’s student loan problem, and why it’s so damn hard to fix it. The Department said it had the power to make a vocational college prove that it could “prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation,” based on the Higher Education Act of 1965. That “gainful employment” bit is the key here — and all the regulations that followed would come to be known by that moniker. If a college couldn’t prove it was helping its students with gainful employment, its students, and thus its coffers, weren’t entitled to federal aid.

The question became what, exactly, gainful employment is, or should be. To put it another way: What qualifies as gainful employment? Does the student have to make more money after college than she would have before? Does it matter how much debt she went into to earn a degree?

Detailing regulatory twists and turns is as thrilling as offering play-by-play of a gently sloped walk, so we’ll gloss over what came next. Ultimately, in 2011 the administration defined gainful employment as the following three thresholds:

    On average, graduates shouldn’t be spending more than 12 percent of their annual income on loan repayments.
    35 percent of a college’s graduates and drop-outs need to be repaying their federal loans after they stop taking courses.
    Students shouldn’t be spending more than 30 percent of their discretionary income on paying back loans.

Only after a college failed all three thresholds for three consecutive years would they lose access to federal funds. Analysts estimated that the regulations would have made 5 percent of for-profits ineligible for federal funds, effectively dooming them.

To recap: the worst actors in the industry would be put out of business, the ones left behind would be able to boast that they’re DOE-approved, and the industry could begin to shake the impression that it’s overpriced, underwatched, and interested more in students’ money than their post-graduation livelihoods.

But to for-profits, gainful employment was a pox on their campuses, a discriminatory middle finger from an administration hostile to all things profit. They sued.

They won. A federal district court judge struck down the gainful employment regulations, citing the DOE’s arbitrary choice of 35 percent as the repayment threshold. The Department had a right to hold for-profits accountable for its repayment rates, but not without some basis of what the threshold should be.

Nevertheless, the regulations, or the threat of them, have had a major effect on the for-profit sector. Enrollment was down 2.8 percent in 2011, compared to a .2 percent drop in higher education overall. Apollo Group, which runs the University of Phoenix, noted a 14 percent drop in enrollment between summers 2011 and 2012, and its stock is down 80 percent from its 2009 high. Industry watchers attribute this partly to a rebounding economy, but also to new orientation programs in various schools that let students take classes tuition-free for a trial period, so that if they drop out they won’t incur debt and hurt the college’s default rates. That type of screening has led to lower enrollment.

Not to be denied, this September the Department of Education restarted negotiations around gainful employment. For-profits have resumed their fierce opposition to it. As the for-profits fight for their livelihood, they’re fighting against the very thing that could help legitimize them.

"How Do You Balance Outcomes Versus Access?"

Steve Gunderson still shakes hands like a congressman. Double clasp, eye contact, big smile on his elfin face. Gunderson, the president of APSCU, was a Republican congressman from Wisconsin until 1997, three years after being outed as gay on the floor of the House. Now he’s the figurehead of for-profit higher ed, taking the APSCU CEO job in 2012. He’s the guy who has to make the case against the Department of Education’s vision of gainful employment.

I first met Gunderson in late June, before he was scheduled to give the commencement address to hundreds of DeVry graduates in Crystal City, Virginia. Good with small talk, he has a hushed speaking voice when he’s not at a lectern, and has a habit of tucking his fingers against one another as he leans forward in his seat. Gunderson, who hates waiting in line, filed into the room along with the graduates. “Pomp and Circumstance” played. Families craned their iPads to get a good picture. Aside from the large number of minority faces in the crowd and under the mortarboards, it was like any other college’s graduation.

When it was Gunderson’s turn at the dais, he name-dropped Thomas Friedman, David McCullough, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and President Obama. He also tried to assure the graduates that their degree was money well spent. He said associate’s degree recipients could expect an extra $423,000 in lifetime earnings. Bachelor’s degrees: $900,000. The subtext was clear: your student loans are nothing compared to what you’re about to reap.

“Today, entrance into the American middle class requires a combination of hard work, education and career skills,” Gunderson said, “You have been given that gift. The question now is how you will use it.” But for nearly all of these students, the gifts were paid for with an installment plan.

Two days later I went to Gunderson’s office, a nice corner unit nine floors above Connecticut Avenue in D.C., to have a chat. On the agenda: gainful employment, the sector’s struggle for legitimacy, and how to ensure a college is actually doing its job. His book, The New Middle Class: Creating Wages, Wealth, and Opportunity in the 21st Century, sat on a coffee table, and we settled in for a two-hour interview.

“We’re not against gainful employment. That’s the misunderstanding of this sector,” Gunderson told me. APSCU, it turns out, doesn’t want an absence of accountability; it would just like accountability that (it thinks) makes sense. Its main complaint is that you can’t ask a sector that caters to low-income students to ensure a certain number of those students pay back their loans within a certain period of time. “Under that standard, two things would have happened. Schools in the inner city and schools in rural America would’ve been forced to close,” Gunderson said. “You automatically sentence that demographic to being excluded from the opportunity.”

Opportunity. This is Gunderson’s favorite safeword, a tug of the heartstrings and an allusion to a nostalgic American Dream in which anyone, given a chance, can make something happen. APSCU’s convention was titled “Opportunity for all,” remember, and his book’s subtitle is “Creating wealth, wages, and opportunity in the 21st century.” It’s potent stuff, and it’s hard to refute: if someone wants to go to school and better themselves, why should the government stop them? How is it in a government’s interest to deny its citizens that, ahem, opportunity?

But how do we judge what an opportunity should cost? Is it our responsibility — as a society, as a government, as a democracy — to do that calculation for consumers? Or is it only Elizabeth Warren’s?

Gunderson says he considers college to be an investment. But then he also thinks that colleges shouldn’t be held responsible for its students’ financial decisions. Gainful employment, he says, doesn’t make sense because it punishes schools for choices students make after they’re out of school. “It’s like blaming my brother [who’s a car dealer] for people who default on their car loans. Like, what was I supposed to do, you know?”

But college is not a car. One isn’t supposed to be more likely to pay off car payments after buying a car than she was before. Colleges — and especially for-profit colleges — predicate their entire purpose on that very idea. Higher education is supposed to transform the student, whether it be her mind, her resume, or both.

But is it fair to expect the same results from for-profits as from traditional schools, given their students’ demographic differences? Are they handicapped from the start?

Gunderson told me that the industry needed more “risk-adjusted metrics,” meaning more data that took the for-profits’ high-risk students into account. The little research that has tried to control for the difference in students has been inconclusive.

Even if the data is mixed, are we really to blame for-profits for exploring America’s neglected corners? Reflecting on the industry’s struggles, Gunderson said, “I think it’s a cheap shot to criticize our sector for serving students who are low-income and eligible for financial aid. I don’t see anybody else trying to serve them and I think there’s real evidence that the traditional elites are not reaching out and serving that constituency.” It would be easier to refute Gunderson’s point if states hadn’t just spent a half-decade defunding community colleges.

This is what happens when we are unwilling to adequately fund public higher education, but still claim it as an imperative for a new American economy. We end up outsourcing the Americans who need the most help to the private sector. That sector, despite being more accountable to its shareholders than its customers, customizes its programs for a demographic that, through a quirk of welfare, can pay. As the government decides how best to fix the problem, millions of students are caught in between.

Which brings us back to gainful employment, and what, to APSCU, is fair. Its ideal is simple: Apply the same standards to for-profit schools as to the rest of higher education. As of now gainful employment only applies to vocational schools because of arcane legislative reasons. The sector would prefer that changed.

This, of course, also buys for-profits time, as a legislative change like that requires Congress to pass a new Higher Education Act. That is unlikely anytime soon, which is why the DOE has been so aggressive with gainful employment in the first place.

Gunderson said he understands why there’s such a focus on accountability right now, with student debt rates as high as they are. But he thinks that something is lost if we turn away students at the door. There’s one central question he asked that could apply to all of American higher education: “How do you balance outcomes versus access?”

Change Is Coming (Maybe)

On the final day of the APSCU convention, as attendees recovered from the Kool & the Gang concert, I ducked into a panel called “Managing Risk in the Current Regulatory and Legal Environment.” There, five men (lawyers and college officials) gave a presentation about how not to run a company into the ground. General advice: don’t be egregiously predatory, and don’t work with anyone who is.

When the conversation turned to lawsuits — there have been many against for-profits — one panelist was particularly active. William Calhoun, the Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Corinthian Colleges, has dealt with enough lawsuits to have tips about best practices. He noted that the company doesn’t pay nuisance settlement fees just to make a case go away. Calhoun, warning he was going to be politically incorrect, said that if it did it would allow the plaintiffs to “sidle up to the trough as often as they can to get money out of you.”

Intrigued by Calhoun’s equating students to swine, I went up to talk with him. Calhoun said he knew better than to speak on the record. Kent Jenkins is the man who does that.

I emailed Jenkins on June 10. That same day there were reports that the SEC had begun an investigation into Corinthian’s practices. As Corinthian itself wrote in its SEC filing: “Corinthian is also under investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and several state attorneys general.”

Among opponents of for-profits, Corinthian is seen as one of the sector’s worst offenders. David Halperin, an anti-for-profit activist, has a particularly comprehensive chronicle on his website,RepublicReport.org. Some highlights:

    If gainful employment regulations had gone into place immediately, 43 of Corinthian’s 143 schools would have failed all three tests.
    In order to comply with the requirement that more than 10 percent of its income come from non-federal sources Corinthian raised tuition, forcing its students into deeper debt.
    Corinthian admitted on an investor call that it expected 55 percent of its private loan recipients will default.

Amidst all this, it should come as no surprise that Corinthian’s stock is down 89 percent from its 2009 high.

Jenkins, a verbose guy from North Carolina who has done stints as both a reporter and a public relations officer, has made a career pushing back against government intervention. His LinkedIn page boasts that he’s helped stopped a “water-system takeover by Chattanooga city government,” and “defeat organ transplant policies proposed by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.” His entry for Corinthian boasts, “Crisis communications strategy to counter year-long series of congressional hearings on private-sector education.”

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that our sector has not had problems,” Jenkins told me. But look at “any type of organization in the U.S. that is trying to offer career education that leads folks directly to a better job opportunity. Who’s doing it better than us? Who gets comparable or better results?”

He has a point. Federal job training programs are underfunded, stigmatized, and ineffective. And then there are community colleges, which are overburdened and offer a traditional course structure. Indeed, community colleges have a much lower completion rate on 2-year associate programs than for-profits — 21.9 percent compared to 62.7 percent in 2008, according to DOE data. In certificate programs, the numbers are more equal, with community colleges slightly better.

Wanting to see a for-profit campus in person, I asked Jenkins to meet me at Corinthian’s Everest Institute in South Plainfield, New Jersey. South Plainfield is part of the larger Everest chain that specializes in medical assistantship, accounting, and electrician training. In 2010, something like 19.7 percent of students who had attended South Plainfield defaulted on their loans. (Numbers aren’t exact because South Plainfield is grouped with several other schools in its default report.) Average loan debt is around $11,000, which Everest discloses to all students, as federal law now requires.

This is where Matthew Mastrogiovanni, the logistics administrator who wanted to be an electrician, took his courses. And it’s also where Denice Addy, a 29-year-old from nearby Irvington, graduated with a dental assistant certificate in August. Addy had been to a few other schools, but their structure put her off. Everest’s single-track curriculum appealed, as did its commercials. “I thought they were funny. I’m sorry to say that, but I thought they were a joke, so I went down to the school to check it out. To see if the school was a joke. But once I got there it was actually a decent school.”

South Plainfield’s campus is right off the highway, in a rundown industrial lot. I found Jenkins with South Plainfield’s president, Bob Butterworth. Butterworth came to Corinthian from a background in business, working at Marriott, PepsiCo, and Wendy’s International. He and his sleepy blue eyes had no education experience before this job. Neither did Jenkins and his salt and pepper mustache.

The tour began, and seemed to be engineered to rebut every one of the industry’s critiques. Poor customer service? Let me introduce you to our receptionists, whom we call Directors of First Impression. Kids that get lost in the shuffle? Here’s our bulletin board with all the current students’ faces — nearly all people of color — under a label that reads, “Our New Future Graduates.” Sketchy admissions employees? Let’s take a walk to the admissions pod, where everything’s out in the open, so anyone can overhear anything at any moment. Everyone who worked for Everest was wearing nametags, like they were in a commercial.

Coming through the vents I detected that familiar, clammy breath of the federal regulator. I hadn’t felt it since Orlando.

The campus itself had the feel of the interior of a very new high school — gleaming floors, classrooms that doubled as lab spaces, and kitschy street signs, one of which read “New Start Boulevard.” In one hall there was a piece of paper stuck to the wall that boasted about a 53.36 percent hiring ratio for nursing students out on externships.

Students were in class and wandering the halls, the same as students anywhere else — some goofing off, some paying attention. We walked into a physical therapy class as test subjects’ legs were high in the air. These students, and the ones in front of the dental mannequins, and the ones in a makeshift house with loose electrical wiring, and the ones prodding old Dell computers in an IT workshop had come to Everest to try and change something. They wanted something more from their lives, and for various reasons had chosen to spend more to get it.

Denice Addy, the South Plainfield grad with the dental assistant diploma, has a job now. But Everest didn’t help her get it. She found it herself, at her kids’ dentist’s office. First the office brought her on as an intern, and then hired her outright. “My school actually didn’t help. Of course they’re going to take that and say that I did. But in all actuality I found it myself,” she said.

I asked if she felt like she needed the Everest certificate to get that job. “They’ve hired people that have no experience and they’ve hired from other schools. So, yeah, if I wouldn’t have gone to Everest I probably would have gotten there anyway.” Her program cost upwards of $16,000. But she doesn’t regret going. “I wanted a career, you know?” she told me, reflecting on why being in dentistry is better than her last job, in security. “Because I don’t think security — you don’t need to actually go to school for that.” There is a ladder to climb in healthcare that there wasn’t in security. Going to college was a step towards socioeconomic mobility.

Nevertheless, the loans put Addy, Mastrogiovanni, and the rest of for-profit students in a precarious position, just like student loans can do for students who go to more traditional colleges. All of them limited their immediate financial scope in order to hopefully expand it in the future. But for-profit students are the ones less equipped for that adjustment than any other, largely because the society that’s trying to save them now didn’t provide for them somewhere else.

Now that the sector’s combative stance towards government in the early part of the decade has passed, what everyone seems to agree on is that change is coming. With a stalled Congress, for-profits remain one of our only immediate chances to experiment with how we hold colleges accountable for student debt. For obvious reasons, they find that onerous; but nearly everyone else should find that exciting. This is the frontier.

When the tour came to a close, I walked by the gong that students ring when they enroll, through the lobby with the children’s play set in the corner, and out into a parking lot noisy with the sound of the highway. As I got into Jenkins’ car for a ride to the train station I noticed something in the adjacent lot. It was empty and neglected, having been forgotten years ago. But there was something growing amidst the emptiness. A field of weeds had shot through the asphalt, yearning for the sun.

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