How private equity firms gobbled up higher education

Increasingly the boom could be characterized as a Wall Street versus Main Street match-up. Even in the 1980s, the majority of for-profit programs were still mom-and-pop affairs: short-term certificate courses in subjects like cosmetology and truck driving. By the early years of the new millennium, students were attending Fortune 500 chain schools for full-fledged degrees in teaching, medical assisting, business, and psychology. In 2012 there were 21 publicly traded for-profit colleges, and less than a quarter of for-profit college students attended a mom-and-pop operation; the other 1.3 million went to publicly traded or private-equity-owned schools.

The profits in this new world were beyond belief. One study found that the for-profit industry netted 55% profit margins between 2000 and 2012. In other words, for every dollar they took from students, 55 cents went to shareholders, with overall profits peaking in 2011 at $5 billion. Within a decade of Apollo’s IPO, Phoenix’s student body had grown tenfold, and thanks to students’ easy federal money, the company was bringing in more than $1 billion a year.

It was a win-win for just about everyone involved. The schools’ profits came almost exclusively from federal grant and loan moneys. The federal government was bankrolling not only their and their investors’ windfalls but also those of the financial institutions and guarantee agencies that did the lending and collecting under the Federal Family Education Loan program.

But there were two groups left out of the bonanza: the public at large, whose tax dollars kept the machine running, and the students who got sacked with the bill.

Then the evidence started coming in, yet again, that the for-profit corporate darlings of the ’90s and aughts were no more sophisticated — certainly no more beneficial — than the shady computer schools that had preceded them. In 1970 there had been only 18,333 students enrolled at degree-granting for-profit schools, less than a quarter of a percent of the total number of college students. By 2009 there were 1.85 million — almost 10% of the total. The grift had grown a hundredfold.

“I had worked in the sales industry for many years,” the admissions supervisor stated. “But Ashford [University] had the most aggressive sales floor I have ever seen.” The supervisor’s employer was putatively an accredited institution that offered a wide variety of bachelor’s and advanced degrees; in reality it was effectively a money-printing operation.

The school’s many sordid practices were revealed in a 2017 lawsuit filed against the institution by the attorney general of California. Among them were the tales of Ashford’s salespeople — aka “admissions counselors” — who made hundreds, sometimes even a thousand, cold calls a week. Still their managers berated and taunted them, forcing underperformers to stand all day, jangling keyrings with the ID cards of their fired former colleagues in their faces. Some of them cried; some had mental breakdowns; eventually most quit or were fired. Managers created “lowest performer lists” and then fired the bottom 10th of recruiters. When the salespeople did manage to land a mark, they celebrated by ringing cowbells or flapping plastic hand clappers. “The sales floor had a true boiler room atmosphere,” said the supervisor, not unlike that “portrayed in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.”

The sales floor had a true boiler room atmosphere, not unlike that portrayed in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

And if they all misled some naive fools in the process, say, a few hundred a month, well, that was just the cost of doing business. It wasn’t like they were going to get fired for calling loans “grants” or promising a program would lead to high-paying jobs or guaranteeing that if things didn’t work out at the school, any credits earned there would transfer elsewhere (as they almost certainly would not). One Ashford admissions counselor got 25 violations in eight months and the managers dished out only a slap on the wrist. The risk of punishment by the company’s Compliance Department was low, but the reward was irresistibly high: admissions counselors got paid by the sale, and the best of them made in the six figures. Recruiters preyed on their marks’ naiveté about higher education, convincing them that they couldn’t receive their financial aid until well into the semester (when it would be too late to get a refund), lying about what their degrees would qualify them to do, and encouraging them to spend their federal aid funds on things like cars or expensive vacations (against federal law).

Ashford University was owned by Bridgepoint Education, which was backed by Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm. And the secret to its success was a foolproof tactic that for-profit financiers had discovered for getting their business off the ground and gaining access to the all-important stream of federal aid money. The trick was to gobble up existing mom-and-pop proprietary schools — as well as small, financially struggling nonprofits — and to acquire their accreditations, assets as valuable as New York City taxi medallions.

But for students, the business model was a bust — at Bridgepoint, just as at any number of for-profit giants. With only seven full-time faculty for almost 74,000 students, Bridgepoint, like many of its competitors, spent way more on recruiting than it did on instruction. And it showed: Only about a quarter of students in any given year went on to get their “diplomas” within six years (public and nonprofit schools consistently graduated about two-thirds of students in that timeframe). Those who did graduate tended to leave with a hefty amount of debt — nearly $35,000 on average. By 2017 almost 20% of alumni were unemployed, and almost half didn’t do anything related to their degree.

Five years after California filed suit against Ashford, a state superior court judge found that the company had engaged in widespread deception — estimating that over an 11-year period, its recruiters had spread misinformation in more than 1.2 million calls — and issued more than $22 million in penalties. (In 2024, an appeals court reduced the penalty by nearly $1 million).

The beneficiaries of Bridgepoint’s grift were its shareholders and managing partners. The losers were everybody else. And if theirs wasn’t a particularly victimless crime, so what? Nobody cared much about students anyway. “You stop thinking of these students as people,” said one recruiting manager.

In 2010, Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate’s education committee, began a two-year investigation into for-profit schools. Harkin’s assessment of the sector was scathing. He declared for-profits expensive, exploitative, and concerned only with their own profits. “They are not focused on the success of their students,” Harkin declared.

A number of these schools were held by private equity firms like Goldman Sachs. In 2011, one Goldman-backed chain took in more than $350 million in Pell Grant funds and made a little more than that in profit. At a time when the federal government was refusing to help unemployed, down-on-their-luck, and defrauded borrowers, it was bailing out banks like Goldman Sachs twice over: They had already benefited from billions of dollars in Great Recession recovery funds, and now they were scooping up ill-begotten federal student aid via failing for-profit colleges.

A simple equation summed up the for-profit ethos at this time: charge as much as federal student aid will supply, and cut costs to the bone.

Fifteen of the schools Harkin’s team investigated were publicly traded. These schools received, on average, 86% of their revenues from federal sources, right up to the line of what was legal. One of the ways they did this, Harkin found, was by recruiting veterans. In the years after World War II, legislators reinvented the GI Bill several times to reward veterans of later conflicts, like the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and to adapt to the evolving military, which had become an all-volunteer force in the 1970s. A loophole allowed them to count Defense Department moneys, including GI Bill funds, as non-federal money. In 2009, a Bloomberg News reporter uncovered a tactic used by Ashford University recruiters. They were targeting a wounded warriors unit at Camp Lejeune, signing up veterans with brain injuries who couldn’t remember which classes they were taking. Each veteran was a lucrative prospect, allowing schools to gobble up yet more federal funds.

And gobble they did. By 2010, Harkin found, for-profits were taking in a third of all GI Bill education funds. But even more shocking, federal money flowing to for-profit schools accounted for 25% of all federal student aid and 47% of eventual loan defaults. This, in spite of the fact that the schools enrolled little more than 10% of all American college students.

So what happened to all the extra money for-profits took in? Harkin’s investigation found that for-profits spent nearly a quarter of all revenues on marketing and recruiting and often paid their executives multimillion-dollar salaries, far above the average rates for public- or nonprofit-university presidents. Students’ money enriched every corner of the for-profit industry except one: quality of instruction.

Economist Stephanie Riegg Cellini co-authored a sweeping study of for-profits, which found that students of for-profit certificate programs were slightly less likely to hold a job than their counterparts in public programs. In 2015, a separate study found that job applicants got just as many call-backs by listing no educational experience on their résumés as they did by listing for-profit credentials.

When for-profit grads did find employment, Cellini found, they earned about a 10th less than the public program certificate holders. In fact, these for-profit students were actually worse off than if they hadn’t gone to school at all. When taking into account their debt loads, for-profit graduates were projected to lose about $1,200 on their educational “investments” over the course of their lifetimes.

In short, a simple equation summed up the for-profit ethos at this time: charge as much as federal student aid will supply, and cut costs to the bone. Everything in the middle could be harvested as profit. For-profit education was an industry on the dole.

Ryann Liebenthal is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California, who has reported extensively on the student loan crisis. She is the author of “BURDENED: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis.”

Excerpted from the book “BURDENED: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis.” Copyright © 2024 by Ryann Liebenthal. From Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.