university_of_phoenix_logoThe long, front-page story is about the proliferation of for-profit trade schools. Many of them recruit students agressively with rosy promises of future employment — and leave them with crippling debt from student loans. At the same time, they get a huge portion of their income from the federal government.

If that reminds you of the University of Phoenix, it’s because that’s how it operates, too. From the Times:

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year […]. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

Emphasis added. The University of Phoenix has been the subject of a couple of exposés in the Times in the past. The company agreed to a settlement including attorney’s fees of nearly $80 million under a false claims act suit last year — on top of a total of more than $15 million in fines levied by the U.S. Department of Education in the last ten years.

A major Times story on the school’s scuzzy practices is here.

Reason, the libertarian magazine, did a more favorable look at the school’s operations in 2008. The article was written before the nation’s economic meltdown later that year; the writer’s aperçu that the U of P offers “offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage” would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It’s available here.