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Ex'pression College for Digital Arts Chief Executive Officer Daniel Levinson stands in a Foley...
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They rake in millions of dollars in federal tuition aid and still charge students more than $20,000 a year, on top of scholarships and grants.
Despite their high prices and promises of good jobs, more than a dozen of the Bay Area's most expensive trade schools graduate fewer than half of their students, report alarming rates of students defaulting on their loans -- or both.
While Californians have been hearing for years about runaway tuition at the state's public universities, the state -- and now the federal government -- is demanding better results from a different sector of the higher education world: for-profit colleges.
Squeezing the for-profit sector would be "all to the good," said UC Berkeley
education Professor Emeritus Norton Grubb. "They enroll low-income students, they charge them high tuition, they get them all on student aid and then the students drop out, leaving them with no increased earnings potential and a lot of student debt."
Take the $25,700-per-year Everest College in Hayward, where one in three former students did not earn enough to repay their student loans. Or the 1,900-student University of Phoenix in San Jose, which brought in $17 million in federal student aid in 2010-11; it reported a graduation rate of just 19 percent and a student loan default rate of 26 percent.
New federal regulations proposed for vocational programs and President Barack Obama's