Students' financial aid exploited for profit at tiny campus with 76,000 online students

The rise of predatory, fake Universities

More often than not, this is becoming the new American Way. This is the type of capitalist enterprises that the conservative right wingers always long for.  They want the government to get out of the way so they proceed to gouge their unsuspecting victims. No wonder the term capitalist pig continues to resonate.

From the Huffington Post

CLINTON, Iowa -- Inside the red brick campus of Ashford University, perched on a bluff above the Mississippi River, the door marked "President's Office" remains perpetually shut. Telephone calls to the university's head are swiftly transferred to a corporate office some 2,000 miles away, in San Diego.
A new, 500-seat football stadium adorns the campus, and is featured prominently in Ashford's promotional literature, though the university has no football team. Signs around campus proudly read "Founded 1918" and "90 Years Strong," despite the fact that Ashford -- one of the nation's fastest-growing for-profit colleges -- has existed for less than a decade.

The perplexing campus landscape here in Iowa amounts to an elaborate stage set for a lucrative, online education empire that uses these trappings to sell itself to students as a traditional college experience. That strategy was the brainchild of the corporation behind Ashford: Bridgepoint Education Inc., a publicly traded venture started by a group of former executives from the University of Phoenix, a name now synonymous with for-profit higher education and the controversial marketing practices that have brought the industry crosswise with federal regulators.

Six years ago, Bridgepoint purchased what was then called Franciscan University of the Prairies, a near-bankrupt, 300-student college that for decades had been run by a local order of Franciscan nuns. The school delivered a crucial commodity: legal accreditation. That enabled Ashford's students to tap federal financial aid dollars, the source of nearly 85 percent of the university's revenues -- more than $600 million in the last academic year. Ashford now counts nearly 76,000 students, 99 percent of whom take classes online.
Two years ago, Bridgepoint engineered an initial public stock offering that brought in $142 million.

The goal, employees say, is getting "starts": students who fill out the paperwork for student loans and make it through at least four weeks of their first five-week course. That is the point at which the university is able to keep the student's federal aid money, regardless of whether they continue their studies.

'All I've got to do is babysit them for four weeks,'" said a former leader in the admissions department, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified "I'd be thinking, 'Come on, this person is clearly not ready to go to school.' But I'd call you, pump you up, keep you confident for four weeks, and once I knew you completed, you were forgotten. It's easy when I'm counting the money."