Subprime U.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - On for-profit universities - Brief article - Column

Speaking of good television, in case you missed the recent Frontline episode about for-profit higher education, it revealed that though these institutions enroll only 12 percent of the nation's students, they account for 44 percent of the students who default on their loans.

Why so many defaults? The schools rely on these loans to finance themselves. The largest of the for-profits, the University of Phoenix, gets 86 percent of its revenue from the federal government, according to Frontline. To maintain that financing, at least until it was stopped by a lawsuit last year, Phoenix paid its enrollment counselors solely on the basis of the number of students...