Haitian-born author Dady Chery details the history of Laureate Education, the for-profit university system that enriched Bill and Hillary Clinton, and how it preys on poor applicants in developing nations.
From News Junkie Post:
Education is the latest public commons that is being attacked and turned into a commodity by a group of the world’s arrivistes, including Douglas Becker, Donald Trump, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Money brings, in those who obsessively accumulate it, a transformation of thought and deed that is most discernible in the nouveaux riches. To give meaning to their purchasing power, they commodify all they can. As part of this process, and almost as a celestial joke, they also become persuaded that anything can be bought. Gradually, they come to believe that money will guarantee access to anything, the acquiescence or corruption of anyone, the evasion of any law or ailment, and the repair of any deficiency including, in many cases, a spotty education.
Consider 49-year old Douglas Becker, the founder, Chairman, and CEO of a network of 88 for-profit institutions in 28 countries that offer “undergraduate, master’s and doctoral” degrees and enroll more than a million students. Becker’s for-profit institutions, which are mainly in South America and Europe, although also in the United States and quickly branching out through Asia and the Middle East, cynically exploit the deeply held belief by many people that an education is a passport out of poverty, to indebt ambitious working-class people. Laureate has especially targeted as a market Latin America, where in many countries only about 20 percent of college-age people manage to gain admission to the public universities. Such institutions are free, but they require passing grades on difficult entrance exams and are the most prestigious schools in these countries.
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In an interview with Richard Johnson of the New York Post, Trump advisor Roger Stone wondered if the Clintons got rich from State Department funds. Further, he accused the Clintons of helping Laureate to eliminate its competition. Stone argued that the payments to Bill Clinton have protected Laureate from government attacks on their accreditation and fitness for student loans even as much smaller operations like Corinthian and Trump University have been severely hit. Corinthian went bankrupt in 2015 after a federal district court in Illinois found it to be liable for $530 million in predatory loans for promising its students jobs that did not materialize and getting them heavily indebted. Trump University was recently hit by fraud lawsuits from New York and California for calling itself a university, although it had been doing so since its inception in 2005. By contrast, no lawsuit so far has stuck to Laureate. Possibly the main mistake of Trump U. and Corinthian has been to grow on US citizens, unlike Laureate, which has taken care to parasitize foreign nationals first, particularly working-class people from emerging powers.
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