Over the holidays I noticed several stories in the national media about for-profit higher education. The gist of the stories has been that these are sketchy organizations that just want to take your money and give you an education that can’t possibly match up to traditional, non-profit higher education.
I remarked to myself that this seems to be a theme we will see much more of in 2011. There’s nothing the mainstream media dislikes more than profit, and profit-making organizations that move into the turf of traditional lefty academe just have to be knocked down a peg or two.
The Village Voice did its part recently when it ran a story called “For-Profit Blues.” In that story, a student named Tamicka Bourges claimed to have gone into massive debt without even getting a diploma from one of these nefarious for-profit universities. But there was this little problem:
Freelance writer Rob Sgobbo’s article “For-Profit Blues” was removed from the website after the Voice learned that Sgobbo had invented a character, “Tamicka Bourges,” who claimed she had amassed a large debt at Berkeley College without obtaining a degree.
We first learned that there might be a problem when Berkeley College denied that one of its spokespersons, Kelly Meisberger, had spoken to Sgobbo. Berkeley later added that it had no record of Bourges as a student. At about the same time, the GAO called to inform us that there was no spokesperson there named “Matt Fraser,” whom the story quoted.
The Voice got a little too enthusiastic about bashing for-profit colleges, running too quickly with what was, essentially, a made-up story. But it fit their template, so I guess it was too good to check.
Expect to see a lot of this in the next year, maybe not with the fake sources, but with the intent to show for-profit education in a negative light.
