Urban News Features

For Profit Colleges - Let the Buyer Beware By Julianne Malveaux

May 10, 2015

For Profit Colleges - Let the Buyer Beware
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about 1.7 million people will receive their Bachelor’s degrees, and another nearly 750,000 will receive associate’s degrees this May and June. The numbers have been rising over the past ten years, with 22 percent more receiving bachelor’s degrees (the growth in women’s degrees is faster than that of men), and 12 percent more associate’s degrees (again, with the degrees awarded to women growing faster than those awarded to men).

Too many of these students will graduate with heavy debt. While the data suggest that the average student graduates with about $30,000 of debt, the fact that some students have no debt at all makes the number even higher. African American students are nearly twice as likely to graduate with debt as Caucasian students. And it is often much harder for African American students to find jobs than it is for others. Still, a college degree makes a difference in life chances and lifetime earnings, which is one of the reasons that public policy has focused on postsecondary education.

Students who have attended for-profit colleges go to school with the same hopes and dreams as those who attend traditional not for profit universities. They attend schools like Kaplan and DeVry and Corinthian because they want to improve their education and find better jobs. They go into debt, and seek grants because they believe the investment is worth it. And too many of them have been sold a bill of goods.

Corinthian Colleges, Inc. had more than 77,000 students at its peak, although those numbers have dropped since then. Their students, in 2012-2013 were mostly adults who worked full time, mostly minority (51.8 percent), and mostly low-income enough to qualify for Pell Grants (72.9 percent). According to one source, these students borrowed more than $7600 each year to pay for their education. Corinthian is among the for-profit schools that depend on the federal government for their income stream. They direct them to apply for Pell grants, push them to seek federal student loans that have subsidized interest rates, and encourage them to get bank loans with higher interest rates. They tell students that these loans are worth it because it will help them get better jobs later.

The federal government has been scrutinizing Corinthian and other for-profit colleges for years, especially because they have found that these colleges often exaggerate their success in placing students in better jobs. Now, Corinthian Colleges have shut down, leaving more than 16,000 students stranded. These students have used up semesters of their Pell grant eligibility (which is capped at 12 semesters), and have thousands of dollars of debt. If they are mid-degree, they face the challenge of trying to transfer credits to another college. While there may be some relief for these students who owe money, others will either be forced to repay debt or imperil their credit standing.

Is Corinthian the exception, or is it the rule in the world of for-profit colleges? We know that these colleges target adult learners, and market to minority populations. More than half of the students at Corinthian were students of color, and at many of the other for-profit colleges the enrollment of minority students exceeded 30 percent. We know that these colleges rely on tuitions for their profit, which means that when they find students who qualify for Pell grants, it boosts their bottom line. According to the California Association of Private Postsecondary Schools (CAPPS), at least 60 percent of the students enrolled in the top six for-profit colleges received Pell grants. Corinthian topped the group with nearly 73 percent of their students receiving Pell grants, but ITT Technical Institutes was not far behind with a 71.8 of their students receiving Pell grants. In comparison, 39 percent of the students at public colleges, and 34 percent at private nonprofit colleges have Pell grants.

Some for-profit colleges do a better job than Corinthian, and many have not run into trouble with the federal government. Still, because taxpayer dollars are being used to finance these colleges, they must be more carefully scrutinized both by the federal government and by accrediting associations. Furthermore, the Corinthian debacle is a warning to students who might get a lower cost and better education by going to a public university or to a community college. Before enrolling in one of these colleges, students need to consider other options, and also check on the placement records these schools like to brag about.

Students of color are especially vulnerable to the hype these colleges offer. They say they provide opportunities and jobs, but too often they don’t. They market to those at the periphery; those who believe their lives would be significantly improved with education. Their lives can improve with more learning, but the students must beware of for-profit colleges that often promise more than they can give, and push students into debt. The closing of the Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is a cautionary tale for those who choose for-profit colleges as the gateway for their hopes and dreams.

Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist. She can be reached at www.juliannemalveaux.com

Something Hard to Understand By William E. Spriggs

May 11, 2015

Something Hard to Understand

By William E. Spriggs

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Each week, another candidate throws a hat into the ring for the 2016 presidential campaign-a constant reminder that President Barack Obama is at the end of his term. Currently, the president is engaged in a high-stakes battle, twisting the arms of the Democratic Party base and pressuring his close congressional allies, like the Congressional Black Caucus, to help salvage his attempt to hammer through a multination "trade" agreement with Pacific Ocean rim nations. That is simply very hard to understand.

The neo-liberal Washington consensus, from the International Monetary Fund to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has concluded that the pressing challenge today is rising inequality in income and wealth. And, as all students of inequality understand, the United States-as the industrialized nation with the most extreme inequality-is at a point where inequality is retarding future growth. One reason is that inequality lowers educational attainment of too many people, and the skill of a nation's workforce is the key to economic growth.

There appears to be additional reasons, including the capture of the political apparatus by corporate and conservative powers such as the Koch brothers and their nearly $1 billion campaign pledge, and the tilting of policies toward the haves at the top of the economic ladder to the detriment of national economic growth interests, like public investments needed for growth.

History will reflect that President Obama did steer the United States free of one of the globe's lingering problems-stagnant economies and high unemployment in many industrialized nations. He pushed for a fiscal stimulus during his first year in office, which helped the United States rebound more successfully from this Great Recession than other nations, especially the Europeans, who stuck more closely to fiscal conservative notions that trapped them in austerity.

History also will note that a key element of America's inequality-access to health care-as been greatly improved by the president's Affordable Care Act. That act has helped reduce significantly the level of post-tax and transfer inequality the United States would otherwise have suffered.

Yet, inequality has continued its destructive growth in the United States, despite our more robust recovery and the shrinking of the health insurance inequality gap. So, as President Obama is closing out his term, why would he spend so much political capital on a trade deal that replicates the worst elements of the post-North American Free Trade Agreement era, which have resulted in a dangerously growing U.S. trade deficit? Unfortunately, while the neo-liberal "smart Washington thinking" has had to rethink some of its policy prescriptions in light of the high costs of inequality, it still clings to its remaining plank of failed trade policy.

The president is risking a lot. In addition to trade, he also risks the ignominy of being the only Democratic president to fail to increase the federal minimum wage since its creation; joining Ronald Reagan as the only other elected president to fail to do so. Currently, House Democrats, under Rep. Bobby Scott (Va.), and Senate Democrats, under Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), have introduced legislation to incrementally raise the minimum wage to $12 by 2020. Their legislation would restore the wage structure of the post-World War II era when wages and productivity rose together, and incomes of those at the top and bottom rose in step.

Clearly, avoiding the historical humiliation of being the one Democrat to stand in defense of one of the hallmarks of the New Deal, and a bulwark of the era of America's shared prosperity that it launched, will take heavy political lifting against an entrenched Republican-controlled Congress rooted in undoing the New Deal and advancing policies that have only proven to exacerbate inequality.

Today, median household incomes for Americans remain below their levels in 2007, which, thanks to two terms of the Bush economy, had fallen from their peak level in 2000. Also poverty levels for America's families, which in 2000 were at historic lows, but climbed during the Bush administration, are even higher today. And consumption by the bottom fifth of Americans remains below their 2008 abilities. With this much pain continuing in the lower half of America's households, it is hard to understand how the president is spending so much time on something so unrelated to the issues at hand.

Finally, another component of inequality is the unresolved standing of millions of workers who lack the freedom of citizenship protections to bargain freely with their employers. The president campaigned on fixing America's broken immigration system. And fixing it is important to raising the wages of millions of Americans by fixing the fracture this is causing in our labor markets. The Executive Orders he issued to take some measure of action on immigration will help. But, with so little left to his term, the president must weigh more carefully what his long-term legacy will be. We don't have time for him to waste on investment deals benefiting corporations and the 1 percent.

Follow Spriggs on Twitter: @WSpriggs. Contact: Amaya Smith-Tune Acting Director, Media Outreach AFL-CIO 202-637-5142.

Justice for Freddie Gray is a Long Way Off By E. R. Shipp

Justice for Freddie Gray is a Long Way Off
By E. R. Shipp

E.R. Shipp (The HistoryMakers Photo)

NEWS ANALYSIS

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The battle has not been won yet, though it sure felt like a Super Bowl victory to people young and old who high-fived, pumped fists, honked horns and literally danced in the streets when State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby uttered these words Friday: “we have probable cause to file criminal charges.”

The medical examiner had determined the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray to be a homicide. And Mosby, the youngest chief prosecutor in a major U. S. city, the woman many thought too inexperienced for the job, did what many others have not when given the chance. She conducted “a comprehensive, thorough and independent investigation” and then she named names: Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., Officer William Porter, Lt. Brian Rice, Sgt. Alicia White, Officer Edward Nero, Officer Garrett Miller. Citing varying degrees of culpability, she held them accountable for an illegal arrest and a harrowing ride in a patrol wagon where Gray “suffered a severe and critical neck injury as a result of being handcuffed, shackled by his feet and unrestrained inside of the BPD wagon.” His death, she said, was “the result of a fatal injury that occurred while Mr. Gray was unrestrained by a seat belt in the custody of the BPD wagon.”

In the annals of the law when Black suspects run up against walls of blue, May Day in Baltimore did mark a victory. Savor it for a moment. In fact, I am sure that the officers’ defenders prefer dancing in the street to marching in the streets that inconveniences shoppers and Orioles fans. Meanwhile, as is their constitutional right, they are marshaling resources for the legal chess match ahead. They will try to have Mosby removed from the case, citing bias. They will challenge the charges. They will challenge the evidence. They will try to discredit witnesses. They will seek to have any trials held somewhere other than Baltimore. They will appeal if perchance anyone is convicted down the line. Convictions are not inevitable at the end of this pursuit of justice – but don’t tell that to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

Just the day before, the mayor, who has taken hits from many directions, had pledged something I feared she could not deliver. At a summit called by the National Action Network, she declared: “We will get justice for Freddie Gray. Believe you me, we will get justice.”

But she has faith in an unprecedented justice alliance: the U.S. Justice Department, now headed by Loretta Lynch; Mosby, who represents the state; and herself. “If, with the nation watching, three black women at three different levels can’t get justice for this community, you tell me where we’re going to get it in our country.”

Rawlings-Blake characterizes herself as “relentless” in her quest to clean up the Baltimore Police Department and is annoyed that her administration does not get credit for “the reduction in police shootings, discourtesy, excessive force, lawsuits against the city, [and] finding more officers accused of wrong doing guilty.” On Friday, she sounded like Superwoman sending a warning to the bad apples of the police department, the 5% that I’ve heard referred to time and again. “To those of you who wish to engage in brutality, misconduct, racism and corruption, let me be clear: There is no place in the Baltimore Police Department for you.”

Mosby is tenacious. The day after Gray, a healthy happy-go-lucky fellow with a string of arrests for selling and possessing illegal drugs, arrived at the Western District police station comatose and in cardiac arrest, she deployed a team of investigators. What they turned up, apparently with the cooperation of someone among those cops and with other witnesses, is “sickening,” as the mayor noted and as my own stomach can attest. One feels revulsion upon hearing what they allegedly did to Freddie Gray. The stomach churns even more as one reflects on the efforts underway to justify his arrest in the first place and to blame the dead man for beating himself up in the police van to the point of severing his spinal cord.

“Extreme indifference to the value of human life” – That’s what the driver, Officer Goodson, is charged with, more formally called “second-degree depraved heart murder.” He and the others face various charges of manslaughter, assault, false imprisonment and misconduct in office. But the whole lot of them, if Mosby’s narrative holds up, exhibited “extreme indifference to the value of human life.”

Unfortunately, those who had a part in Freddie Gray’s last moments are not alone. The thousands of people who have taken to the streets in Baltimore and around the nation since his death on April 19 bear witness to that. Government at all levels, corporate America and the “haves” are all guilty of “extreme indifference to the value of human life” in the Sandtowns of our land.

Charges against these officers are a step towards addressing what happened to Freddie Gray. The accused are entitled to due process and in the court of law, if not the court of public opinion, they are presumed innocent. But Mosby is on to something when she focuses on a bigger picture and appeals to the young people who have taken to the streets to express their impatience with the status quo. She wants them to join forces with her to “develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come.”

Now that will be a time to shout, “Hallelujah!”

E. R. Shipp is an associate professor and journalist in residence at Morgan State Univeristy School of Global Journalism and Communication.

Baltimore, America Now Awaiting Justice By Hazel Trice Edney

May 5, 2015

Baltimore, America Now Awaiting Justice
By Hazel Trice Edney

baltimore-convictions

Now that six police officers have been arrested in the death of Freddie Gray. The community must wait for the course of justice to see whether they will be convicted and punished. PHOTO: Roxanne Fulton/Trice Edney News Wire

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As the smoke clears in the city of Baltimore leaving more than 200 burned out or destroyed businesses, a mourning family, and a still skeptical community struggling to maintain new hope for justice, President Barack Obama has weighed in vowing, “We can't leave entire sectors of our economy or entire communities behind.”

Speaking to a private Democratic National Committee gathering in New York City, President Obama indicated that – though he hasn’t visited Baltimore since the destructive uprising in response to the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of police - the city and cities like it are on his mind.

“What’s been brought to, once again, America’s attention over the last several months is that there are still folks left behind from recovery. There are communities that are still locked out of opportunity,” Obama said. “And part of our task over the next two years, next five years, 10, 20 years is making sure that the basic ideal upon which this country was founded is realized; that there’s not a child in America who, if they’re willing to work hard, can't make it.”

He concluded, “And whether we see the news in Ferguson, or New York, or Baltimore, what we know is that's still not the case.”

The story of Freddie Gray, yet another Black male dead at the hands of police, is now known around the country. Millions await to see whether justice will prevail as six police officers have now been charged in his death due to injuries sustained while in police custody.

State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby, at 35, now has the eyes of the nation. She has charged the six officers with events leading to Gray’s death. All six police officers have been arrested and now await justice. Mosby contends:

The officers had no probable cause to arrest Gray in the first place.
The endangered him by placing him in the police wagon unsecured; yet shackled by his hands and feet face down.
They denied him medical assistance although he was obviously in pain and requesting help.

Upon the May 1 announcement of the charges, the streets, which only a few days earlier were crowded with angry looters and protesters turned into streets packed with celebrants marching by the thousands with hope to see justice prevail. It’s been a long haul. The U. S. Department of Justice, led by new Attorney General Loretta Lynch, is also considering whether to file civil rights charges against the police department. She was scheduled to visit Baltimore on Tuesday to continue that discovery process.

“We’ve got to reevaluate how there’s been a shield around police officers, but no protection for citizens,” Baltimore Pastor Jamal Bryant said in an interview. By this time next year, Bryant says, “It is my hope that there will not be one presidential candidate where we don’t talk about the Black prison pipeline, a year from now we will have raised a new generation of young politicians who are not just protestors but shaping the policies.”

President Obama, in New York, went on to announce enhancements for “My Brothers Keeper”, his signature program to address socio-economic issues pertaining to Black and Latino males.

“The private sector and corporate community came together, initially have raised $80 million, and are going to keep on going, for us to provide mentorship programs and apprenticeship programs, and to work with cities and communities all across the country that are focused on this issue,” Obama said. “I intend to get as much done in the next 22 months as possible.”

New Book Champions Importance of Black Dollars

May 3, 2015

New Book Champions Importance of Black Dollars

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - He has been called “the nation’s most prolific writer on economic empowerment for Black people.” Now, Jim Clingman has released his 5th book on the subject aptly describing the dominant-submissive relationship between economics and politics, respectively. The book, Black Dollars Matter, contains stark and sometimes biting commentary, statistical data, and documented information, with thought-provoking quotations sprinkled throughout.

“Black Dollars Matter is a searchlight to find solutions, a spotlight that illuminates the way forward, and an admonishment that we ‘Teach our dollars how to make more sense;’ and it shows us how to do that,” says Clingman in a statement.Clingman has always believed in the priority of his message over the messenger. “I have no proprietary claim on most of what I write. My message is taken from the deep treasures of information left by many who have passed on,” he states. “I am just another in a long line of messengers.”

In the book, he espouses practical easy-to-facilitate solutions to the economic and political problems facing Black people in America and he continues to dedicate himself to initiating and participating in those solutions, rather than merely issuing self-serving and self-aggrandizing calls to the masses. “Jim Clingman is unquestionably one of the foremost practitioners of Black economic empowerment in America,” says Rev. Dr. Jonathan L. Weaver; Founder & National President, Collective Empowerment Group, Upper Marlboro, Md.

“Professor James Clingman is considered by many to be the most thought-provoking, solutions-oriented, and perceptive commentator on the too-often ignored critical subject of Black economics,” says Peter Bailey; Journalist, Washington, D.C.

“Because Jim is a man of faith, he recognizes that these conversations encompass issues regarding government, institutional religion, nationalism, and social injustice,” says Arnelious Crenshaw, Jr.; Evangelist, Northeast Church of Christ, Oklahoma City.

Black Dollars Matter is available at www.blackonomics.com, www.professionalpublishinghouse.com, and Amazon Kindle eBooks. For more information or to order the book, tClingman can be contacted directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., 513-315-9866.