Update: Laureate Universities International, to which the Clintons have a direct connection, apparently gets most of its income from its schools overseas. During the period 2010 -2012, and after Bill Clinton received a $4 million plus a year payment from Laureate as an “Honorary Chancellor,” the State Department approved millions of dollars in grants to International Youth Foundation, a non-profit chaired by Laureate’s CEO, Don Becker:
[While] IYF had received government grants (mainly from the U.S. Agency for International Development) as far back as 2001, they “exploded since Bill became chancellor of Laureate,” accounting for the vast majority of the nonprofit’s revenue. In 2010, “government grants accounted for $23 million of its revenue, compared to $5.4 million from other sources. It received $21 million in 2011 and $23 million in 2012.” The link between International Youth Foundation and Laureate has not been previously reported, he said. […]
A Bloomberg examination of IYF’s public filings show that in 2009, the year before Bill Clinton joined Laureate, the nonprofit received 11 grants worth $9 million from the State Department or the affiliated USAID. In 2010, the group received 14 grants worth $15.1 million. In 2011, 13 grants added up to $14.6 million. The following year, those numbers jumped: IYF received 21 grants worth $25.5 million, including a direct grant from the State Department. […]
… Hillary Clinton’s financial disclosure forms in 2012 revealed only that her husband received nonemployee compensation of more than $1,000 from [Laureate] that year. The Clinton Foundation’s donor disclosures showed that Laureate cumulatively gave between $1 million and $5 million through 2014. […]
Laureate plays up its Clinton ties in a big way. Its homepage prominently features a photo of Clinton speaking this month at a new campus in Panama. Other pages detail Clinton’s role at Laureate and the company’s relationship with the Clinton Global Initiative.
I think this provides further damning evidence of the pay-to-play connections between Laureate and the Clintons while Hillary was Secretary of State.
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The for profit college industry is one of the worst scams going, at least if you are one of their students. They have a much lower graduation rate than traditional colleges, and an absurdly high number of their students rely on student loans to fund their education. On average, tuition costs are much more expensive. Many are rife with fraud and deceptive business practices. Their business model relies heavily on federal funding, and many exploit veterans and low income students.
Candidate Hillary Clinton has stated repeatedly on the stump that she will crack down on these for profit higher educational scam artists. However, not so long ago, she was much less concerned about the for profit college industry. In fact, she actively favored one particular for profit college while she was Secretary of State, Laureate International Universities:
[In 2009] Clinton wrote in an email to a top aide that she wanted to add Laureate Education to the guest list for the event. Describing Laureate as “the fastest growing college network in the world,” Clinton said the company was “started by Doug Becker who Bill likes a lot.”
“It’s a for-profit model that should be represented,” she added in the August 2009 email. A senior vice president at Laureate was added to the guest list, a separate email shows.
Former President Bill Clinton several months later became an honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities, a role for which he was paid $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014. Clinton stepped down from the position earlier this year.
That’s right, she did a favor for Laureate, and they, in return just happened to appoint her husband to a honorary position that paid him $16.5 million over four years for whatever honorary chancellors do. To give you an idea just how much Laureate Universities rakes in from their students, let’s look at one of their five schools in the United States, Walden University in Minneapolis, which charges students up to averages $60,000 in tuition and fees per quarter per degrees! That comes to $120,000 per academic year.
Now my daughter attends a prestigious science and engineering school in the Northeast that charges a lot in tuition and fees, also. She pays roughly $60,000 for the entire academic year (i.e., half what Walden charges), which includes tuition, fees, books and on campus room and board. Graduates with a Bachelor’s degree have a 89.4% success rate (either employment in their chosen field, acceptance into a graduate program or join the Military). Average starting salary equaled 62,509 (data for Class of 2014).
The four year graduation rate at her college is 74%. On average, online for profit colleges average only a 22% graduation rate. Hard to imagine that Walden provides an educational experience equal or better than the one my daughter receives. And by all accounts they don’t even come close:
[C]ritics of Laureate’s Walden University in Minnesota claimed professors were inaccessible and that continual delays stretched out the time — and thus money needed — to earn an advanced degree. Three students have filed a lawsuit against Walden, hoping to make it a class-action suit, alleging breach of contract, unjust enrichment, violations of state consumer protection and unfair competition laws.
Of course, Bill was far from the only person to benefit from a connection to the for profit college industry. After Hillary stepped down as Secretary of State, she gave a speech (sound familiar?) that paid her $225,000 to address “Academic Partnerships, a for-profit education company in which Jeb Bush held an ownership stake and on whose board he served.”
Clinton’s newly filed personal financial disclosure shows that she was paid $225,500 on March 24, 2014 by Academic Partnerships. At the invitation-only event in Dallas, Texas, Clinton reportedly said, “today a student doesn’t need to travel to Cambridge, Mass., or Cambridge, England, to get a world-class education.”
Academic Partnerships assists universities in converting their academic degree programs into online versions that can be taken by students around the world.
Yet, she wants us to believe that now when she is elected to the Presidency, she will crack down on an industry that provided her and her husband with such lucrative sinecures. Color me — skeptical, at best. And you wonder why young people, many of them crushed under a heavy burden of student loan debt, and their parents, as well, don’t trust her?
