The issue is that the profit comes before the education. These institutions prey on low-income people who for whatever
reason couldn't get into public institutions. When the students graduate they have huge debts, typically larger than
those that went to public institutions, but worse their degrees are often worthless. The accreditation for these institutions
often come from companies owned by the same corporation. The accreditation means nothing so your credits can't transfer.
Do a google search, you'll find article after article about students who went to these schools trying to get a better life
and just made their lives worse. They went from poor, to hopelessly poor. Whereas before they were poor with bad job
prospects they're now poor with bad job prospects and HUGE debts. They often just stop paying them. It's one of the
biggest contributors to our student debt problem.
>The issue is that the profit comes before the education. ...
That sounds like a fully-general argument against provision of any good by a for-profit business: "The issue with private farms is that the profit comes before the food." "The issue with private semiconductors is the profit comes before the computational efficiency."
True, profits do bring the potential for fraud, abuse, etc., but obviously there are at least some situations where that can all be contained. What's special about education per se?
You cite abuses, but are those artifacts of the for-profit part, or the "students generally don't have good information about what a given school will do for their career"? I mean, there are lots of cases of students at "non-profit" public universities who are drowning in debt from a worthless degree.
I would argue it's a combination of the high cost (we aren't talking about people ending up with a few thousand dollars of debt), the fact that it might take years to determine if any given school is actually not terrible, and the fact that "education" itself is given special considerations over many products and services.
