It Is Not Just for the Sake of Journalism That We Need to Shut the Washington Post Down Today
It looks as though the Post has become a deeply corrupt and disfunctional educational company. Matthew Yglesias:
Yglesias » Kaplan, Inc: The Washington Post company['s] biggest source of revenue is... Kaplan... its low-performing for-profit university unit is its biggest source of growth as Tamar Lewin points out in an excellent NYT piece:
Over the last decade, Kaplan has moved aggressively into for-profit higher education, acquiring 75 small colleges and starting the huge online Kaplan University. Now, Kaplan higher education revenues eclipse not only the test-prep operations, but all the rest of the Washington Post Company’s operations.... [O]nly 28 percent of Kaplan’s students were repaying their student loans. That figure is well below the 45 percent threshold that most programs will need to remain fully eligible for the federal aid on which they rely....
[T]he basic business model of the Washington Post Company... is... [to] say “in exchange for paying us money, we’ll provide you education services that pay off in the long run.” Potential customers... avail themselves of taxpayer-subsidized loans in order to take the Post up on their offer. But 72 percent of the Post’s customers find that they’re actually unable to repay those taxpayer-subsidized loans.... [T]he Obama administration has proposed that taxpayers stop subsidizing programs with dismal performance rates.... [T]he Post would prefer to keep on getting free money from taxpayers and thus “spent $350,000 on lobbying in the third quarter of this year, more than any other higher-education company.”... Donald Graham has personally “gone to Capitol Hill to argue against the regulations in private visits with lawmakers... [h]is newspaper, too, has editorialized against the regulations.”... [E]very member of congress is now on notice that the city’s most influential newspaper is prepared to go to bat for its corporate partners.
Shut it down today, please.
