In my large, personal database of personal opinions, there are a couple of rows relevant to this post:
+ Educating and/or retraining people to do different jobs is usually an exercise in trying to fit a square peg into a round hole;
+ Any time the federal government injects itself into free enterprise, it mucks things up, usually bleeding money to the corrupt and losing money for the taxpayers it ostensibly represents.
This weekend, I was reading about how the for-profit institutions (the kind you see advertising constantly on daytime TV to the people in their lounge chairs who are out of work) depend very heavily on federal handouts to cover their exorbitant tuitions. I (naively) never knew that these places actually sucked down federal money, but they actually account for 25% of all the higher education handouts (whereas the other 75% go to students of real institutions of higher learning, like Stanford and Princeton).
It turns out that these very fishy enterprises are starting to wither away quickly, now that a little scrutiny is being applied. Recent investigations showed that 100% (yep, 100%) of all these public for-profit institutions had some level of corruption in their operations, and forthcoming regulations are going to cut off federal handouts to those places whose "graduates" default on their loans (the default rate is currently around 75% at some of these places!)
It's nice to see that, at least in a small way, a tidbit of accountability is starting to see the light of day. Below is recent price action for Corinthian "Colleges" (COCO):