They have been a long time target of what I like to call scam factories. And these are schools that are purely interested in taking advantage of their benefits, and they don’t even actually care if the students graduate because it’s really just a matter of what they call getting new starts. So if you can get a student who’s a new start, that student is bringing in a stream of cash, which you can kind of think of it as like a Ponzi scheme, because the more students that are coming in on the front end, they don’t really care about the outcomes as long as they have that new stream of revenue that they can reach out to their shareholders and demonstrate the record profits that we saw with a lot of them. It’s unfortunate because, you know, these are students who are looking to build a better life, who are seeking opportunity and who have heard from anybody above them that education is important. And so they go out to do that. Unfortunately, finding themselves a target of some of these really just terrible schools with frankly pretty abysmal outcomes.
It’s imperative that the Department of Defense starts to take this issue more seriously and educate service members, because, again, they are targets of these schools. But also, we all know that veterans are essentially the alumni of the military. And so it starts with the DOD, it starts with the services, making sure that they’re educating their their members so they can become informed consumers of their benefits. Ultimately, you can’t pare the message up, build a better life, go to school and then just throw them into the thrown to the wild and expect that as first, largely as first generation students, that they’re going to know how to how to do that. And so it’s a process on the front end. But I also I also say that the second thing that needs to happen is we really need to be screening the schools that are actually tapping into GI Bill benefits. And if there are schools that are known scammers, why would they have access to these benefits to begin with? That’s a real hard question we need to be asking.
