California lawmakers push agency to better protect students at for-profit colleges
Thomas Peele
March 17, 2021
Bureau floats plan to hike fees to for-profit colleges amid fears they would be passed on to students
California lawmakers working on how to stop fraud at for-profit colleges had to face the reality Tuesday that pushing the regulators to increase protections may end up costing students higher tuition.
While legislators pushed for the Bureau for Private and Postsecondary Education to do a better job, bureau officials revealed that it can do so only by increasing fees to the schools they oversee by, in some cases, more than 1,000%. Such fees are routinely passed on to students, officials said.
“I thought the math was wrong,” Assemblyman Evan Low, D-San Jose, who chaired the hearing, said when he tried to calculate the percentage of one increase and came up with 1,309%. But his math wasn’t off. The bureau is proposing to jump the fee to operate an accredited school from $750 to $10,564.
