By Professor Doom
I’ve written
about Trump
University before, and it appears I was wrong, at least a little. I thought
the amounts involved were only a few million (and thus nothing compared to the
hundreds of millions in Clinton’s Laureate school), but the amounts were pretty
significant, even if pale next to other scandals by professional politicians.
--my apologies for
linking to a fake news site, but I couldn’t find anything trustworthy that
covered this adequately. Weekly World News and other tabloids have been around
for decades…why is “fake news” a big problem all of a sudden?
Before going
further, I want to mention a small issue. Many use this settlement as proof
that Trump is a scammer. Perhaps so, but I think the best you can take from
this is if Trump does wrong, he’ll actually be taken to court…a scammer he may
be, but unlike the last half dozen presidents, he’ll actually have to face
consequences for his illegal actions. Trump says he settled just so this case,
already in its 6th year, can finally go away; I’ll accept this as
face value, because we all know how issues that are resolved with incessant
denials despite mountains of evidence never seem to go away (hi Hillary!).
Back to today’s
topic, that’s more money involved than I thought. Trying to do the math here
makes it tough to figure out how much was taken from “students.” The class
action had around 6000 students, with a minimum “tuition” of $1,500. So, he
took at least $9,000,000 from suckers looking to get rich off real estate, and
had to give most of it back. I’m putting words in quotes here because this
wasn’t a real university (obviously) and this wasn’t actual tuition in the
normal sense. It’s weird, I’ve seen many such schemes on late night TV, Trump’s
prices really aren’t out of line with other such get-rich-quick-in-real-estate
schemes. I guess he was too successful here.
So, all well and
good, I suppose, but…wait a minute. Average college tuition is over $25,000 a
year when you consider all expenses, and you need about 4 years of it. Do we
finally have precedent for clawing back the money from administrators who have
been suckering high school kids for decades?
Let’s see what
the charges were:
“The school promised
to teach his investing "secrets."
The secrets, of
course, were secrets to making money. Gee whiz, most of the students coming
onto campus were told they were going to make a million more bucks over a
lifetime because of the “secrets” they would learn in higher education. It
might be a small stretch, but this charge could easily be leveled at most
colleges in this country.
I concede
there’s a bit of gray area there, how about another charge:
“Many”? But
everything students “learn” on campus, at least at the undergraduate level, can
be purchased for a tiny fraction of tuition, and the material in college
textbooks is available in the public library for free. Does this fake news site
know that students are regularly charged $100 or more for a textbook that
contains nothing that wasn’t said and published over a century ago?
Wait.
Accreditation is a huge fraud. In this blog I’ve highlighted massive academic
scandals that went on for almost 20 years, scandals which accreditation never
would have found about because, as I’ve shown in detail, accreditation has no
inclination to learn about academic fraud. Moreover, once independent agencies
discovered the fraud, accreditation did nothing.
With accreditation
so questionable, I’m hard pressed to understand the problem with Trump U
claiming to have accreditation. You may as well run a blog and explicitly say
you’re publishing fake news, it would do as much harm to your credibility as
running a university and saying it’s fully accredited. Accreditation only serves one purpose: to
allow access to the Federal student loan scam…which Trump University never
took.
And so I rejoice:
we now have precedent for taking many of our so-called “universities” to court
and charging them with the same level of fraud that Trump University settled
for—I do note that part of the settlement requires no admission of wrongdoing
(of course)…but the precedent is now clear.
If all it takes
to be part of a lawsuit is for the education not to pay off, the implications
here are staggering.
We have around
20,000,000 college students. Half
of college graduates (and that’s just the graduates!) are working in jobs
where the degree is worthless. So, let’s do the math. 10,000,000 ripped off
customers, bigger than the lawsuit. $100,000 per degree, again more than
Trump’s lawsuit. So, $1,000,000,000,000, a trillion dollar lawsuit can be filed
against higher education. That’s just for this year’s students. This fraud has
been going for twenty years at the least, so we’re talking $20 trillion
worth of lawsuits.
I know, it’ll
never happen, but I still choose to be hopeful. The key meta-issue the last
election was the sheer hypocrisy of hyper-criticism of every splinter in
Trump’s eye (and there are plenty, I grant) while ignoring a veritable redwood
forest of logs elsewhere.
If Trump’s
piffling 6,000 students and nine million dollars merit a multi-year lawsuit,
then, absolutely, ten million students, for a trillion dollars, would as well.
I’m not holding my breath, I know it won’t go country wide, but what happens
when a typical university, with 25,000 students or more, suddenly finds itself
being slapped with mega-lawsuits wanting that tuition money back. It’s a crack
pipe dream to suspect the thieving administration will be forced to give back
the money, I know, but just to see the immense frauds end will still be good
enough.
So, thank you,
Mr. Trump, for cracking open the floodgates on stopping this fraud even a
micrometer…it’s more than I would have guessed Hercules himself would have been
able to accomplish.
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