Description:
Bad for-profit colleges leave many thousands of students in debt and jobless. What could our government do to limit such abuses? The Profits of Failure offers a definitive answer.
Brief description: DAVID WHITMAN is the president and founder of Whitman Wordsmithing & Communications. In a wide-ranging career, he was chief speechwriter/senior writer in the U.S. Department of Education Office of Communications and Outreach, and chief speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He has worked as a freelance journalist, author, editor, and consultant, specializing in education reform and environmental, energy, and social policy issues. He wrote Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, a prize-winning study of secondary schools that succeeded in closing achievement gaps; and was an adjunct instructor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs and a professor for its introductory class in reporting and writing. David was a contributing editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, where he served as chief correspondent covering social policy, and wrote widely on abortion, poverty, welfare reform, homelessness, ethnicity and race, family policy, immigration, inequality, and other social trends, and a visiting Media Fellow with the U.N. Foundation's Better World Fund, where he reported on promising alternatives for reducing oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. He was also a Journalism Fellow in the Alicia Patterson Foundation Program, and a senior research assistant at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. David's numerous TV and radio appearances include: Think Tank (PBS); The John Hockenberry Show (MSNBC); All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, The Scott Simon Show, and The Diane Rehm Show (National Public Radio). He has sung semiprofessionally in two doo-wop a cappella groups, is an avid hiker and fly fisherman, and also works as a certified and licensed massage therapist in the D.C. area. Whitman is married to journalist Lynn Rosellini; they have one daughter, Lily.
Review Quotes:
"The sad, sometimes surprising, and often devastating history of scandal and abuse at for-profit colleges is richly told in this riveting account of for-profit schools and the government's efforts to protect taxpayers and students from bad career training. Anyone who cares about protecting our nation's most vulnerable and dispossessed college students will want to read this meticulously researched and powerfully argued book. Step by step, David Whitman debunks conservative bromides about for-profit colleges, and the Trump administration's elimination of accountability for taxpayer dollars in the sector. Thankfully, Whitman doesn't stop there, and proposes better solutions to protect students and taxpayers alike." -Arne Duncan, Former U.S. Secretary of Education
"Time and again the nation's for-profit career colleges-which should play a leading role in providing equality of opportunity-have instead exploited students who seek a better life for themselves and their families. David Whitman offers a sweeping and incisive history of the United States' repeated failures at effectively regulating this sector, from after World War II through the Trump administration. It traces the surprising reversal of partisan officials' stances on regulation, as conservatives relinquished their traditional view that it was essential to the healthy operation of free markets and the protection of consumers. A must read for those who hope the nation can do better at providing pathways to the 'American dream.'"
-Suzanne Mettler,
John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions,
Cornell University; author of Degrees of Inequality
"With the insight of an insider and the context of a historian, David Whitman offers a unique and necessary angle of vision on the issues surrounding for-profit college education and illuminates a path forward."
-Noliwe Rooks, author of Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education