Higher Ed Watch

Remember last August when Tea Party activists flooded Congressional town hall meetings to fight President Obama's proposal to overhaul the nation's health care system? The protests galvanized the news media and, for a time, looked like they might create enough momentum to derail the president's plans.

The Career College Association (CCA) is apparently hoping to have the same impact this summer -- as it is urging its members to come out in force during the Congressional recess this month and "attend as many town hall meetings as possible." The group is hoping to build opposition to new "Gainful Employment" rules the Obama administration has proposed that would cut off federal financial aid to for-profit college programs whose students take on the most unmanageable levels of debt (in relation to their expected future earnings) and have the poorest record of repayment. The association is also likely hoping to use these gatherings to make new friends on Capitol Hill who can pressure the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee to back down from its investigation of the sector.

"With the release of the NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] which includes the Gainful Employment measure, it is now more important than ever that we fight for the academic choices of our students," a notice on CCA's website states. "Attending Town Hall Meetings and building relationships with Members of Congress are incredibly effective ways of combating the negative perceptions of our students and schools."

To prepare its members for this assignment, the group has put together a webinar -- with the help of Emily Blount, the press secretary for Virginia Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, whose brother Brian Moran is CCA's executive vice president for government affairs -- entitled "How to Attend a Town Hall Meeting."  According to the webinar, these gatherings give for-profit college leaders the chance to have a "meet and greet with a Member of Congress" and to "introduce" their schools "to activist members of the community."

The webinar encourages CCA members to attend these meetings with an entourage in hand, made up of at least one student representative, faculty members and staff, and local employers who can vouch for their schools. School officials are also urged to come armed with "positive data to support our schools and students" -- since providing this information is "an integral part of developing legislative champions."

Unlike the Tea Party activists, CCA members are encouraged to be polite and courteous because they are there to win lawmakers over. To that end, the school officials are told that they should make a special effort to reach out to the "the member of the [lawmaker's] staff on hand" so that they can "begin building a relationship with him/her." School officials should exchange business cards with these staff members, and send thank you notes to the aides, inviting them to visit their campuses in order "to help create a dialogue between yourself and the Congressional office."

While CCA members are not supposed to be confrontational, their ultimate goal is to "set the facts straight about  the value of for-profit education" and to combat "negative perceptions" of the schools. With that in mind, we doubt that they will bringing up this Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on serious recruiting abuses at more than a dozen for-profit schools or this morning's Senate HELP Committee hearing, which is focusing on what the GAO found.

We will have more coverage of the hearing and the report later this week. Stay tuned.