Dear Commons Community,

President Barack Obama signed an executive order yesterday designed to protect veterans, current members of the military, and their families from deceptive marketing practices that some for-profit schools are using to target them for their military benefits. In his speech, Obama promised to put an end to recruiting strategies that he said “swindle and hoodwink” our troops and their families into making decisions against their best interests.

Here are a few of the recruiting habits Obama highlighted:

• “They’ll say you don’t have to pay a dime for your degree, but once you register, they’ll suddenly make you sign up for a high-interest student loan.”
• “They’ll say that if you transfer schools, you can transfer credits. But when you try to actually do that, you suddenly find out that you can’t.”
• “They’ll say they’ve got a job placement program when, in fact, they don’t.”

Obama highlighted a particularly egregious case: “One of the worst examples of this is a college recruiter who had the nerve to visit a barracks at Camp Lejeune and enroll Marines with brain injuries — just for the money. These Marines had injuries so severe some of them couldn’t recall what courses the recruiter had signed them up for.”

Other scandals involve for-profit schools that have  used dishonest tactics to lure troops and veterans. The Student Veterans of America(SVA) recently discovered that, in an effort to appear “veteran friendly,” several schools established fake SVA chapters that were run by for-profit school administrators.

Obama said that it is time to put an end to scams and to follow through on the promise to give troops “an America that will forever fight for you, just as you fought for us.”

Thank you, Mr. President!  We also need an executive order for the for-profit colleges who scam non-veterans!

Tony