Washington -- Has Omer E. Waddles sold out? Mr. Waddles’s friends and former colleagues on Capitol Hill ask that question in their less-guarded moments, as they ponder why the well-regarded former Congressional aide and Education Department official has affiliated himself with an association of for-profit trade schools.
Why else but for big money, they muse, would Mr. Waddles have passed up a chance to play a key role in this year’s reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in order to take charge of the Career College Association, a group with a reputation for its bare-knuckled defense of unscrupulous trade schools?
“There certainly were a number of raised eyebrows when Omer took the job, since he is such a talented guy and there were any number of things he could do,” says Terry W. Hartle, vice-president for government relations at the American Council on Education. Mr. Waddles, for example, was said to have been Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s top choice to lead the Massachusetts Democrat’s staff through the higher-education reauthorization process.
Mr. Waddles laughs at his peers’ suspicions. Yes, the money in his new job is nice, he admits, and No, he won’t say how much he earns. But, he says, he didn’t take the job for the cash.
He took it in part, he says, precisely because of his peers’ reaction, which shows the wide gulf of mistrust and suspicion that separates traditional colleges and the for-profit trade schools that Mr. Wad-dles’s group represents.
Mr. Waddles says he hopes the relationships he has forged in Congress and at the Education Department will improve communication among different higher-education groups, lawmakers, and officials of the Clinton Administration.
“I think that people will be more willing to enter into a dialogue with me because of my history, and because I have a reputation of being fair and open,” he says."There are some who continue to have a hostile attitude toward the schools that I represent. It makes my job tougher. But I will just have to keep working to convince them that we have a product that is worth maintaining.”
For the Career College Association, Mr. Waddles’s appointment represents a dramatic break with the past.
With membership plummeting, the association’s Board of Directors decided last spring to oust Stephen J. Blair, who had been president of the group for 11 years.
Where Mr. Blair was a bomb thrower, Mr. Waddles is a conciliator. Where Mr. Blair slung insults and barbs, Mr. Waddles is offering olive branches.
“Steve Blair was always looking for the wedge issue that he could use to attack the other sectors of postsecondary education, and he spent a lot of time doing that,” says Richard T. Jerue, vice-president for government relations at the Education Management Corporation, a trade-school chain based in Pittsburgh that primarily operates profit-making arts schools."That was counterproductive, and I don’t think that Omer will do that.”
Mr. Waddles has spent all but one of the last 13 years in Congress. Over the past six years, as staff counsel for key Congressional committees and for the Secretary of Education, Mr. Waddles has helped to develop virtually every piece of legislation affecting higher education.
“Omer has won great respect in the postsecondary community over the years,” says Thomas Sapienza, president of the Sawyer School in Pittsburgh and chairman of the Career College Association’s board."We believe he will help us become stronger partners within the broader community.”
Mr. Waddles will have his work cut out for him. In the coming months, Congress will begin its review of the Higher Education Act, which governs most federal grant and loan programs for college students. Already, some higher-education groups are urging lawmakers to make it harder for proprietary schools to remain eligible for financial-aid dollars from Washington.
Elizabeth M. Imholz directs the Higher Education and Training Access Project of the National Consumer Law Center, which has represented many proprietary-school students who have charged their schools with providing shoddy educations. In a letter to Representative William F. Goodling, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the House panel charged with reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, Ms. Imholz warned that while"the epidemic of problems with scam trade schools experienced in the decade covering 1984-1994 may have subsided, these problems have by no means been eradicated.”
She cited the recent indictments of two officials of the IADE American Schools, a for-profit chain of vocational institutions based in Los Angeles, for defrauding the federal government of more than $1-million in Pell Grant funds. A Congressional hearing on trade-school problems in 1995 revealed that officials of IADE had used Pell funds to pay for leases on luxury automobiles, Club Med vacations, and their own six-figure salaries.
In her letter, Ms. Imholz recommended that Congress bar a trade school from awarding student grants and loans unless at least 70 per cent of its enrollees graduate and get jobs in their field. Currently, this requirement applies to only short-term vocational programs. The Education Department is reportedly considering such a proposal in the recommendations that it will send Congress this spring for the higher-education reauthorization bill.
Trade-school owners say such proposals would apply much stricter rules to their institutions than those that govern traditional colleges and universities and could evict large numbers of their schools from the federal student-aid programs.
Mr. Waddles does not deny that trade schools have had their problems in the past, but he thinks that the government has effectively wiped out the problem schools. Ironically, as a Democratic Congressional aide in the early 1990s, Mr. Waddles helped write the legislation that directed the Education Department to expel from the student-aid programs the institutions that had high default rates.
Since the Clinton Administration came to power in 1993, the department has barred 672 educational institutions from all federal financial-aid programs and an additional 203 solely from the loan programs. Most of those removed have been for-profit trade schools.
“We were looking for an instrument that could clearly tell us what was a good school and what was a bad school,” Mr. Waddles recalls."What we created was an arbitrary and blunt-edged instrument that knocked out some very bad schools, but also knocked out many fine ones, too.”
He adds:"We’ve seen a fire across the prairie, and that fire has had a purifying effect. As our sector has weathered the storms of recent years, a stronger group of schools is emerging to carry, at a high level of credibility, the mantle of training and career development.”
Mr. Waddles believes he can have the greatest influence if he emphasizes the positive role his institutions play, rather than the failures of traditional colleges.
“Our role is not to create a hostile environment,” he said. “It is to show how our institutions are vital to the mission of the Department of Education, which is to provide the best educational opportunities to the nation as a whole, and not only to those who are seeking a pure educational experience at an Ivy League college.”
Mr. Waddles’s determination to"turn down the flames” and build alliances with lobbyists for the traditional institutions contrasts sharply with the confrontational approach of his predecessor, Mr. Blair.
“For Blair, the trade schools were in an all-out war with the other sectors,” says Thomas A. Kube, the executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology."He was too defensive.”
Mr. Blair says that his critics at trade schools have forgotten the mess they were in a few years ago.
“We faced the total and complete removal of all trade-school students” from the federal loan programs, and"the negative press exploding at that time was so blistering that even the champions that we had in Congress were disappearing,” he says. “But we were able to turn it around, to have people really understand what career education meant to them, and to their families, and to society.”
Mr. Blair says he is most proud of the lobbying campaign that he undertook to keep the trade schools in the federal student-aid programs. Under his leadership, the association’s member schools forged closer relationships with the lawmakers in their districts. The association galvanized local business leaders to lobby on behalf of the trade schools from which they drew their employees. And it became more involved in fund-raising for lawmakers who were supportive of the schools.
Even with all those efforts, he says, he knew that the trade schools would have to"pay a price” to make up for the “disgusting practices of a handful of schools” that ripped off students. While the 1992 reauthorization let trade schools stay in the student-aid programs, it gave the Education Department the tools to remove hundreds.
The Career College Association paid dearly. The group’s membership dwindled as schools were forced to close. But others left because they did not like Mr. Blair or the way he ran his association.
One such trade-school leader was Robert B. Knutson, chief executive officer of the Education Management Corporation."He found their strategy to be too defensive,” says the corporation’s Mr. Jerue."The association was not able to take criticism constructively.”
Mr. Knutson did not like the fact, for instance, that whenever trade schools were charged with having excessive default rates, Mr. Blair would charge colleges with failing to graduate their students and place enough of them in jobs.
Mr. Blair says he believed that Congress should require colleges to publicize their graduation and completion rates, which college officials do not want to do because, they say, these measurements don’t reflect their missions well.
Mr. Blair accuses them of hiding something. Mr. Waddles sees it differently.
“I think we need to judge schools by something more than defaults,” he says."But I don’t know if graduation rates or placement rates are the right measures, because I recognize that they don’t necessarily translate into what the traditional missions are for other types of colleges and universities.”
That kind of cooperative stance toward the rest of higher education is just what the Career College Association’s board sought when it hired Mr. Waddles, and it seems likely to please Mr. Waddles’s peers here. If it lasts, they may be happy that Mr. Waddles took the position, no matter what they think motivated him.
Many of the House and Senate staff members who shepherded the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act through Congress are now, like Omer Waddles, in jobs which they will lobby on behalf of their new organizations during the 1997 reauthorization process.
POSITION THEN POSITION NOW _______________ ______________ Rose M. DiNapoli Staff member, Assistant vice- House Committee president for on Education and marketing, Student Labor Loan Marketing Association Sarah Flanagan Staff member, Vice-president for Senate Subcommitte government relations, on Education, Arts National Association and the Humanities of Independent Colleges and Universities Terry W. Hartle Staff director for Vice-president for education, Senate government relations Labor and Human American Council on Resources Committee Education Richard T. Jerue Counsel to House Vice-president for Education and Labor government relations Subcommittee on Education Management Labor-Management Corporation Relations