The news made for a catchy headline: “8 For-Profit Colleges Collect More Than $1-Billion in Veterans’ Education Benefits.” Only problem: It was a little more nuanced than that.
The news coverage, based on a report released in September by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, included incorrect numbers calculated by the committee. The panel announced its error on Thursday.
Rather than tallying the one-year increase in veterans’ education benefits—which would have been $627-million in the 2010-11 award year—the committee mistakenly used two-year data. The change means that those colleges increased their benefits by 86 percent compared with the previous award year, not 159 percent, as the committee had previously reported.
In the corrected report, the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix and the largest veterans'-benefits recipient, collected $133-million in benefit money, rather than the $210-million previously reported. The Education Management Corporation, another for-profit college company, generated the next-highest total, $113-million in benefits last year, not $173-million, while ITT Technical Institute brought in $99-million, not the $178-million the committee had said it did.
The committee also misreported data on the University System of Maryland, which brought in $31-million rather than $51-million, and the University of Texas system, which generated $25-million, not $45-million.
In a written statement, the health and education committee stressed that the study’s central findings remained unchanged—that for-profit colleges still receive the largest amounts of veterans’ benefits. The committee had analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as part of an investigation into how for-profit colleges were marketing heavily to student veterans and collecting large sums of federal benefits.
Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa and the committee’s chairman, had said for-profit colleges aggressively recruit student veterans. “Military money helps these schools on paper to meet a key statutory requirement that no more than 90 percent of their revenue come from federal financial-aid programs,” Senator Harkin had said. “But because of a technicality in the law, military benefits are not counted on the 90-percent limit.”
On Thursday a spokeswoman for the committee said the number-crunchers discovered the error when they used the data for further analysis.
The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the chief lobbying group for for-profit colleges, issued a statement on Thursday rebuking the committee for its initial report.
“We are stunned that such damaging statements, harming thousands of students and the reputations of several schools, could be made in the first place,” said Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the association. “Through a reckless rush to judgment, the committee’s majority members unleashed an unwarranted tidal wave of negative publicity for our schools.”
Mr. Cohen continued: “Today’s correction indicates in the strongest possible terms that we need fewer press conferences and more collaboration on higher-education reform, putting the interests of all students first.”
