During last week's GOP debate, many of us in Florida were surprised to hear Marco Rubio attack Donald Trump over his Trump University scandal and the ongoing lawsuits against him over it. Not that Trump doesn't deserve to have them highlighted, but because Rubio has his own Trump University problem.
Floridans will remember Rubio's support of the now shuttered Corinthian Colleges, another for-profit college that Rubio not only supported, but of the entire for-profit college concept that Rubio touts in his own education policies.
Fusion has summed up the hypocrisy rather well here:
You might think that Rubio wants to crack down on schools like Trump University, but you’d be wrong. He wants a lot more of them. One of the key provisions in Rubio’s education plan is a proposal to lower accreditation standards to let more schools compete for students. As he described the plan in July, “Our higher education system is controlled by what amounts to a cartel of existing colleges and universities, which use their power over the accreditation process to block innovative, low-cost competitors from entering the market. Within my first 100 days, I will bust this cartel by establishing a new accreditation process that welcomes low-cost, innovative providers.”
“Low-cost, innovative providers” is probably a friendlier way of describing the for-profit college system, an industry rife with the kind of fraud that Trump University is accused of. By lowering accreditation standards, Rubio’s plan would not only encourage more for-profit schools to enter the market, but also legitimize these institutions in a way that might make it harder for defrauded students to seek redress.
Rubio isn’t just in favor of for-profit schools. He also has ties to some of the worst of them. Rubio’s Senate campaign and PACs supporting him received more than $27,000 from the infamous Corinthian Colleges Inc., which was shut down and fined by the Education Department for misleading students and forcing them to take on huge amounts of debt to pay for a subpar education. As Bloomberg reported last April, Rubio sent a letter to the Education Department asking for leniency for Corinthian.
The Rubio campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Of course Rubio hasn't responded.
It's kind of amazing that Rubio even brought Trump University up, given the fact that it begs for stories like this to surface all over again.
But Rubio apparently thought it was worth the risk, given the depths he's willing to sink to out of desperation for a candidate who has yet to win a single primary or caucus.
