Disappearing articles

Topics/tags: Academia

This morning, as on most weekday mornings, I pulled up the Inside Higher Ed newsletter to see the latest news in academia [1]. One article of interest was titled Report: Dream Center Execs Believed They Would Get Help From Trump Officials. For those who don’t know, Dream Center is the latest in a series of for-profit colleges [3] to go bankrupt, leaving its students stranded [4]. Dream Center is a particularly interesting case because (a) the Department of Education allowed them to take over a set of failing institutions, even though they had no prior experience in higher education and (b) Argosy University, which the Dream Center ran, received student financial aid dollars from the U.S. Government, but failed to distribute it to the students who were supposed to receive it.

I’m not sure why, but I find myself compelled to read about what is happening in the for-profit higher-education sector. Perhaps it’s that I consider that sector part of the reason that so many American distrusts higher ed; it certainly contributes more than its fair share toward our national student debt [5,6]. And so I went to read the article.

Unfortunately, when I followed the link, I got a Page Not Found error. Did they put the wrong link in the newsletter or did the page get taken down for other reasons?

Later in the day, I tried a Web search. The first result was the following.

Yes, that search result linked to the same URL as the newsletter. In case you were wondering, the link remains down. At this point, the page seems to be gone. It’s not even in Google’s cache. I wonder why.

Fortunately, the Times article on the matter still exists as does another article in Republic Report. The latter is a bit more succinct. As importantly, the letter from House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-VA) to Betsy DeVos about the matter is available. Let’s see …

As outlined in the body of this letter, the actions of Dream Center and the Department of Education’s (Department) execution of its responsibility to protect students raises [sic] [8] grave concerns. The Committee has also come across newly-obtained documents [sic] [9] that raise questions about whether the Department took steps to allow Dream Center to mislead students and how the Department should have better protected students. The documents reveal that during this period, HLC clearly and consistently indicated to Dream Center that it must notify students enrolled at these institutions of the change in status. Yet, the documents indicate that Dream Center executives knowingly ignored HLC’s requirements and continued to falsely market the institutions as accredited by HLC.

The documents also reveal that Department officials were made aware of Dream Center’s false claims of accreditation, but the Department did not immediately require Dream Center to take corrective action. Instead, the Department informed Dream Center executives that it would to retroactively accredit the institutions during the period they had lied to students—rewriting history to erase Dream Center’s deceptive marketing practices. The documents further suggest that Department officials were not forthcoming to Congress and the public about the information they had about Dream Center’s status and practices. [10]

I’m lazy and busy. I don’t want to read through all the articles, the whole letter, and all the attachments. However, in my quick skim I was able to note that Exhibit 5 appears to be an email from Principal Deputy Under Secretary Diane Auer Jones about the expectations placed on Dream Center. Since Jones seems to be the official most implicated in this mess, I’m probably missing something. I see that multiple documents also refer to an earlier article in Republic Report that describes similar issues.

It’s too much of a morass to wade through right now. I wish that the IHE summary still existed. And I’d like to see the comments from the normal cast of commenters on IHE. Oh well.

In any case, I’m still left wondering: Why is the article gone? Did IHE get threatened? If so, was it by Dream Center lawyers, by the Department of Education, by The New York Times [11], or some other entity? Or perhaps they’ve decided to work on a longer article for tomorrow’s edition. We shall see.

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Postscript: Continuing down the rabbit hole, I decided to see how much of the article I could retrieve using different search terms. The result of my first search [12] read,

Department official would pull strings to help with accreditation challenges after … Dream Center, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit with no prior … The Trump administration’s oversight of the transaction has now come …

With a slightly different set of search terms [14], I got,

The Trump administration’s oversight of the transaction has now come under … The Times reports that Dream Center executives discussed in …

Another set of terms [15], gave me,

Internal company emails and documents show executives at Dream … pull strings to help with accreditation challenges after its purchase of a …

It’s always fun to pull out words. Accreditation Challenges pull strings [16] yielded,

Dream Center Education Holdings believed a top Education Department official would pull strings to help with accreditation challenges after …

Ooh, Accreditation Challenges after Dream Center gives me

The Higher Learning Commission, which accredited several Art Institutes campuses, pulled its accreditation in January 2018. … Jones also said the accreditation issues didn’t push the chain of colleges toward financial collapse but only dictated whether students could transfer credits elsewhere.

And Internal company emails and documents show executives at Dream results in,

Internal company emails and documents show executives at Dream Center Education Holdings believed a top Education Department official would pull strings to help with accreditation challenges after its purchase of a chain of for-profit colleges, The New York Times reported Tuesday …

Jones Dream Center results in,

Dream Center, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit with no prior higher education … Diane Auer Jones, the department’s principal deputy under …

Let’s try direct quotes. The Trump administration’s oversight of the transaction has now come yields,

The Trump administration’s oversight of the transaction has now come under scrutiny from consumer groups and congressional Democrats. The Higher Learning Commission, which accredited several Art Institutes campuses, pulled its accreditation in January 2018.

Progress!

With a bit more work, here’s what I ended up with. It’s clearly not the complete article, but it’s enough for now.

Internal company emails and documents show executives at Dream Center Education Holdings believed a top Education Department official would pull strings to help with accreditation challenges after its purchase of a chain of for-profit colleges, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Dream Center, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit with no prior higher education experience, agreed to buy the Argosy University chain and multiple Art Institutes from Education Management Corporation in 2017. The Trump administration’s oversight of the transaction has now come under scrutiny from consumer groups and congressional Democrats. The Higher Learning Commission, which accredited several Art Institutes campuses, pulled its accreditation in January 2018.

Diane Auer Jones, the department’s principal deputy under secretary and point person for higher ed policy, told Congress she was unaware of the HLC decision until almost six months later. Jones also said the accreditation issues didn’t push the chain of colleges toward financial collapse but only dictated whether students could transfer credits elsewhere.

Yeah; I don’t know what to do with that extended excerpt. But I feel a strange sense of accomplishment. I should find a way to automate the process.

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Postscript: Was there a point to this musing? It started out as an exploration of why an article might disappear. It gave me a chance to rant a bit about for-profit institutions of higher education. And it led me down one of those rabbit-holes of can I do this on the Interweb? Yeah, I think I need to add rambly to the tags [17].

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Postscript: Someone managed to find the article in Google’s cache. I’m not sure why they could find it and I could not.

Report: Dream Center Execs Believed They Would Get Help From Trump Officials

By [Andrew Kreighbaum](https://www.insidehighered.com/users/andrew-kreighbaum // July 24, 2019

Internal company emails and documents show executives at Dream Center Education Holdings believed a top Education Department official would pull strings to help with accreditation challenges after its purchase of a chain of for-profit colleges, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Dream Center, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit with no prior higher education experience, agreed to buy the Argosy University chain and multiple Art Institutes campuses from Education Management Corporation in 2017. But it almost immediately encountered problems with accreditors. The Education Department cut off access to federal student aid for Dream Center campuses in March after weeks of reports about the colleges failing to pay out student aid. The Trump administration’s oversight of the transaction has now come under scrutiny from consumer groups and congressional Democrats.

The Higher Learning Commission, which accredited several Art Institutes campuses, pulled its accreditation in January 2018. But Dream Center continued to advertise that its campuses were accredited – meaning students’ credits would be recognized by employers and could transfer elsewhere – for five more months until they were told to stop by the Education Department. Diane Auer Jones, the department’s principal deputy under secretary and point person for higher ed policy, told Congress she was unaware of the HLC decision until almost six months later. The Times reports that Dream Center executives discussed in internal email communications being tipped off by the Education Department about a forthcoming retroactive accreditation policy, contradicting the department’s timeline.

An Education Department spokeswoman told the Times that Dream Center didn’t receive any special benefits and that the department had sought to help as many students transfer into new programs as possible. Jones also said the accreditation issues didn’t push the chain of colleges toward financial collapse but only dictated whether students could transfer credits elsewhere.

I’m still not sure why I couldn’t get the cached page at the time, but can now. In any case, I’m glad to see that my strange search strategy helped me get most of the article.

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[1] I also read Chronicle. However, I find myself drawn to IHE because it has more short articles and includes more discussion [2].

[2] Some of that discussion gets irritatingly repetitive. But I also see some interesting insights.

[3] Strictly speaking, Dream Center is a non-profit. But it’s so closely tied to the for-profit world. Among other things, it shares a leader with Woz U [4].

[4] No, it’s not Steve Wozniak, formerly the better Steve. I’m disappointed that (a) Woz would set up this kind of entity in the first place and (b) that he’d partner with the kind of people who ran Dream Center.

[5] Non-profits are also going bankrupt. However, most of those do their best to do so in a fashion that tries to limit harm to students, including making sure that they finish the current semester’s courses. In contrast, the Dream Center shut down in mid-March, with little, if any, warning to its students.

[6] If I recall correctly, for-profits are responsible for ten percent of students in higher education, but 25% of federal student loans. My ten-minute Web search failed to support that claim. However, I did find that the Chicago Booth Review says that For-profit colleges enroll 10 percent of US students but account for 50 percent of student-loan defaults.

[7] I should also acknowledge that the for-profit sector often seems to do a better job of understanding the needs and issues of non-traditional students.

[8] I think that should be raise.

[9] I think that should be newly obtained documents.

[10] Scott, Bobby. 16 July 2019. Letter to the Honorable Betsy DeVos. pp. 2–3. Available online at https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Chairman%20Scott%20Letter%20to%20ED%20re%20Dream%20Center.pdf. Visited 24 July 2019.

[11] IHE’s quick takes are often summaries of articles from elsewhere on the Interweb. And, as you’ll see in the postscript, this article seems to be based on one from The Times.

[12] Whoops. I forgot to record my search terms.

[14] I forgot to record those, too.

[15] You can probably predict what happened to those search terms.

[16] Finally, I recorded them.

[17] I originally had short. That term no longer seems to hold.

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Version 1.0 released 2019-07-24.

Version 1.1 of 2019-07-24.