Bill and Hillary Clinton's ties to for profit colleges under renewed scrutiny

Everyone who is demanding that the candidates release their tax returns may just have a point. As soon as Hillary Clinton published hers there were yet more goodies coming out of them which raise yet another round of questions about the pay for play attitude which seemed to define the State Department under her tenure. This time it revolves around the familiar subject of for profit colleges and her husband’s highly lucrative associations with them. (Washington Examiner)

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Bill Clinton netted $1.6 million last year from a pair of for-profit education companies that caused controversy for the future president during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state.

Laureate Education paid Bill Clinton nearly $1.1 million in 2015, according to tax returns released by his wife’s campaign Friday. GEMS Education, a Dubai-based firm, paid him more than $560,000.

Both companies are major donors to the Clinton Foundation…

Douglas Becker, CEO of Laureate, also heads a nonprofit group called the International Youth Foundation, which netted millions from the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2010. USAID is an arm of the State Department.

This is one of those tangled webs the Clintons tend to weave and it catches all manner of flies. Laureate operates for profit universities and they gave plenty of money to the Clinton Foundation in addition to paying Bill a pile of cash directly. But the CEO is also the head of the International Youth Foundation and they raked in millions from the State Department.

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One can see how this turns into a mess fairly quickly. That’s particularly true when Hillary Clinton is regularly out on the trail railing against for profit universities and insisting that everyone should be getting a “free” college education. Back in April, Clinton was attacking such institutions and the Daily Caller was already pointing out the fundamental hypocrisy in these complaints.

Clinton’s disparaging remarks about the often seedy for-profit college industry omitted the fact that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have deep ties to Laureate Education, an international conglomerate of aggressive, telemarketing-happy, for-profit colleges that is ensnared in controversy all over the globe.

Recently, for example, the U.S. Department of Education announced that four of the $3.4 billion-per-year private company’s six U.S.-based schools are on an official list of colleges and universities at which regulators have uncovered notable financial problems. Schools on the list are penalized by having restricted access to federal funds, notes Inside Higher Ed.

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Will anyone notice? It’s difficult to imagine given the swirling mess of other scandals surrounding her candidacy. But all of this information adds up to a picture which those following Clinton’s career already knew quite well. Hillary Clinton will say anything she has to at any given time to get what she wants. Inconsistency and outright mendacity don’t slow her down a bit, and we shouldn’t expect that to change between now and the election. It’s just what the Clintons do.

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