We've previously posted about Anya Kamenetz' book: DIY U. Here's a review (PDF) of the book by Donald M. Norris of Strategic Initiatives.

But before that focus, her primary concern was student loans and debt. Today's Campus' Jeff Wendt recently interviewed Kamenetz. It's a very brief interview, so we'll only quote a small portion:

Jeff Wendt

Does a good business solution suggest itself to you?

Anya Kamenetz

Restoring bankruptcy protection (for student loan debt) will be a good start.  Removing or reducing the federal government guarantee would be a good next step.  The normal workings of the marketplace would then restrict tuition prices.     

For-profit institutions are making a lot of headlines. In a time where it seems to many that higher education needs to rapidly transform, they have that capacity and are doing it. Kevin Carey writes about his time spent with one for-profit entrepreneur, Michael Clifford. Clifford specializes in purchasing dying traditional institutions and making them over into for-profits, such as he did in 2004 with Grand Canyon University.

The reputable parts of the industry are at the forefront of much technological and organizational innovation. For-profits exist in large part to fix educational market failures left by traditional institutions, and they profit by serving students that public and private nonprofit institutions too often ignore. While old-line research universities were gilding their walled-off academic city-states, the University of Phoenix was building no-frills campuses near freeway exits so working students could take classes in the evening. Who was more focused on the public interest? Some of the colleges Clifford bought have legacies that stretch back decades. Who else was willing to save them? Not the government, or the church, or the more fortunate colleges with their wealthy alumni and endowments that reach the sky.

But . . . 

[H]e rejects the Obama administration's proposal to cut off federal aid to for-profits at which student-debt payments after graduation exceed a certain percentage of the graduates' income. In fact, he denies that colleges have any responsibility whatsoever for how much students borrow and whether they can pay it back. He won't even acknowledge that student borrowing is related to how much colleges charge.

That refusal is the industry line, and it is crazy nonsense. As a rule, for-profits charge much more than public colleges and universities. Many of their students come from moderate- and low-income backgrounds. You don't need a college degree to know that large debt plus small income equals high risk of default. The for-profit Corinthian Colleges (as of mid-July, market cap: $923-million) estimated in official documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that more than half the loans it makes to its own students will go bad. Corinthian still makes a profit, because it gets most of its money from loans guaranteed by Uncle Sam.

 Many years ago this writer was hired to do some computer training at a for-profit school. Arriving to teach one day, he discovered the local sheriff, locking the place up and was quick-talking enough to persuade the sheriff to let him take home his personal computer, which had been stored at the school. As for-profits move to fill the gap and be part of the push for more graduates, many criticize them - and many for-profits feel unfairly tarred by the brush of bad stories. Read more.

Government money, lightly supervised institutions, unchecked supervising bodies and debt-trapped students — it all sounds similar to the subprime-mortgage collapse that is still fresh in America's mind. "The analogies are unbelievable," said Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, linking the for-profit education boom to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, the dotcom boom of the '90s and the recent mortgage bubble, which was helped along by lax credit-rating agencies and loose regulation.

For-profit school leaders deny the parallel. "It's silly and simplistic," responds Harris Miller, CEO and president of the Career College Association. "The analogy between the [for-profit college] accrediting bodies and the [credit] rating service is absolute nonsense." Corinthian Colleges Inc. downplays default numbers and cites an Office of Management and Budget figure showing that loan-repayment rates have actually risen in the past decade.