This is Steven Salzberg's blog on science, pseudoscience, medicine, and other topics. I blogged for Forbes for 14 years, but they started censoring me, so I left in October 2024. I'm just here now, uncensored.
Donald Trump used the latest Republican debate as an opportunity to express wildly inaccurate anti-vaccine claims, embracing the thoroughly discredited position that vaccines cause autism. This claim has been exhaustively debunked, by countless scientific studies and by reports from the Institute of Medicine and the CDC. It started with a now-retracted 1998 study by one of the great villains in medicine, Andrew Wakefield, who continues to push his fraudulent views despite having lost his medical license.
Trump's comments were nutty and dangerous, but Ben Carson's response was, in some ways, worse. Carson had the chance to set the record straight, and because of his medical credentials, he could have been effective. He failed.
Trump has been an anti-vaxxer for years, so his comments were not surprising. Science blogger Orac posted a 2007 Trump quote that almost exactly mirrors what he said in the debate.
What was much more surprising, and deeply disappointing, was the response of candidate Ben Carson, who until last year was a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. (Note that although I too work at Hopkins Medicine, I've never met Dr. Carson.) Carson did point out vaccines don't cause autism, but then he made a series of false claims that come right out of the anti-vax playbook.
When the moderator asked Carson to respond to Trump's anti-vaccine rant, Carson had a golden opportunity to do some real good: he could have corrected the record and pointed out the real harm that comes from anti-vaccination misinformation. Instead, he said things like this:
“Vaccines are very important, certain ones, the ones that would prevent death or crippling. There are others, a multitude of vaccines that don’t fit in that category, and there should be some discretion in those cases.”
Forbes bogger Tara Haelle has already explained the grievous error here: all our vaccines prevent death. Carson's claim is simply false, and it's shocking that a highly trained physician would make this statement, on a national stage, without knowing the facts. What Carson should have said–but didn't–was this, from the Every Child By Two organization:
"Each and every vaccine added to the list of recommended immunizations will save the lives and/or reduce the number of disabilities of children in the United States. With the introduction of every new vaccine, rates of both disease and deaths have fallen across the country."
Carson then dug himself even deeper into the anti-vaccine camp with this claim:
"But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time."
This claim is right out of the anti-vaccine playbook: it was the basis of the "too many, too soon" campaign launched by Jenny McCarthy's Generation Rescue, the country's leading anti-vaccine activist group. In fact, the vaccine schedule is very safe, and misinformation like this trope leads to parents withholding vaccines from their children, which in turn can cause sickness, disability, and death.
Let me show you what Carson could have done. Six years ago, Bill Maher–one of the most left-wing talk show hosts in the media, and an anti-vaxxer himself–was interviewing former Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who is also an M.D. Here's what happened:
Dr. Frist interrupted Maher and said "wait, this is important," and proceeded to school Maher on how vaccines save lives. I wasn't a big fan of Frist, but he did a fantastic job here. Carson, in contrast, just pandered to the audience, and to Trump.
The moderator also asked Rand Paul, the other M.D. among the candidates, to respond to Trump's anti-vax claims. He too repeated the anti-vaccine trope that he "ought to have the right to spread my vaccines out a little bit." This is nonsense as well: Paul does have that right, and no one has ever proposed taking it away. It's bad medicine, though, and as doctor, Paul should know better. He failed as well.
It's far more harmful to the public when a high-profile doctor makes anti-vaccine statements than when a blowhard like Trump makes them. Dr. Ben Carson and Dr. Rand Paul should both know better.
Watching ABC's World News Tonight this week, I saw an impressive-looking ad for a pill that claimed to improve memory and cognition. The ad showed several adults, all looking very happy, presumably because they didn’t forget where they left their keys. In appearance, it looked like many of the drug ads that run on the evening news in the U.S. these days.
The ad described a product called Prevagen, which is sold as a supplement, not a drug. This is a critical distinction: supplements are almost completely unregulated, unlike real drugs. The FDA isn’t allowed to regulate supplements and their claims, thanks to Congress and the 1994 DSHEA law.
I was curious about what this memory pill could be. The Prevagen ad, website and packaging make a number of very strong claims, scientifically speaking. The biggest claim is that Prevagen improves memory*, something pretty much everyone would like. The website also includes the more specific claim that “Prevagen can improve memmory within 90 days.*” The package adds that Prevagen “supports healthy brain function*, [a] sharper mind*, and clearer thinking.*"
How can they make these claims if they aren’t true? Simple: every claim has a little asterisk (*) next to it. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the Prevagen webpage, you’ll find what that means:
“*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”
Behind this blanket escape clause, supplement makers hide all kinds of unsupported claims. Thus Quincy Biosciences–Prevagen's manufacturer–can state that “Prevagen significantly improves learning,” add the asterisk, and voila! the FDA can’t touch them, as long as they don't make a claim to cure a specific disease.
So what is Prevagen? It’s a pill that contains a protein called apoaequorin, which is found in a species of jellyfish that glows in the dark. These jellies produce two proteins, apoaequorin and green fluorescent protein (GFP), that help them fluoresce. It’s an amazing biological system, and the three scientists who discovered GFP were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
How (you might be wondering) this can be sold as a dietary supplement? After all, we don’t eat apoaequorin, and isn’t a supplement supposed to be related to something we normally eat? It sounds more like a drug. The FDA agrees with me–I’ll get to that below.
Despite Quincy Bioscience’s claims, I see no reason why eating this protein would have any effect at all on brain function. First of all, it’s not even a human protein, so it's unlikely to work in humans. Second, even if it did work in humans, eating it would not deliver it to our brains, because it would be almost certainly be broken down in the stomach. And third, the connection between this protein and memory is complex, so simply having more of it is not likely to improve memory.
Prevagen isn’t cheap, either. If you order direct from the company, a month’s supply of pills will cost you $66 with shipping. There’s even an “extra strength” version, though I cannot see how twice as much of an ineffective pill will be twice as effective. On the other hand, two times zero does equal zero.
I wrote to ask the president of Quincy Bioscience, Mark Underwood, if his company is claiming that Prevagen will provide any benefits to people suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s. He didn’t answer that question, but he did respond that “our scientific basis for the claims we make related to Prevagen are on pretty solid ground.” He was careful to qualify this first, though, writing that
“Prevagen is intended to assist people with mild memory issues related to aging. Prevagen is not a pharmaceutical, nor is it approved by the FDA for the treatment of any neurodegenerative disease (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc.). We do not wish to confuse mild memory loss related to aging with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia in our advertising.”
I also asked Underwood if he could provide any peer-reviewed studies supporting his company's claims. He sent me several studies, but none of them was peer-reviewed: they include company-sponsored studies that are unpublished, and one published abstract from 2011, in the Journal of Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Abstracts, though, are not peer-reviewed: they are short summaries typically presented in oral form at conferences, and sometimes published (as this one was) in special supplements to journals. This abstract seems to be the basis of the claim on Prevagen’s website that “Prevagen was tested in a large double-blind, placebo-controlled study using computers to assess brain performance. 218 adults over 40 years old participated in the three month study. Prevagen significantly improved learning and word recall.*” (Note the asterisk again.)
Prevagen’s claims should be easy to test. If Prevagen really does improve memory, then it would be relatively cheap to run large, well-controlled studies on randomized subjects, and I’d expect to have seen multiple studies published since 2011. But because Prevagen is being marketed as a supplement, Quincy Bioscience doesn’t have to prove anything. They just have to be careful not to cross the line in their advertising.
I asked Ted Dawson, the Abramson Professor of Neurodegenerative Diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, what he thought of Prevagen’s claims.
“It is hard to evaluate Prevagen as to the best of my knowledge there is no peer-reviewed publication on its use in memory and cognition,” said Dawson. “The study cited on the company’s web site is a small short study, raising concerns about the validity of the claims.”
Treating dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other age-related brain disorders is truly difficult. If you want to see what real scientists (not supplement maker) are doing to try to stave off or cure dementia, here’s a short video narrated by Dr. Dawson:
Dr. Mark Sager, a scientist at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute and a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, has been quoted saying that he does not recommend Prevagen “primarily because there’s no evidence that it does any good.” He recommends adopting a Mediterranean diet instead, which does have some scientific evidence to support it.
I’m not the first person to raise questions about Prevagen. In 2012, a class action lawsuit was filed against them in California, in which the plaintiffs argued that the Prevagen didn’t work and that the advertising campaign was false and misleading. Earlier this year, another class action lawsuit against Quincy Bioscience argued that Prevagen’s active ingredient, apoaequorin, "is completely destroyed by the digestive system.” And in 2012, the FDA sent Quincy Bioscience a warning letter (see it here), pointing out that the company was marketing Prevagen as a drug, not a supplement. The FDA stated that:
"Apoaequorin is not a vitamin, mineral, amino acid, herb or other botanical, or dietary substance for use by man to supplement the diet ... nor is it a combination of dietary ingredients. Therefore, the synthetically produced apoaequorin used in your Prevagen products is not a dietary ingredient as defined in section 201(ff)(1) of the Act.... Accordingly, your Prevagen products could not be marketed as dietary supplements even if they were intended only to affect the structure or function of the body and not for use in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease."
Somehow, though, Quincy continues to sell Prevagen as a supplement. Their website claims they are the #1 selling brain health supplement in the U.S. today.
The appeal that Prevagen is making to consumers is a very old one: basically, they want you to think that if a protein is used in your brain, then eating that protein will make your brain healthier (even though apoaequorin is not a human protein). By this argument, I could package up hundreds of different proteins (perhaps thousands–the brain is a complex organ) and sell them as “brain food” This simplistic principle has been used for centuries in folk medicine: it’s the reason why some people think that eating the body parts of bears and tigers will make them more virile. But eating tiger organs doesn’t make you more like a tiger. It's a form of magical thinking, and there's simply no science to support it. In short, it's just wrong.
Human health isn’t that simple. You don’t acquire the properties of the food you eat. Eating chicken won't make you fly, and eating tuna won't make you a fast swimmer. Eating jellyfish proteins (Prevagen's main ingredient) won't improve your memory, nor will it allow you to emit green fluroescent light. There's no magic brain food, or supplement, that will make you smarter. But you can be a tiny bit richer by not spending your money on ineffective supplements.
One of this summer’s biggest hits was the movie Jurassic World, which earned a record $209 million on its opening weekend back in June. It's so popular that it’s still showing in theaters now, more than two months later.
Like its predecessors, the fourth movie in the Jurassic Park series features a theme park filled with dinosaurs that were created by cloning dinosaur DNA. In the movie, the dino DNA was collected from mosquitos preserved in amber, which (in the fictional movie world) had sucked the blood of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
The success of the movie spurred YouGov.com to conduct a poll, asking Americans if they believed it was currently possible to create dinosaurs from DNA found in fossils. 28% said yes.
It makes for a fun story, but is there any science behind it? Well, yes and no.
Can we clone a living organism entirely from scratch, just from its DNA sequence alone? Yes! Not only can we do it, but it has already been done. Genome scientists Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, both former colleagues of mine, achieved this at least twice, creating bacteria by synthesizing the necessary DNA and then “booting up” a new bacterial cell, which went on to replicate itself and grow into colonies of brand-new bacteria. Very impressive work, although bacterial genomes are quite small, only a few million nucleotides long.
Moving up a step, just last year, Hopkins scientist Jef Boeke (who is now at NYU) and his team synthesized an entire yeast chromosome. Yeast are single-celled like bacteria, but they're eukaryotes, evolutionarily closer to humans and dinosaurs than bacteria. Eukaryotes keep their DNA sequestered inside a nucleus, which in turn makes them way harder to clone from scratch. Synthesis of the remaining yeast chromosomes is under way, and it’s entirely feasible that we’ll have artificial yeast in just a year or two.
As of today, though, no one has even come close to synthesizing a multi-cellular creature like a dinosaur–or a chicken, or a frog, or a human. But in principal, it is possible to create a living animal just from its DNA, though it might take a few more decades to do it.
So yes, we might someday create animals from DNA. But dinosaurs? Alas, this half of the Jurassic World question gets a big “no.”
The problem is, despite the compelling story in the movie, there is no dinosaur DNA left on the planet. None at all, despite what you might have read. Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, mostly likely because of a massive asteroid impact in the Yucatan peninsula, and DNA simply doesn’t last that long.
But wait, you might ask: what about all these stories about Neandertal DNA, or woolly mammoth DNA, or other ancient species? These studies are true and are very exciting. Scientists have reconstructed the genome of our Neanderal relatives from very old bones, around 30,000-40,000 years old. We can extract DNA from bones that old, although the DNA is badly degraded. I worked on an ancient DNA project myself, using an 11,000 year old mammoth thigh bone to reconstruct part of its genome. We were able to recover quite a lot of mammoth DNA from that bone.
Other work on ancient samples has demonstrated that in the most extreme conditions, where the bones have been continuously frozen in the Greenland ice sheet, DNA may survive as long as 1 million years. However, dinosaurs lived in temperate climates where DNA degrades far more quickly, and virtually all dinosaur DNA was probably gone within a few thousand years after the dinosaurs became extinct.
(By the way, that same YouGov poll that asked about cloning dinosaurs also asked "Do you believe that dinosaurs and humans once lived on the planet at the same time?" 40% of Americans said yes, demonstrating once again that Americans are woefully misinformed about evolution and the history of the planet.)
So alas, a mosquito that sucked the blood of a Tyrannosaurus rex, and then got swallowed and preserved in tree sap, would not yield any T. rex DNA for present-day cloning experiments.
This doesn’t mean we’ll never have a Jurassic Park, but if we do, we’ll have to guess at what that dino DNA looked like, perhaps using the DNA of birds. Perhaps, though, we should focus on saving the species we have left, which we are rapidly wiping out, before worrying about reviving long-lost dinosaurs.
Just two months ago I wrote about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's dual attacks on his state's flagship university. Walker, who is currently running for the Republican nomination for President, is moving to eliminate tenure for professors at the University of Wisconsin, while at the same time implementing an enormous $250 million budget cut.
This week we learned a new reason why Gov. Walker cut that $250 million: he wants to give it to wealthy hedge fund managers to build a new basketball arena for the Milwaukee Bucks.
No kidding. I can only imagine what my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin are thinking.
On Wednesday, Walker signed a bill that would spend $250 million of taxpayers' money to build the new arena. Last year, the team was purchased by two billionaire hedge fund managers, Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens. In what's become a standard ploy, the new owners threatened to move the team if they didn't get a new arena.
As the Washington Post reported on Thursday, one of the team's other owners is Jon Hammes, one of Walker's top campaign fundraisers. Hammes' son recently donated $150,000 to a pro-Walker super PAC. For the Hammes, this must seem to be a pretty good return on investment: $150K plus some fundraising work in return for $250 million. (Obviously, Walker will deny that there's been any quid pro quo. But he's been working on this deal for months: according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, he included $220 million in state money for the arena in his budget back in February, but state lawmakers took it out.)
The libertarian Cato Institute denounced the public financing of the arena, according to the New York Times. Other Republicans are furious with Walker because one of the team's co-owners (Lasry) is a major supporter of Hillary Clinton's campaign.
When I wrote about Walker's attacks on the University of Wisconsin in June, I was mystified by why he would go on the offensive against an institution that his state should be incredibly proud of–and that provides countless benefits to the state and the nation. It seemed petty and vindictive, and it still does.
But the money cut from the University of Wisconsin, $250 million, exactly matches the state's contribution to the new arena for the billionaire hedge fund owners of the Milwaukee Bucks. It's now obvious what Scott Walker's priorities are.
Women now have a surprising new reason to go on the pill.
Birth control pills have been around since the 1960s, when they offered women a revolutionary degree of control over their reproductive capabilities. Over the years, the formulation of "the pill" has changed, but it remains one of the most widely used, and most effective, forms of pregnancy prevention.
This week, a very large new study in The Lancet Oncology reported that use of birth control pills provides a significant, and surprisingly large, reduction in the risk of endometrial cancer. The benefit lasts for decades–women who used the pill in the 1960s have the same reduction in cancer rates as women who took it more recently. This is very good news for women.
The new study combined data from 36 earlier studies covering a total of 27,276 women with endometrial cancer and 115,743 without it. The authors–a large group called the Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies on Endometrial Cancer–have been working for ten years to collect and analyze this massive data set. Overall, they found that the risk of endometrial cancer in women who had used the pill was only 69% of the risk in women who had never used it. The benefit increased with longer usage: for every 5 years on the pill, women had a 24% reduction in the relative risk of cancer.
Relative risk of endometrial cancer (red line) based on how many years a woman used birth control pills. From "Endometrial cancer and oral contraceptives: an individual participant meta-analysis of 27,276 women with endometrial cancer from 36 epidemiological studies", published online 4 August 2015 in The Lancet Oncology.
Endometrial cancer is the most common gynelogical cancer, accounting for 6% of all cancers in women. The National Cancer Institute estimates that in the U.S., 54,870 women will be diagnosed with endometrial cancer in 2015, and 10,170 will die.
To put the benefit of birth control pills in numeric terms, the new study reports that:
"In high-income countries, 10 years use of oral contraceptives was estimated to reduce the absolute risk of endometrial cancer arising before age 75 years from 2.3 to 1.3 per 100 women."
The benefit is even larger for women who used the pill longer: after 15 years the risk of cancer drops to 1%. The authors estimate that over the past 50 years, the pill has prevented 400,000 endometrial cancers in western Europe, the U.S., and Australasia, including 200,000 in the past decade.
The policy implications of this new study are profound, and likely to be controversial. Women have long struggled to control their reproductive rights, and in many countries access to the pill is still very limited. Even in the U.S. the fight for access to birth control continues: just last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a private corporation, Hobby Lobby, that claimed it had religious objections to providing birth control as part of its health care coverage. (Never mind the absurdity of the notion that a corporation could claim to have religious views.)
Now there's a new and very different reason to provide birth control pills as part of health care coverage. Time will tell whether this dramatic cancer prevention benefit will trump the objections of those who want to deny women access to the pill.
When was the last time anyone in Congress passed a truly good idea? I can’t remember.
But they do manage to come up with bad ideas, and sometimes these ideas make their way into laws, causing no end of harm.
This month, two U.S. Congressmen have come up with the idea to offer prizes rather than grants for scientific research. They were inspired, according to a story in Science magazine, by DARPA’s prize competitions for robotic vehicle design, as well as the private XPRIZE competition.
Now Congress wants the National Institutes of Health to give out prizes for biomedical research. They've tucked this idea into the 21st Century Cures Act, a bill funding the NIH and FDA that was passed by the House of Representatives on July 10. Congressman Todd Young of Indiana and Andy Harris of Maryland amended the bill to require NIH to create a new prize competition.
This is a staggeringly bad idea. Why? Where do I begin? Well, first of all, biomedical research costs money–lots of money. Everyone I know in biomedical research, in which I’ve been working for 25 years, needs money before they make their discoveries. A prize at the end is nice, but you can't do anything if you can't pay for equipment, supplies, and (perhaps Congress will be surprised to learn this) people’s salaries.
Flawed though it may be, the current U.S. funding system works pretty well: scientists write up their ideas as proposals, NIH or NSF convenes panels of experts to review those proposals, and the best ones (more or less) get funded.
A prize, on the other hand, is awarded after the work gets done. If this is how we’re going to fund science, then very little good work will get done. Only rich people, or rich companies, will be able to compete for prizes in biomedical research. That's how science worked in the 1800s and before, when the only way to do science was to find a wealthy patron, or to be wealthy yourself. Not surprisingly, things moved slowly back then.
But wait, it gets worse. These NIH prizes will be decided by a small committee, in a setup that will be ripe for corruption. According to the new bill, the committee will have 9 members:
The NIH Director
4 members appointed by the NIH Director
One member appointed by the Speaker of the House
One member appointed by the majority leader of the Senate
One member appointed by the minority leader of the House
One member appointed by the minority leader of the Senate
This just gets worse and worse. There’s no way that 9 people, even if they’re all great scientists, can choose the best idea from among all areas of biomedical research. This is why NIH convenes hundreds of scientific review panels every year to do peer review: they need experts who understand the specifics of the research.
These 9 people will be responsible for giving away $80 million per year in prizes. In the scientific world, that's a huge program. Look at it this way: the Nobel committee gives out five prizes of $3 million each, or $15 million per year. If this passes the Senate, Congress will have created a prize that is 5 times larger than the Nobels, to be handed out by a yet-to-be-named committee of 9.
But this committee is fraught with problems: 5 out of 9 members will be political appointees, with no requirements that any of them have any scientific or medical training. And because the Director of NIH is a political appointee, one could argue that all 9 are political appointees. What's more, the appointments will last for 5 years, making them truly powerful committee members who will be unaccountable to the public or to anyone else.
One thing is certain: the prize committee members will be flooded with lobbying efforts to sway their choices. This sounds a lot like how Congress works; or rather, how the ugly underbelly of Congress operates.
But wait: there's more! The House bill says that these competitions are open to
“any person … without regard to the person’s place of incorporation, primary place of business, citizenship, and residency.”
In other words, NIH will give these prizes to foreign citizens–and companies! So apparently they will take some portion of NIH's budget, and instead of awarding it in grants to U.S. scientists, they will give prizes to companies in, say, Russia.
Don’t get me wrong: I think science should be supported in every country around the world. But each country has its own system, and the NIH is by far the most important source of funding for biomedical science in the U.S. We just can't afford to have NIH give out prizes to the entire world. Competition for grants is already fierce, with fewer than 20% of scientific proposals being funded today. Did I mention that this prize competition is a terrible idea?
Here's another little gem: the bill allows the NIH Director to outsource the administration of the prize competition to a private company, who can take 15% of the money for itself. Was a private contractor involved in writing this bill? I’m guessing some company is already making plans to siphon off precious research funds running these competitions–and I wouldn't be surprised if they had a hand in drafting the bill.
The 21st Century Cures Act has some great things in it, such as an extra $1.75 billion per year for NIH over the next 5 years. Many people, scientists and non-scientists alike, would like to see that happen. But Section 1002, Prize Competitions needs to be deleted when the Senate takes this up.
We could certainly do a better job allocating scarce funds to biomedical research in the U.S., but setting aside a large sum to be awarded by a politically-appointed Prize Committee at NIH is a staggeringly bad idea. Let’s stop this train before it leaves the station.
Would you pay the same tuition for a Harvard degree as for a second-rate school that you've never heard of? Probably not. But thanks to the federal government’s help, that’s exactly what we are all doing. It turns out that many of the biggest beneficiaries of federal loan programs for graduate schools are low quality, for-profit universities that have figured out how to turn federal largesse into nice fat profits.
A new study from the Center for American Progress finds that just 20 universities account for nearly one-fifth of all grad student debt, a total $6.6 billion. What’s perhaps most surprising is who those universities are: 10 of the 20 are for-profit schools, including two foreign schools.
The problem here is that these schools offer terrible value for the money. There’s little debate (except from the schools themselves) that these schools have very low standards for admission. The only requirement seems to be money, and if you don’t have it, they will help you borrow it (often from the federal government). The degrees themselves are barely worth the paper they are printed on, because the reputations of most of these schools are–well, let's just say they aren't good. Graduate degrees do improve your career choices, if you get them from a well-regarded institution. But when the school isn’t even ranked in the top 200, a degree isn’t going to open any doors, and it’s certainly not worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to get one.
The biggest borrower on the list is Walden University, whose grad students borrowed $756 million last year, according to the CAP report. Walden is owned by Laureate Education, a for-profit education company that hopes to go public next year. This seems to be a profitable enterprise, at least for its CEO. If you've never heard of Walden, join the club: it has no academic reputation to speak of. (Don't confuse Walden University with Walden College, the fictional school made famous in the Doonesbury comic strip. Garry Trudeau did poke fun at Walden U. once, in his August 2012 strip. In that strip, the president of Walden College laments that the graduation rate is so low that “it’s like we’re a for-profit school!”)
For-profit schools are taking advantage of a quirk in the law governing student loads. As Elizabeth Baylor at the Center for American Progress explains, the Higher Education Act allows graduate students to borrow much more than undergrads, up to $50,000 per year. Online, for-profit universities encourage students to borrow far more money by offering graduate degrees (what they call graduate degrees, anyway) rather than bachelor's degrees.
I've heard the argument from the other side: we’re offering education to people who aren’t served by mainstream universities, they say. Well, maybe that used to be true, but no more. Are you a student who just wants to learn a new skill? Today you can get high-quality education for free through Coursera or EdX, which offer courses taught by professors at the country's top universities, including my own. If you want a certificate of completion for a course, you can get it for as little as $50 at Coursera.
If, on the other other hand, you want a degree to burnish your resume, there are thousands of small (non-profit!) colleges in cities around the country that offer equal or better training, at lower cost, than for-profit universities.
Let me try another comparison. Let’s supposed you wanted to borrow $20,000 to buy a new Mercedes. That seems reasonable, since the car itself is collateral for the loan. Now suppose instead you wanted to borrow the same $20,000, but you’re going to use it to buy an old Yugo, one of the worst cars every made. Why should anyone lend you the money for that? Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing by subsidizing loans for mediocre universities.
Could it get any worse? Well yes, actually: the 7th-largest recipient of graduate student debt, at $352 million, is Liberty University, a school founded by the fundamentalist Christian televangelist Jerry Falwell. This school doesn’t just offer a mediocre education. Instead, they mis-educate by teaching students creationism instead of evolution. They even have a Center for Creation Science to “promote and communicate a robust young-Earth creationist view of Earth history.” This is misinformation masquerading as education.
It’s too bad that for-profit universities continue to draw in students with promises of a better future, only to leave them in debt. But we don’t have to subsidize their practices. Let’s stop offering loans for degrees at online-only and for-profit schools.
