Good God

The Bush administration's and right wing's War on Knowledge and Education has become much broader than its early and ridiculous War on Science. It has now expanded to include a War on Higher Education. Via the New York Times comes news of this diversion of funds to "entrepreneurial" diploma mills:

It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.

That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.

For those of you following at home, that is the same budget bill that cut student loan aid for college. Check out the full story and see how campaign donations from online "colleges" laid the groundwork for this change.