Ed. The debate here about WGU hinges on money.
I suspect the major source of money is public funds .. Pell, military, unemployment. This funding source presents a problem if the way we award this money to students is need based but assumes that the university will not just carry their students as income providers.
from Huffington Post WASHINGTON — Pell Grants are the nation’s largest financial aid program, providing low-income students with grants to help pay for the rising cost of attending college. But the cost of the program is also growing rapidly, set to exceed $40 billion for the 2012 fiscal year.
Some lawmakers have advocated lowering the maximum grant size, which is currently $5,550. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Education and is looking to reduce the costs of the program. In a radio interview on Friday, he compared Pell Grants to “welfare” and decried the fact that students who receive them don’t have any sort of graduation requirement and could go straight from the education grant to “food stamps.”
“So you can go to college on Pell Grants — maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it’s turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century,” said Rehberg in an interview with Blog Talk Radio. “You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college. And there ought to be some kind of commitment and endgame.”
Rehberg added under the federal program, a student could “go to school for nine years on Pell Grants and you don’t even have to get a degree.”