Learning to Samba—at Government Expense

Just like today, the for-profit industry was rocked by journalistic exposés and scandals. In 1948, Collier’s magazine ran an investigative report that found the VA was paying “for the training of ballroom dancers, bartenders, amateur photographers, amateur piccolo players, horseback riders and chicken sexers.” It concluded, the nation “has squandered at least half a billion dollars supporting what in many instances is the greatest boondoggle of all time: the questionable Veterans’ Education programs.”¹

A sample scam: For-profit schools sprang up to provide dance lessons for tens of thousands of GIs and got the government to pay for the lessons by pretending the schools were training the veterans to be “dance instructors.” Congressman Homer Ramey, a Republican from Ohio, complained that “so many veterans have been induced, often by high-pressure methods, to squander their educational benefits on such instruction that if all of them actually were to become [dance] teachers there would be enough to make the entire population of the United States completely familiar with both the rumba and the samba within a year.”²

By 1950, the VA itself had issued a biting report on for-profit abuses of the GI Bill. In a Special Message to Congress transmitting the report, President Truman warned that in “many instances, veterans have been trained for occupations in which they will be unable to find jobs when they finish their training…. Each time a course of trade and vocational training does not contribute in a substantial way to the occupational adjustment of a veteran, it constitutes a failure.”

Later that year, Congress passed a joint resolution establishing a House select committee to investigate education and training programs under the GI Bill. For 13 months, the committee conducted the first of many deep-dive congressional investigations of for-profit schools. Its 1952 report found that “exploitation by private schools has been widespread.” There was “no doubt,” the committee concluded, “that hundreds of millions of dollars have been frittered away on worthless training.” A committee-commissioned GAO examination of 641 for-profit trade schools determined that newer proprietary schools were engaged in “extensive advertising campaigns, which were often misleading and laden with extravagant, unjustifiable claims.” Just 20 percent of the 1.67 million veterans who attended for-profit schools on the GI Bill completed their courses, according to the GAO.