Devi Rao, Fellow

Happy National Coming Out Day, everyone! In honor of this day, in which we celebrate coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) or as an ally, I wanted to take a minute to highlight our resources on existing federal protections for LGBT students. Plus, I’ll give shout-outs to a couple of important laws that the National Women’s Law Center is working hard to get passed, along with our allies at the Human Rights Campaign, GLSEN, the ACLU, and others.

Before I do that, though, take just a second to review a few of the latest stats showing the extent to which bullying and harassment of LGBT students in schools is a serious problem.

• More than 8 out of 10 LGBT students had experienced verbal harassment (being called names or threatened) in the past year because of their sexual orientation.
• LGBT youth are twice as likely as their non-LGBT peers to say that they have been verbally harassed and called names at school.
• Youth who are out at school are more likely than students who are not out to have been called names involving anti-gay slurs, and to experience verbal harassment at school “frequently.”

In some cases, this conduct is more than just “bullying,” it’s sex-based harassment that’s prohibited by Title IX.

Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee issued a searing indictment of for-profit colleges. The report, “For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success,” was the result of Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)’s two-year investigation into the growing for-profit higher education sector.

The report found that although for-profit colleges, in theory, have an important role to play in higher education and should be well-equipped to meet the needs of non-traditional students—such as older students and single parents—the reality is quite different.

For-profit education is a big money-making industry that puts profits ahead of student success. More widgets = more profit. Except for that the widgets in this case are students. So it’s no surprise that companies that the report examined spent $4.2 billion (with a capital “B”) on marketing and recruiting, equivalent to 22.7% of all revenue.

This incentive structure has led to aggressive, misleading, and deceptive recruiting practices that look a lot like a sales process. For example, training materials from some for-profits showed that recruiters were taught to locate and manipulate prospective students’ fears.

And it’s working! These schools sink incredible amounts of money on marketing and recruiting, and are reaping incredible profits. In 2009, publicly traded companies operating for-profit colleges had an average profit margin of nearly 20% (and paid their CEOs an average of $7.2 million).