Corinthian Bought Many Good Friends

While Corinthian Colleges appear to finally be out of the Create Huge Student Debt in Exchange for No Marketable Skill business, the autopsy on this wreck of a for-profit edupreneurial ship is not yet complete. And yet, the post-mortem is already showing more signs of the advanced disease which not only afflicted Corinthian, but apparently infected some influential friends as well.

 Lee Fang, at Unofficial Sources, scored a look at Corinthian's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing forms, and they are illuminating. Corinthian was apparently spreading plenty of money around in the form of  "secret payments to an array of political consultants, think tanks and political dark money groups."

Corinthian gave money to Crossroads G.P.S., a Karl Rove group which helps elect candidates with money from undisclosed donors. Corinthians creditors include a full range of consulting firms from a former Obama election staffer to a veteran of the Reagan administration. And while they registered some of the lobbyists they hired, it appears that there were some undeclared lobbyists in their pay as well.

Two high profile groups now linked to Corinthian include ALEC, everyone's favorite corporate-legislation match-making group, and the American Enterprise Institute. Both of those groups used up plenty of ink and bandwidth arguing that for-profit colleges should not have to prove that their graduates actually landed jobs.

Last October, Andrew Kelly, AEI’s resident scholar on higher education reform, specifically defended Corinthian and criticized the “Obama administration’s bloodlust for such schools.”

There are also payments made to members of the Corinthian board.

It's particularly swell to consider that since Corinthian depended almost exclusively on government-backed student loans to survive, they were paying to maintain powerful friendships mostly with our tax dollars.  Click on over and read the full report.