Monroe College is a higher-education success story. Believe it or not, progressives want to shut it down.
Founded in 1933, it focuses on practical learning: There are no seminars on intersectionality or cultural appropriation, no rock-climbing walls, organic vegetable gardens or ethnic theme houses. In other respects, Monroe is similar to other small colleges. It has dining halls, libraries, student clubs and a Title IX coordinator. “I have 850 athletes, 1,000 people in dormitories, 1,000 foreign students,” says Marc Jerome, Monroe’s president and something of a force of nature, on a recent visit to the Journal’s offices. “We look and feel like a traditional college—an urban college.” Its main campus in the Bronx, on New York City’s northern rim, and it has sites in nearby New Rochelle and the Caribbean nation of Saint Lucia.
Monroe provides training in fields like information technology, nursing and culinary arts, and its student outcomes are exemplary. A Monroe student is 10 times as likely to graduate on time as one who enrolls at a nearby community college, and the college’s 3.9% student-loan default rate is among the lowest in the state. It also ranks among the top three colleges in New York for graduating Latino and black students.
Yet Monroe is controversial because it is organized under the tax code as a for-profit entity. For the past decade Mr. Jerome has battled liberal officials, in the administrations of both President Obama and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who insist that “predatory for-profits” are harming low-income students.
The “language alone causes harm,” Mr. Jerome laments; it “makes it like a culture war issue.” He’s especially stung by “the use of the word ‘predatory’ to describe every proprietary institution,” which he says “is just wrong and immediately stifles thoughtful discussion.”
Animus toward for-profit education, Mr. Jerome insists, is hurting the young people whose interests progressives claim to have at heart: “They’re not helping students. They are only political, and they seem to have only one agenda—to close every single for-profit institution.”
Mr. Jerome, 52, talks a mile a minute. A track star at Tufts University, he’s still full of physical energy. In an aside, he notes that he can hold a plank position for five minutes, whereas most people would tire in 30 seconds. It’s an apt metaphor for his ability to endure hostile government officials.
The college is a family business that spans three generations. Mr. Jerome’s paternal grandfather, Harry, helped found Monroe School of Business during the Great Depression. Named after President James Monroe, the school initially enrolled seven students and tuition was $10 a week. Demand exploded in later decades thanks to the GI Bill and the expansion of federal student aid during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In 1978 Mr. Jerome’s father, Stephen, took over as president, and its programs have since expanded to include IT, criminal justice and early education. Enrollment is about 9,000.
Kavita Nauth was 12 when her family moved to New York City from Belize. She earned good grades in high school, but her family had limited means to pay for college. On a Monroe scholarship, she earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice while working part-time as a tutor. After graduation, she went to work as a receptionist at the accounting firm BDO USA and later returned to Monroe for a master’s in criminal justice. Over seven years she has advanced into management and investigative work. “I was intrigued by this new world and learned to delve into the mind of a criminal to understand why people do what they do,” says Ms. Nauth, 32.
In 2009 the college opened a culinary school, which CollegeRank lists among the top 20 nationwide. At an on-campus restaurant called the Dining Lab, students train as butchers, bakers and sous chefs under faculty supervision and offer the public a $25 prix fixe dinner—a bargain at New York prices. Monroe culinary arts graduate Kimani Hines, who moved to New York from Jamaica at 17, trained at Monroe under award-winning chef Dean Costantino and did an overseas “externship.” “One of the most memorable experiences I had was eating and working my way across Italy,” he says. In 2014 he was hired by Alvin & Friends, a upscale Caribbean restaurant in New Rochelle.
Monroe hasn’t always encountered hostility from Democrats. In 2013 then-Rep. George Miller of California and three New York colleagues were impressed enough with its student outcomes to nominate Mr. Jerome to an advisory committee on the Education Department’s gainful-employment rule. That rule, adopted in 2011, was supposed to ensure that schools “provide their students with an education adequate enough for them to pay their college loans back.”
But the Obama administration applied the rule strictly only to for-profit institutions, which enroll less than 10% of all students. After a federal court struck down the first version of the rule, Obama officials rewrote it in 2014 to make it more punitive. In effect, it cut off federal student aid to for-profits whose student borrowers’ annual debt payments exceeded 8% of their total earnings. Some 1,400 for-profit programs educating more than 800,000 students would have failed the rule had the Trump administration not stopped enforcing it last year.
Yet according to Mr. Jerome’s calculations—based on the Obama administration’s College Scorecard data—other types of institutions also do poorly. He found that 12% of public colleges and 36% of private nonprofits wouldn’t pass. Nearly all historically black colleges would fail.
‘I put out the first research that showed most publics and privates would also fail,” Mr. Jerome says. “My daughter goes to Hamilton,” a nonprofit liberal-arts school in upstate New York. “She got her first job making minimum wage at some great PR company.” Her debt-to-earnings ratio would have exceeded the Obama gainful-employment standard. “There are plenty of people who graduate SUNY, CUNY, NYU”—the public State University and City University of New York, and the private New York University—“who in their first couple of years [after graduation] become baristas.”
The gainful-employment rule was the brainchild of Robert Shireman, a stalwart foe of for-profit learning who as deputy undersecretary of education helped to nationalize student lending. Mr. Shireman left the Obama administration in July 2010 after being caught sharing information with a short-seller betting against for-profit college stocks. But he has continued to drive his antiprofit agenda from his perch at the Century Foundation, where he is urging lawmakers in Democratic states to finish the job he started.
In New York Gov. Cuomo is trying to jam a provision into the state budget to require that for-profits spend at least 50% of their budget on academic instruction and generate no more than 80% of revenue from the government. The problem with the spending limit, Mr. Jerome says, is that in the bill’s language, academic spending “is defined—solely—as the salaries and benefits for instructional staff.” Spending on tutoring, counseling and career services wouldn’t count. More than 90% of all colleges in New York would fail this rule if it applied to public and nonprofit institutions—but it doesn’t.
As for the limit on government funding, the bill is written in such a way that colleges like Monroe would get punished for providing scholarships. “Three years ago, I started a program—because I knew, with Bernie Sanders, where the world was going,” Mr. Jerome says. “I’m offering free tuition to low-income students—no payment, no student loan. And I opened it up to a cohort of undocumented students.” But the legislation would exclude “institutional aid” from “the calculation of annual revenues,” which would make the government share of funding larger.
Mr. Jerome phoned Mr. Shireman after learning he was driving the Cuomo bill behind the scenes. “I said: Robert, you’re telling me that you’re going to argue that an African American or Latino, poor student at Monroe College should not have access to public funds . . . just because you hate a for-profit college so much? And he was like—well, he didn’t quite answer me.”
Mr. Cuomo’s legislation, Mr. Jerome says, would put most good for-profits out of business. Their students would wind up unemployed or at community colleges with lower graduation rates. “I must see 1,000 community-college dropouts every year, and a lot of them can’t attend because they owe money,” Mr. Jerome says. “Cuomo is actually proposing something that’s regressive and antiprogressive.”
Mr. Jerome says liberal thinking on education is often based on nothing more than prejudice: “I’ll go into a Democrat’s office, and here’s what they think: ‘Community colleges and publics should have no regulation, because they’re just good. And they don’t have enough money. They just need more money. And you guys, you’re rich, you have too much money, and you’re just bad.’ ”
“That level of discourse doesn’t serve anyone,” he adds—and New York exemplifies “everything that’s wrong with the knee-jerk Democratic higher-education agenda right now. And I’m trying to change it.”
Mr. Jerome has organized a grass-roots campaign—not unlike the one liberals waged against Mr. Cuomo’s Amazon subsidy deal—to persuade Albany Democrats to stand down. He’s enlisted more than a dozen high-school principals who’ve written letters to the New York City schools chancellor and state lawmakers expressing worries about the Cuomo legislation.
One Bronx principal tells of a student “who worked hard and was finishing near the top of her class, but she was not hopeful about her future prospects given her undocumented status. When she was accepted into Monroe and into the [scholarship program], a huge burden was lifted off her shoulders.” Another notes that “the lack of social emotional supports are an institutional challenge in the [community college] system which directly affects the success level of my graduates” and warns of “the potential disaster if all for-profit colleges are closed.”
Mr. Jerome doesn’t mind being regulated, but he wants the rules applied uniformly—and he notes that many nonprofits and public colleges operate like big businesses. Southern University of New Hampshire, a private school in Manchester, spends more than $100 million a year on advertising. CUNY, a public institution, last year paid economist Paul Krugman, a fierce critic of income inequality, $245,000 to teach.
“The challenges of student debt, earnings and completion rates can be found across all of higher education,” Mr. Jerome says, but “for-profit colleges have become the convenient scapegoat.”
Ms. Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.