The Arnolds likely know little about the role that career colleges play, including educating first-generation, veteran, fulltime employed, and minority students in much higher proportions than traditional four-year universities.
Yet Arnold Ventures is the largest single funder working to shut down career colleges. Since 2017 Arnold Ventures have provided 91 grants, totaling $46.6 million, to organizations and projects focused on advocating for policies governing career colleges. Tellingly, the first grants to identify reforms that address the unfair practices of for-profit colleges were to Harvard University – not exactly an expert of the working-class middle America students that attend career colleges. Shortly afterwards Arnold Ventures dedicated more funds to the Century Foundation and acted as the dominant contributor to Veterans’ Education Success, which is run by several liberal Capitol Hill staff members and was founded – likely not coincidently! – by Carrie Wofford, a law school classmate of Laura Arnold.
Moreover two organizations – the Project on Predatory Student Lending (PPSL) and the National Student Legal Defense Network (NSLDN) – have also received significant support from Arnold Ventures. NSLDN was a new organization staffed mainly with former Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lawyers from the Obama administration. Both groups litigated and sued the Trump administration to block action on any reforms and now they are leading efforts to eliminate the rights of students to choose a career college. In five years, NSLDN received five grants from Arnold Ventures totaling $7.7 million. One estimate put the grant total at 90% of the group’s operating budget. The $8.5 million that PPSL has received is a similar portion of its operating budget.
As Phil Hill, the publisher of the On EdTech blog has written, “In the education space… something seemed to have happened around 2017 that led Arnold Ventures to dramatically ramp up their grant-making starting in 2018, and to aggressively fund other think tanks and foundations” –likely, to target career colleges
Now the Arnolds have turned to a new front in their attack on nontraditional students: Online Program Managers (OPMs). OPMs are private companies that provide the technical expertise for many traditional colleges and universities to provide online classes, which expands access to nontraditional students who otherwise may not have the time or money to attend four years of fulltime classes.
In 2020 and 2022 Arnold Ventures breathlessly called OPMs “obscured from public view” and a “for-profit pocket” that “slipped by regulators.” Their advocacy supported other OPM cynics like the Century Foundation (see above) which preceded calls for more regulation. Predictably, their progressive friends in the Biden Administration heeded the Arnold call with a February 2023 rule that has since been ridiculed and withdrawn, but will likely rise again.
The Arnolds appear to have little regard for the nontraditional students that attend these schools, ostensibly preferring to route them into state-run community colleges, or traditional private universities even if career colleges are the better fit for the student.