‘The US secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, continues to refuse debt forgiveness for thousands of students ripped off by predatory for-profit colleges.’ Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/Associated Press

For a clear picture of how damaged the US postsecondary education system is, one need only look at the money-printing mill that is the for-profit college. I should know: I spent 10 years “teaching” at one of the most notorious cash-grab colleges in the country. There, I saw profoundly underprepared students racking up far more debt than their “traditional” peers – debt they would default on at more than twice the rate of those peers, landing the costs of these wayward scholars directly on the shoulders of taxpayers.

This week, the US Department of Education accidentally showed just how badly the problem of for-profit college debt is intertwined with predatory loan collection: in a court filing, the Department of Education jacked up its estimate of its own illegal debt collection from 16,000 former students at bankrupt Corinthian College to nearly three times that amount. All while the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, who was held in contempt of court for the department’s actions, continued to refuse debt forgiveness for thousands of students ripped off by for-profit colleges.

From 1995 to 2015, enrollment at for-profit colleges went up more than 460% – more than 14 times that of traditional institutions. Meanwhile, students at for-profit colleges – mostly low-income, minority or first-generation college students – face challenges that severely compromise their ability to stay in school: my students suffered from homelessness, mental illness, abuse and bank accounts so low they couldn’t afford subway passes.

Those challenges didn’t matter to recruiters: skipped the SAT or ACT? No problem! As long as you had a pulse and a GED you were in. Once those students got to class we professors – whose yearly fire-at-will contracts made us particularly vulnerable to any kind of student complaint – were told to “work it out”....

....“As soon as people hear about this obscure pact undermining the public interest and the fight against climate change, they will be outraged. Either the EU and member states fundamentally revise it, or pull out,” he said.

Friends of the Earth Europe is one of 260 civil society organisations and trade unions that have warned the ECT is incompatible with climate action because it contains measures to protect energy investments even where they contradict climate goals.

The environmental groups say the treaty is being used by large fossil fuel companies to to take national governments to court over decisions to phase out dirty energy....

....After the war, worker unions gained strength, bringing back socialist sympathies as the country entered a more industrial and international era. This is when Finnish history took an unexpected turn.

Finnish employers had become painfully aware of the threats socialism continued to pose to capitalism. They also found themselves under increasing pressure from politicians representing the needs of workers. Wanting to avoid further conflicts, and to protect their private property and new industries, Finnish capitalists changed tactics. Instead of exploiting workers and trying to keep them down, after World War II, Finland’s capitalists cooperated with government to map out long-term strategies and discussed these plans with unions to get workers onboard.

More astonishingly, Finnish capitalists also realized that it would be in their own long-term interests to accept steep progressive tax hikes. The taxes would help pay for new government programs to keep workers healthy and productive — and this would build a more beneficial labor market. These programs became the universal taxpayer-funded services of Finland today, including public health care, public day care and education, paid parental leaves, unemployment insurance and the like.

If these moves by Finnish capitalists sound hard to imagine, it’s because people in the United States have been peddled a myth that universal government programs like these can’t coexist with profitable private-sector businesses and robust economic growth. As if to reinforce the impossibility of such synergies, last fall the Trump administration released a peculiar report arguing that “socialism” had negatively affected Nordic living standards.

However, a 2006 study by the Finnish researchers Markus Jantti, Juho Saari and Juhana Vartiainen demonstrates the opposite. First, throughout the 20th century Finland remained — and remains to this day — a country and an economy committed to markets, private businesses and capitalism.

Even more intriguing, these scholars demonstrate that Finland’s capitalist growth and dynamism have been helped, not hurt, by the nation’s commitment to providing generous and universal public services that support basic human well-being. These services have buffered and absorbed the risks and dislocations caused by capitalist innovation....

Finland will have the world’s youngest serving prime minister later this week when Sanna Marin, 34, is sworn in by parliament at the head of a coalition whose four other parties are all led by women, three of them in their thirties....

Finland’s government is now led by these five party leaders. #newgeneration pic.twitter.com/vis0qB9tO8

— Tuomas Niskakangas (@TNiskakangas) December 8, 2019