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Sandu U Is Not for Me (Or You)!
Currently the for-profit private college represents the most financial invasive, damaging, and destructive Ponzi scheme around. This is one of the many reasons we are deeply troubled by Mike Sandhu’s intellectually dishonest “college campus” that simply a bait and switch scheme to build millions of square feet of warehousing on prime agricultural land without normally city services and will clog local Tracy streets and the highway with thousands of trucks.
The so-called college Sandhu intends to locate near Tracy is a college in name only. We pointed out it isn’t really college
click here.
Basically, its classes are exclusively limited to promoting the language and culture of a subregion of India and no classes are offered to teach college level skills needed to prepare a student for the technology focused 21st Century economy. The fact the founder and president dropped out of college supplies a rich and ironic illustration of what is going on.
The University of Silicon Andhra in Milpitas, CA.
What is going on? For profit colleges encourage lower- and middle-income student to take out large student loans to pay for the college tuition. In the
case of a for profit college like Sandhu U, tuition is just another word for profits. They take the tuition money from the student loan and the student is saddled with a huge debt. The for-profit college promoters don’t care if any students graduate or get family wage jobs. They just care about getting the profitable tuition money.
Once colleges like Sandhu U get the tuition money funded by the student’s loan they don’t care if the student gets an education and a high paying job that can pay back the debt. The statistics prove this point. According to a Temple University study almost 40 percent of full-time undergraduates who enrolled in the 2011-12 academic year accumulated debt but did not have a degree in six years. Being saddle with student loan debt but without a college degree has serious consequences: according to the US Department of Education over 4.65 million young people are in default of student loans. This number represents over 1/3 of all the current student loans. And these loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. The borrower’s credit rating is ruined and their hope for a better future dashed.
Offsetting this human misery is the increased wealth of the promoters of for-profit colleges, like Mr. Sandhu.
So, we perceive Sandhu’s plan as bad public policy for lots of reasons. We don’t need millions more feet of warehousing that creates low paying jobs and massive amounts of truck traffic and parking issues. We don’t need to convert more prime agricultural land. We don’t need a huge industrial park unconnected to city services.
And we certainly don’t need a faux college in name only designed to saddle innocent young people with substantial debt, no college degree or family wage job and dashed hopes of a promising future.
We hope leaders like Supervisor Bob Rickman continues to ask the hard questions and keep the developer’s feet to the fire. And we hope mislead politicians like Assembly member Carlos Villapudua will take a second and hard look at this Trojan horse development scam.