According to the Carrer College Association, Mothers are an important market for the profitability of many educational insitutions as women account for approximately 65 percent of college students with more than half having dependent children.
However, recently, this same group of people have been targeted, “victimized” and insulted upon receiving notification of special college grants and scholarships that President Obama had created specifically for single mothers. As it turns out, women were receiving ads via email where they would see a picture of the President as well as a link which, when clicked on, took them into a new window where they were then asked to enter their age as well as other specific information related to the kind of college degree they sought. This same website then produced a list of schools that matched up with the email recipients choices.
Within a short period of time, recruiters from popular universities such as Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix would send out emails and phone calls. In one case, a woman by the name of Nicole Massey, started asking these colleges about the Obama loans as well as money for single moms, in which recruiters responded that they would contact her with more information regarding her question. The only problem was that they failed to contact her.
When ProPublica attempted to follow up on this apparent scam by following several lead generators linked to the Obama mom ads, all either declined to comment or did not return calls/e-mails. That’s when they took matters into their own hands. Using volunteers from the ProPublica Reporting Network to click on the links and fill out the online forms, ProPublica hoped to determine which schools were buying leads. Just as Massey had it happen to her, all of the volunteers received dozens of emails and phone calls within no time from the following schools:
- Walden University
- Golden Gate University
- Kaplan University
- Ashford University
- American InterContinental University
- Capella University
- Colorado Technical University
- University of Phoenix
- University of Southern California Rossier School of Education
Of the aforementioned colleges, only one was a non-profit university. When volunteers asked lead generators and college recruiters about the Obama grans or scholarships for moms, none of the recruiters claimed that these grants actually existed however, none disputed that they existed either.
(Via: ProPublica)
