Bill Clinton Profits from World’s Largest For-Profit University

As accusations swirl around Donald Trump for the complaints filed against Trump University, few people know about how Bill Clinton was hired in 2010 to be Chancellor for the Laureate Network, the world’s largest for-profit university network. Not just Bill Clinton but other Clinton friends from the past were hired to promote the university. Investors in the vast multinational university include Henry Kravis, George Soros, Steve Cohen and Paul Allen. One of the investors in Laureate University, SAC Capital Advisors LP, is a hedge fund that had to pay a $1.2 billion dollar settlement to the US Dept. of Justice to settle allegations of insider trading.

Bill Clinton has personally been paid to make appearances promoting Laureate University in countries such as Malaysia, Peru and Spain. By January 2014 Laureate University had 800,000 students worldwide and its annual revenue was $4 billion, far larger than the revenues of Trump University. Laureate has taken over struggling colleges by using high-pressure marketing tactics such as “turbocharging enrollment” using students as telemarketers. Laureate University was investigated by the Rio State Legislature’s Investigative Commission on Private Universities in Brazil. Robson Leite, a Rio state legislator who led the probe concluded: “They have turned education into a commodity that focuses more on profit than knowledge” Pictures of Bill Clinton line a walkway at Laureate’s Bilgi University in Istanbul. His photos can also be seen outside the rector’s office, along with pictures of Douglas Becker, the founder of Laureate, and Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Neither Laureate nor Bill Clinton will disclose how much money Clinton has been paid to promote the for-profit international university setup, which features both classroom and online instruction. (Update from Richard Henry Lee. According to the tax returns released by Hillary Clinton, the couple had $16.5 million in income from Laureate University.) One student named Larissa Da Silva complains that when she enrolled in IBMR, a Brazilian branch of Laureate, the admissions officer promised her a 30 percent discount on tuition. Two years later the deal evaporated and her monthly tuition cost jumped to 791 reais. She summarized the change of policy by stating “I feel completely deceived.” Apparently the fine print states that grants and tuition discounts may be temporary, so it’s her fault for not lawyering up before she enrolled in the Clinton-promoted college. Laureate has a habit of allowing students with low admissions test scores to enroll. One named Phillipe Linhares, age 24, stated that he was surprised when IBMR in Rio accepted him as a student. “I knew I had done horribly on the test,” he recalled, “But the salespeople called me three times saying I’d done great and asking when I would come down to enroll.” Laureate International Universities, unlike Trump University, is still in existence and going strong. And while news media have attacked Trump for his association with Trump University, somehow the connection between Bill Clinton and Laureate University has been ignored. No stories exist online since 2014. Recently a judge released sealed documents on Trump University, but no one knows where the documents are that show how much money Bill Clinton was paid for his promotion of Laureate, or what other financial connections there may be to the Clinton Foundation. And while the Trump University playbook has been a topic of controversy, no one seems interested in the high pressure sales tactics used by Laureate, the world’s largest for-profit university group. What voters may soon realize is that every time the media attack Donald Trump for something, it turns out that the Clintons were involved first, to a far greater extent. This also proves what Trump has been saying; that the media are very dishonest and focus only on him.