Blue Falcons: Politicians, Government Agencies, and Nonprofits Serve Themselves, Not Those Who Have Served

“Blue Falcon”—military slang for a “Buddy F****r”—refers to someone who betrays their comrades to get ahead. It’s a fitting label for disgraced U.S. Congressman Duncan Hunter, a Marine Corps veteran convicted of misusing campaign funds while cloaking himself in patriotic rhetoric. But Hunter isn’t alone. He’s emblematic of a broader betrayal—one that involves politicians, bureaucrats, predatory schools, and veteran-serving nonprofits. Together, they form an ecosystem where self-interest thrives, and veterans are left behind.

Despite endless platitudes about “supporting our troops,” the systems designed to serve veterans—especially in education—are failing. Two of the most generous and ambitious benefits ever created for veterans, the Post-9/11 GI Bill (PGIB) and Department of Defense Tuition Assistance (TA), are now riddled with waste, abuse, and profiteering. The real beneficiaries aren’t veterans, but an extensive network of for-profit colleges, lobbying firms, and institutions that exploit them.

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The GI Bill and DOD Tuition Assistance: A Pipeline for Predators

The Post-9/11 GI Bill was supposed to be a transformative benefit—a way to reward veterans with the chance to reintegrate, retrain, and succeed in the civilian world. At more than $13 billion annually, it is the single most generous higher education grant program in the country. According to a report highlighted by Derek Newton in Forbes, the GI Bill now costs more than all state scholarships and grants combined and represents half of all Pell Grant spending.

And yet, it isn’t working.

A groundbreaking study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)—conducted by researchers from Texas A&M, the University of Michigan, Dartmouth, William & Mary, and even the U.S. Department of the Treasury—delivers a scathing indictment of the program’s effectiveness. According to the report, veterans who used PGIB benefits actually earned less nine years after separating from the military than peers who didn’t attend college at all. The researchers found:

“The PGIB reduced average annual earnings nine years after separation from the Army by $900 (on a base of $32,000). Under a variety of conservative assumptions, veterans are unlikely to recoup these reduced earnings during their working careers.”

The reason? Too many veterans are enrolling in heavily marketed, low-value schools—institutions that offer little return and often leave students without degrees or meaningful credentials. Veterans from lower-skilled military occupations and those with lower test scores were particularly likely to fall into this trap. These “less advantaged” veterans not only saw worse labor market outcomes but were more likely to spend their GI Bill benefits at for-profit schools with dismal outcomes.

Even worse, the report estimated that the cost to taxpayers for every additional marginal bachelor’s degree produced by PGIB is between $486,000 and $590,000. That’s beyond inefficient—it’s exploitative.

In the Forbes article we put it bluntly:

“This is sad to say, that the GI Bill does not work for many servicemembers, veterans and their families. What's even sadder is that if you drill into the data, to the institutional and program level, it will likely be worse. There are many programs, for-profit and non-profit, that do not work out for servicemembers, veterans, and their families.”

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Tuition Assistance and the DOD’s Open Wallet

The Department of Defense’s Tuition Assistance program also faces exploitation. With few controls, it serves as an open faucet for bad actors who aggressively recruit active-duty service members through deceptive advertising, partnerships with base education offices, and endorsements from shady nonprofits. Just as with the GI Bill, predatory institutions see DOD TA not as an education resource, but as a predictable stream of federal cash.

Military leadership has done little to intervene. The same institutions flagged for fraud and poor outcomes continue to operate freely, bolstered by industry lobbyists and revolving-door influence in Washington.

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Nonprofits and Politicians: Wolves in Patriotic Clothing

The betrayal doesn’t stop with colleges. Many large veteran-serving nonprofits and “military-friendly” initiatives exist more for image than impact. Instead of helping veterans, they prop up harmful systems and launder legitimacy for the very institutions exploiting the military community.

Meanwhile, Congress talks a big game but routinely fails to act. Lawmakers from both parties show up for ribbon cuttings and Veterans Day speeches, but many take campaign donations from subprime colleges and education conglomerates that prey on veterans. They refuse to close known loopholes—like the infamous 90/10 rule—that incentivize for-profit schools to chase GI Bill funds with deceptive tactics.

And all the while, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—underfunded, overburdened, and politically manipulated—struggles to provide the basic services veterans were promised.

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A Sad Reality, and a Call to Action

It’s a bitter irony that programs designed to lift up veterans often lead them into deeper debt, poorer job prospects, and wasted years. The data from NBER, the findings from watchdogs like Derek Newton, and the lived experience of thousands of veterans all point to one conclusion: the Post-9/11 GI Bill, as currently administered, is failing. And so is the broader system around it.

Veterans deserve better. They deserve:

• Strict oversight of predatory colleges and training programs

• Transparency in outcomes for veteran-serving nonprofits

• Accountability from lawmakers and government agencies

• Equitable investment in public and community college options

• A fundamental shift from patriotic lip service to real systemic reform

Until then, the Blue Falcons will continue to circle—posing as allies while feasting on the very benefits veterans fought to earn.

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The Higher Education Inquirer will continue exposing the policies, institutions, and individuals who exploit veterans under the guise of service. If you have insider information or want to share your story, contact us confidentially at gmcghee@aya.yale.edu.

National Day of Mourning: Higher Education’s Long Reckoning With Indigenous Oppression

[Editor's note: United American Indians of New England host the National Day of Mourning. Their website is at United American Indians of New England - UAINE.]

Each November, while much of the United States celebrates Thanksgiving, Indigenous communities and their allies gather in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and across the country for the National Day of Mourning. It is a day that confronts the mythology of national innocence and replaces it with historical clarity. For Higher Education Inquirer, the significance of this day extends directly into the heart of American higher education—a system built, in no small part, on the expropriation of Indigenous land, the exploitation of Native Peoples, and the continued structural racism that shapes their educational opportunities today.

From the earliest colonial colleges to the flagship research institutions of the twenty-first century, U.S. higher education has never been separate from the project of settler colonialism. It has been one of its instruments.

Land, Wealth, and the Origins of the University

America’s oldest colleges—Harvard, Yale, William & Mary, Dartmouth—were founded within the colonial order that dispossessed Indigenous communities. While missionary language framed some of these institutions’ early purposes, they operated through an extractive logic: the seizure of land, the conversion of cultural worlds, and, eventually, the accumulation of immense academic wealth.

The Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 expanded this pattern on a national scale. Recent research documented by the “Land-Grab Universities” project shows that nearly eleven million acres of Indigenous land—taken through coercive treaties, forced removal, or outright theft—were funneled into endowments for public universities. Students today walk across campuses financed by displacements their own institutions have yet to fully acknowledge, let alone remedy.

Higher Education as an Arm of Assimilation

The United States also used education as a tool for forced assimilation. The Indian boarding school system, with the Carlisle Industrial School as its model, operated in partnership with federal officials, church agencies, and academic institutions. Native children were taken from their families, stripped of their languages, and subjected to relentless cultural destruction.

Universities contributed research, training, and personnel to this system, embedding the logic of “civilizing” Indigenous Peoples into the academy’s structure. That legacy endures in curricula that minimize Indigenous knowledge systems and in institutional cultures that prize Eurocentric epistemologies as default.

Scientific Racism, Anthropology, and the Theft of Ancestors

American universities played a central role in producing scientific racism. Anthropologists and medical researchers collected Indigenous remains, objects, and sacred items without consent. Museums and university labs became repositories for thousands of ancestors—often obtained through grave robberies, military campaigns, or opportunistic scholarship.

The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was designed to force institutions to return ancestors and cultural patrimony. Yet decades later, many universities are still out of compliance, delaying repatriation while continuing to benefit from the research collections they amassed through violence.

Contemporary Structural Racism in Higher Education

The oppression is not confined to history. Structural racism continues to constrain Native Peoples in higher education today.

Native students remain among the most underrepresented and under-supported groups on American campuses. Chronic underfunding of Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) reflects a broader political disregard for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Meanwhile, elite institutions recruit Native students for marketing purposes while failing to invest in retention, community support, or Indigenous faculty hiring.

Some universities have begun implementing land acknowledgments, but these symbolic gestures have little impact when institutions refuse to confront their material obligations: returning land, committing long-term funding to Indigenous programs, or restructuring governance to include tribal representatives.

What a Real Reckoning Would Require

A genuine response to the National Day of Mourning would require far more than statements of solidarity. It would involve confronting the ways American higher education continues to profit from dispossession and the ways Native students continue to bear disproportionate burdens—from tuition to cultural isolation to the racist violence that still occurs on and around campuses.

Real accountability would include:

• Full compliance with NAGPRA and expedited repatriation.
• Transparent reporting of land-grant wealth and the return or shared governance of those lands.
• Stable, meaningful funding for TCUs.
• Hiring, tenure, and research policies that center Indigenous scholarship and sovereignty.
• Long-term institutional commitments—financial, curricular, and political—to Indigenous communities.

These steps require institutions to shift from performative recognition to structural transformation.

A Day of Mourning—And a Call to Action

The National Day of Mourning is not merely a counter-holiday. It is a reminder that the United States was founded on violence against Native Peoples—and that its colleges and universities were not passive beneficiaries but active participants in that violence.

For higher education leaders, faculty, and students, the question is no longer whether these histories are real or whether they matter. They are documented. They are ongoing. They matter profoundly.

The real question is what institutions are willing to give up—land, power, wealth, or narrative control—to support Indigenous liberation.

On this National Day of Mourning, HEI honors the truth that Indigenous survival is an act of resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty is not a symbolic aspiration but an overdue demand. The future of higher education must move through that truth, not around it.

Sources
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
The Land-Grab Universities Project (High Country News & Land-Grab Universities database).
David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.
Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World.
NAGPRA regulations and compliance reports.

University of Phoenix, Oracle, and the Russian Cybercrime Crisis That Should Never Have Been Allowed to Happen

The University of Phoenix breach is more than another entry in the long list of attacks on higher education. It is the clearest evidence yet of how private equity, aging enterprise software, and institutional neglect have converged to create a catastrophic cybersecurity landscape across American colleges and universities. What happened in the summer of 2025 was not an unavoidable act of foreign aggression. It was the culmination of years of cost-cutting, inadequate oversight, and a misplaced faith in legacy vendors that no longer control their own risks.

The story begins with the Russian-speaking Clop cyber-extortion group, one of the most sophisticated data-theft organizations operating today. In early August, Clop quietly began exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Business Suite, a platform widely used for payroll, procurement, student employment, vendor relations, and financial aid administration. Oracle’s EBS system, decades old and deeply embedded across higher education, was never designed for modern threat environments. As soon as Clop identified the flaw—later assigned CVE-2025-61882—the group launched a coordinated campaign that compromised dozens of major institutions before Oracle even acknowledged the problem.

Among the most heavily affected institutions was the University of Phoenix. Attackers gained access to administrative systems and exfiltrated highly sensitive data: names, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, routing numbers, vendor records, and financial-aid related information belonging to students, faculty, staff, and contractors. The breach took place in August, but Phoenix did not disclose the incident until November 21, and only after Clop publicly listed the university on its extortion site. Even after forced disclosure, Phoenix offered only vague assurances about “unauthorized access” and refused to provide concrete numbers or a full accounting of what had been stolen.

Phoenix was not alone. Harvard University confirmed that Clop had stolen more than a terabyte of data from its Oracle systems. Dartmouth College acknowledged that personal and financial information for more than a thousand individuals had been accessed, though the total is almost certainly much higher. At the University of Pennsylvania, administrators said only that unauthorized access had occurred, declining to detail the scale. What links these incidents is not prestige, geography, or mission. It is dependency on Oracle’s aging administrative software and a sector-wide failure to adapt to a threat environment dominated by globally coordinated cybercrime operations.

But Phoenix stands apart from its peers because Phoenix, Apollo Global Management, and The Vistria Group should have known better. This institution has long operated at a scale more comparable to a financial-services company than a school. It handles vast volumes of sensitive data connected to federal student aid, identity verification, private loans, tuition reimbursement programs, and employer partnerships. A university with this profile should have been treating cybersecurity as a core institutional function, not an afterthought.

Apollo Global Management, which owned Phoenix during a period of enrollment decline and regulatory exposure, was fully aware of the vulnerabilities associated with online enrollment, financial-aid processing, and aging ERP infrastructure. Apollo’s business model is built on risk analysis and mitigation, yet it consistently underinvested in sustainable IT modernization while focusing on financial engineering and cost extraction. Phoenix emerged from Apollo’s ownership with significant technical debt and a compliance culture centered on limiting institutional liability rather than strengthening institutional defenses.

When The Vistria Group, through Phoenix Education Partners, acquired the university, it promised a new era of stability and digital transformation. Instead, it delivered a familiar private-equity formula: leaner operations, staff reductions, increased reliance on contractors, and deferred infrastructure investment. All of this occurred as ransomware groups such as Clop, LockBit, BlackCat, and Vice Society were escalating attacks on universities. The MOVEit crisis, the Accellion breach, and dozens of ransomware incidents had already demonstrated that higher education was an increasingly profitable target. Vistria had every signal necessary to understand the stakes, yet Phoenix entered the summer of 2025 with outdated Oracle systems, slow patch deployment, inadequate monitoring, and minimal segmentation between financial-aid and general administrative systems.

The breach was not a surprise. It was an inevitability. A university holding the sensitive financial and identity data of hundreds of thousands of current and former students, staff, and vendors cannot protect itself with minimal investment and outdated architecture. When Clop exploited Oracle’s flaw, Phoenix lacked the tools to detect lateral movement early, the expertise to identify unusual activity quickly, and the governance structure to respond decisively. The institution did not discover the breach on its own; it reacted only when a criminal syndicate announced its presence to the world.

This incident exposes a broader truth about higher education infrastructure in the United States. Universities have grown dependent on enterprise vendors whose systems are increasingly brittle and whose security models no longer meet contemporary requirements. Meanwhile, private-equity owners emphasize cost containment and short-term returns over long-term stability. The University of Phoenix breach is the result of those conditions converging with a global cybercrime ecosystem that is more organized, better funded, and more technically agile than the institutions it targets.

Students, faculty, staff, and vendors will bear the consequences for years. Many will face identity theft, fraudulent activity, and the lingering fear that their most sensitive information is circulating indefinitely on criminal marketplaces. Phoenix, like other affected institutions, will offer credit monitoring and generic assurances. But the public disclosures arrived too late, and the underlying failures were years in the making.

Phoenix should have known better.
Apollo Global Management should have known better.
The Vistria Group should have known better.
And American higher education should finally recognize that it can no longer treat cybersecurity as a line-item expense. It is now one of the central pillars of institutional survival.

Sources
Bleeping Computer
Security Affairs
The Register
CPO Magazine
The Record
University of Phoenix breach notifications
Clop leak site monitoring data

The Tragedy of Human Capital Theory in Higher Education (Glen McGhee*)

Related article: The College Dream is Over (Gary Roth)

Related article: When College Choice is a Fraud

Related article: The Higher Education Assembly Line

Related article:  Academic Capitalism and the next phase of the College Meltdown

Have you ever wondered why US student loan debt has soared past all other debt but mortgages, to more than $1.7 trillion?  Did you know $500 billion of that outstanding student loan debt will never be paid back to the US Treasury and that this huge black-hole is sucking the life from Millennials in debt peonage?  

And did you know all of this mess can be attributed directly to a set of misguided economic nostrums that go by the name of "Human Capital Theory"?

This is the tragedy of deeply flawed Human Capital Theory.  Having hijacked notable successes with professionalization (remember: not everyone can be a "professional"), human capital theorists in the early 1960s worked to spread and legitimize the idea that "learning means earning."

The sinister-side is that for the lucky ones, the motto proved true.  But today's grievously high debt burdens and the growing number of precarious jobs for those not so lucky contradicts the idea that "learning means earning."  

The seeds of Human Capital Theory have been growing for more than century, first through Madison Avenue marketing and then University of Chicago myth making. 

Here's an ad from September 1920 issue of Popular Science Monthly that makes the point: the possession of knowledge means higher wages. In this case, the 1920's proprietary “correspondence” schools and colleges relied heavily on this basic message to sell themselves -- what was later to become the central tenet of Human Capital Theory.

The naivete of these one-hundred year old advertisements is obvious now. We know better; whether it's through our own bitter experience, or the experience of those around us -- life is not so simple. Such simplicity has been debunked, and the idea itself that knowledge always translates into higher earnings has lost its appeal.

But at the time, these advertisements picked up on the massive surge in economic changes -- the new jobs, new occupations, new companies -- sweeping the county. Commerce and business life expanded and was transformed in numerous ways. Using 1880-1930 census data, Cristina Groeger shows how upper-class elites benefited far more than, say, those suffering from racial discrimination that barred them completely from higher-wage employment.

Sadly, Human Capital Theory does not take any of this into account. Racial and gender-based discrimination through our social institutions is, unfortunately, completely missing from Human Capital Theory. Learning does not equal earning when you lack access to job opportunities due to discrimination, or when you were born to a certain set of parents at a certain place, at a particular point in time.

For those lucky enough to ride the wave of growing prosperity, the slogan was true. And that's what has been driving support for Human Capital Theory -- it's just a glimpse in a 100 year old rear-view mirror. Public policy at the federal level, state level -- and even local support of education -- has been premised on the myth that financial support of education "equals earnings" -- for everyone. This is, of course, not true for those faced with wage stagnation, high unemployment and under-employment, automation, out-sourcing of good jobs, and skill erosion -- all these factors come into play and complicate the picture.

Worse yet is the global reach of these misguided directives to developing nations to spend freely on education.

In 1960, Theodore Schultz highlighted the importance of human capital for economic development among poor nations in his presidential address to the American Economic Association. “Human capital investing” soon became a priority among economic development specialists and policy makers through the World Bank and the efforts of the Chicago School. "Learning means earning" became World Bank gospel, linking GDP and economic growth with a nation's investment in higher education. The Chicago School apparently falsified the direction of causality between higher education and economic growth, resulting in additional tragical consequences on a global scale.

Not all economists, however, are so deeply committed to Human Capital Theory.

In fact, the number of dissenters is on the rise, and include Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder and Sin Yi Cheung, the authors of The Death of Human Capital?

University of Oxford economist Kate Raworth has developed "doughnut economics" as an alternative approach, even going so far as to encourage "guerrilla economics" and declaring "it's time to vandalize the economic textbooks"!

David Blanchflower, former Bank of England governor and Dartmouth economics professor, is another highly vocal critic of human capital theory. Cristina Groeger's History of Education in Boston 1880-1930: The Education Trap is another critique that runs the length of an entire book.

Gradually, the human capital theorists that were so popular in the 1960s and 1970s are being replaced by a new cohort that isn't interested in supporting outdated dogma.

But tragically, the damage has been done, and economists need to be held accountable. They can start by joining those that are denouncing Human Capital Theory.

*Glen McGhee is the Director of the Florida Higher Education Accountability Project (FHEAP)