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Barring a last-minute legal decision, as of July 1, the nation's for-profit colleges are going to be subject to a new Education Department rule known as gainful employment. That is: Do students end up earning enough to pay off their loans?

A trade group of career colleges is suing to stop the rule, but this is far from the only monkey on the sector's back. As recently as 2010, these schools enrolled one in nine college students. Today, some are shutting down, cutting back, tanking in the stock market, even going bankrupt. The bellwether was the giant Corinthian Colleges a year ago, but many others are in trouble as well. Even the University of Phoenix, which five years ago had 460,000 students, has seen that number fall by half.

Part of this is thanks to government crackdowns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is the new watchdog in town. And it has taken a particular interest in for-profits that market student loans directly to their own students, sometimes in misleading and aggressive ways.

Officials at the bureau sued Corinthian Colleges, alleging predatory lending and illegal debt collection tactics, and in the wake of the Corinthian shutdown they arranged for $480 million in private student loans to be forgiven.

Student activists have also been vocal in criticizing the industry and demanding relief from their loans.

But government enforcement and political debate is not the only reason that these colleges are having problems. Market forces should be considered too.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, if you were a working adult who needed flexibility, in most parts of the country, your best — or maybe your only option — for finishing your degree was probably an online program from a for-profit college. It was hard to ride public transit or turn on a TV during the day without seeing an ad for one of the schools, and they were sophisticated in online advertising as well.

Today, public institutions like Arizona State University and nonprofits like Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University have gotten into the game. They are trying to meet the needs of this same student population by offering online, go-at-your-own-pace programs.

They are enrolling tens of thousands of students. And they are partnering with employers, such as Starbucks with ASU, to defray tuition costs. Their tuition tends to be lower in any case than what the for-profits charge.

"I think the market's been educated," says Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire. "People used to not be aware of the difference between for-profits and nonprofits."

Seven years ago he began the process of building a large online program at his regionally accredited private college. Today it enrolls 22,500 students and has partnerships with 78 employers. Recently Anthem, the health insurer, agreed to offer SNHU's College for America bachelor's program to employees for free.

About half of the company's 55,000 workers — call center employees, administrative assistants, and the like — may be eligible.

So what is the upshot for students and prospective students here?

There are still hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of current and former for-profit college students from over the last two decades who are saddled with high loan debt and degrees of potentially dubious value.

The Education Department says it's working to develop a process for providing debt relief to defrauded borrowers, including many at Corinthian. But critics say that these processes are too onerous and too slow.

At the same time, with the gainful employment rule, observers say the Department of Education is opening a can of worms. Right now, the rule applies only to for-profits. But there are a lot of public and nonprofit privates out there too that may be graduating too few students and leaving them with loans that are too high.

For example, across the country the graduation rate at public community colleges is still just one in five. Nor have the new big online institutions furnished hard evidence about the life experiences or employment prospects of their graduates.

Sitting in an air-conditioned Ola cab on Saturday evening in Bangalore's notorious traffic, I was heading to a friend's party when an older gentleman in a long white kurta and a white cap approached.

Clutching his long walking stick, he looked close to my grandmother's age — she's in her early 90s. His feeble back seemed about to give out. His hands and shoulders shook as he extended his hand to the cab window. He motioned between his mouth and my window, clearly asking for something to eat.

Goats and Soda

Education Plan: Sell Goat, Ride Bus 300 Miles, Sneak Into Prez's House

My mind raced and so did my heart. I debated: to give or not to give?

My heart said yes, YES!

But my mind ran through phrases I have heard: "You give him a handout or a hand up. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Does he really need food, or will he use the money for alcohol or drugs?"

Before I could decide what to do, the traffic cleared and the cab sped away. I glanced back at the man, now struggling to cross the busy highway, tightly clutching his walking stick, taking one step at a time.

I have had many sleepless nights lately not just about him but about everyone I see in poverty around me. I hail from Uganda but am living in Bangalore, India now. Both countries have about the same economic and social challenges. I thought I had figured this begging thing out. I do what I can to help. For children I either buy them food or buy the pens, pencils and other paraphernalia they are selling. For the elderly, the differently abled, the hungry barefoot man on the street, I try to share a meal the way I would with my friends — to the bemusement of onlookers and the confusion of the restaurant owner.

But on Saturday night, I faltered when I faced the elderly man.

My cab fare was 350 Indian rupees. That's about $6. I keep thinking how I surely could have spared a meal for this man. I could hardly hold my tears back thinking about him. What if this were his last day and all he needed was a decent meal? What if he were truly hungry and begging was his only option? What if? What if?

Where is my humanity? What has happened to me?

Many of us struggle with these questions. For me, I feel a personal tie to the people I see begging and selling trinkets. I have been in a similar position.

While my paternal grandfather had wealth in the form of cattle and land from serving as a royal guardsman for the King of Ankole, my dad and his siblings lost it all during political turmoil in the late 1970s. They were forced to squat on other people's lands. My mother had cattle and land, but both of my parents and four of my siblings died by the time I was 10 years old. My uncle kept all but four cattle from me. I had almost nothing.

Fortunately, I had my grandmother, whom I went to live with.

But what if I had not?

What if when I went to sell eggs and milk to earn money for school fees, passersby looked the other way?

What if I was afraid to travel 300 miles alone to ask the president of Uganda for a high school scholarship?

What if I never met American sponsors who afforded me a college education?

So much of life is chance, and sometimes you can be the chance for someone else. You can help make their life better.

For this reason, I give to people I see on the streets. And I don't just give pennies. For a grown man or woman, I give enough for a meal. For a child selling merchandise, I buy enough so the child can afford that book or uniform so he or she won't be kept out of school.

I don't presume to be building a different social order by offering alms to the poor. I know that to eliminate poverty, many issues must be addressed. But I hope that by opening my heart, I let others know I am unhappy about the injustice in the world and I am doing my part.

Some people may think I am gullible. Perhaps I am, in some cases. But that is the choice I make to show solidarity with all human beings.

The next time I see someone like the man at my cab, I will not hesitate but will listen to my heart and give. What will you do?

James Kassaga Arinaitwe is an Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow and a Global Fellow at Acumen. He is currently working with LabourNet, a nongovernmental organization in Bangalore, India, that seeks to improve the lives of workers.

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What if there were an app where a user could have all of the news he was interested in, from the outlets he trusted, all in one place?

That's the goal of Apple's new iOS 9 feature, called, simply, News. It will be a permanent fixture on the iPhone and iPad home screen, just like Calendar, Maps and Weather.

All Tech Considered

Facebook Courts News Giants Into A Deal To Share Viewers, And Revenues

If that app sounded familiar before it was unveiled Monday, that's because other apps are already doing the same thing — Facebook, Flipboard, Twitter, Yahoo News and NYT Now are trying to become the gateway between news consumers and information.

Apple, which announced the app during its debut of iOS 9, is just the latest company to throw its hat into the ring, and it has a distinct advantage over the competition: The News app will automatically be an undeletable part of any Apple mobile device running iOS 9 starting in the fall.

News will be on the radar of millions of Apple users, making it one of the most salient apps on the market. As the Washington Post points out, News could quickly become a contender.

"If the algorithm is good and expansive enough, this could eat market share from Flipboard, Twitter and even, theoretically, those daily newsletters people send around. Not to mention from those outside the ecosystem."

The Two-Way

Apple Announces Music Streaming Service

News won't necessarily be a big success. Its predecessor, Newsstand, turned out to be unpopular with publishers.

Instead of making a home for news apps, as Newsstand did, Apple is partnering with publishers including BuzzFeed, CNN, Conde Nast, The New York Times, Time Inc. and more, displaying their content within the News app in a customizable wrapper. (NPR is among the media organizations that intend to make news available for the News app.)

In an article for NiemanLab, Joshua Benton explained this new relationship between Apple and publishers:

"Individual news apps and individual news brands aren't the primary point of contact with news any more. They're raw material, feeding into broader platforms. The loss of power for publishers in that exchange is obvious; the potential benefits remain mostly undiscovered."

Publishers are trying to keep up as these platforms explore new ways to distribute information to consumers, but the future of News (the app, and the content) has yet to be determined.

Paige Pfleger is an intern with NPR Digital News.

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news industry

applications

Poetry readers, prepare yourselves for a passing of the laurels. The Library of Congress announced in the wee hours Wednesday that the next U.S. poet laureate will be California writer Juan Felipe Herrera.

"This is a mega-honor for me," Herrera said in the announcement, "for my family and my parents who came up north before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 — the honor is bigger than me."

A poet of Chicano descent, the 66-year-old Herrera has spent just about his whole life on the West Coast. Born to a family of migrant farm workers, he bounced from tent to trailer for much of his youth in Southern California, eventually going on to study at UCLA and Stanford. Years later, he stepped out of the state to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop, before — you guessed it — returning home to California.

Along the way, Herrera has been prolific — so prolific, in fact, that few seem to agree about just how many books the man has written. (Some say 30, others 29, and the Library of Congress says 28; we'll just put the number at "dozens.") Those works include poetry collections, novels in verse and plenty of children's books. Across this body of work, the shadow of California, and his cultural heritage, has loomed large.

"I've worked throughout California as a poet; in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms," Herrera told the campus newspaper at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches creative writing. "I would say [I've been] from San Diego all the way to Arcata and throughout the valleys ... for the last 40 years."

The role of poet-in-chief isn't entirely new to Herrera. Beyond his teaching duties at the University of California, Riverside, he has been serving as California's poet laureate since 2012. He's the first Latino poet to assume that role in the state's history.

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Juan Felipe Herrera speaks at the California Unity Poem Fiesta, a 2014 gathering thrown in celebration of his two years (at that point) as the state's poet laureate. Courtesy of University of California, Riverside hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of University of California, Riverside

Juan Felipe Herrera speaks at the California Unity Poem Fiesta, a 2014 gathering thrown in celebration of his two years (at that point) as the state's poet laureate.

Courtesy of University of California, Riverside

The poet laureate's one-year term doesn't carry a lot of prescribed responsibilities — "the Library keeps to a minimum [its] specific duties," according to the announcement — but past laureates have often embarked on projects to advocate on behalf of the form, and to widen its audience. And if there's anything to be gleaned from Herrera's past, it's that Herrera likely will be active in the new position, too.

In a conversation with the journal Zyzzyva, Herrera set out a mini-manifesto of sorts for the role of the writer as teacher.

"These days I think it is good to be in society — to wake yourself up in the throng and mix of people on sidewalks, subways and cafeterias — so teaching writing keeps me at the root of things: new voices, new experiences and new ways of meditating on life and the planet," Herrera said. "Both are extremely essential."

"Poetry," he said, in an interview two years earlier with The Los Angeles Times, "can tell us about what's going on in our lives, not only our personal but our social and political lives."

Herrera is expected to step into the position this fall with the National Book Festival in September. He will succeed Charles Wright, the current U.S. poet laureate. No word yet on when they plan to exchange their poetic licenses.

But, if you're new to Herrera's work, don't just trust me with your first impression. Below, you'll find Herrera himself, in a poem excerpted from his 2008 collection, Half of the World in Light:

Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings

for Charles Fishman

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn't exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.

Excerpted from Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera. Copyright 2008 Juan Felipe Herrera. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arizona Press. This material is protected from unauthorized downloading and distribution.

poet laureate