Love 'em or hate 'em -- and many of this city's current power brokers seemingly fall into the latter category right now -- for-profit colleges are attracting students in ever-growing numbers, as made powerfully clear by an Education Department report released Wednesday.

The report, an annual study of college enrollments, prices and degrees awarded, includes data on the number of students who enrolled in various types of postsecondary institutions throughout the 2008-9 academic year. As seen in the linked table, the statistics show that for-profit colleges enrolled a total of 3.2 million students, 11.8 percent of the nearly 27.4 million students who studied at all institutions that year.

California's community-college system has canceled a controversial agreement that would have allowed students at some colleges to earn credit for discounted online courses at Kaplan University.

The 112-campus community-college system is severely overcrowded, and officials saw the November agreement as a way to make it easier for students to get classes they need. For Kaplan, the agreement promised a boost of credibility and a ready pool of new students, who would be able to take certain online courses at a 42-percent discount.

A large percentage of borrowers who left college in the past four years made no principal payments on their federally guaranteed student loans in 2009, according to the Department of Education.

This is the first time the department has calculated and published repayment rates for every college and university whose students get federal loans.

The data, released Aug. 13, should be a wake-up call to taxpayers, who will be on the hook if these loans are never repaid, and to students who wonder whether they'll earn enough to repay them.

Repayment rates vary widely from college to college. They can be found at http://links.sfgate.com/ZKES.

Responding to criticism following the release of institution-by-institution student loan repayment data, the U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday published answers to some "frequently asked questions" it has gotten since publishing the data on Aug. 13. Most of the document reiterates what the department has already said about the data and its approach to defining gainful employment, but there are some new tidbits:

Larry Isaak will be Capella University's next president, the school said Tuesday.

Interim President Mike Offerman will remain with Capella after Isaak, a former North Dakota State University system chancellor, takes over in November.

Isaak is currently president of thethe Midwestern Higher Education Compact in Minneapolis. He has a bachelor's degree in business administration and an MBA from the University of North Dakota.

Capella CEO Kevin Gilligan said Isaak is "a leader who truly appreciates and will be able to build upon Capella's reputation for academic quality and our focus on learner success.

College classrooms were once filled primarily by eager students straight out of high school. But the vast majority of today's college students work, have a family, are enrolled only part time, or a combination of all three.

This new breed of college student is reshaping the face of higher education in America.

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NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

Law schools, once viewed as a guaranteed path to a high-paying career, are coming under fire as disillusioned graduates find a tighter job market than they say they were led to expect.

A small but growing coalition of graduates, on blogs with names like "Scammed Hard" and "Shilling Me Softly," blame their alma maters for luring them into expensive programs by overstating their employment prospects.

In July, Law School Transparency, a non-profit founded by two Vanderbilt law students, requested that 200 schools submit salary and employment data for 2010 grads, which they aim to post online.

The Obama administration's animosity for business profits threatens to deny educational opportunities for more than 300,000 poor, working or otherwise at-risk college students. Congress needs to step up to block a proposed new rule affecting for-profit colleges.

It's no secret that for-profit institutions such as Strayer University, the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University serve an unusually high percentage of students who lack the resources to repay student loans easily. It's also true that investigations have shown employees at some for-profit schools using misleading recruiting tactics to persuade some students to enroll. Somehow, the Obama administration has conflated the two problems.

By Robert S. Silberman

President Obama noted this month that by the end of this decade, eight in 10 jobs will require higher education and that, alarmingly, the United States has slid from first to 12th in the world for percentage of adults with a college degree. Amid the continuing bad economic news, higher education is critical to our nation's strategy for economic recovery and growth. Clearly, we need to address America's deficit in higher education.

When it comes to marketing and recruiting, the University of Phoenix is turning over a new leaf, or so its executives said at a briefing here Monday.

"We're doing what we think is right," said Gregory W. Cappelli, the co-chief executive officer of Apollo Group, which owns Phoenix and other for-profit colleges and schools. The company, he said, is shifting "from a recruiting mentality and culture into one of a long-term relationship" between potential students and recruiters, who've been renamed "counselors."