Marathon Pundit: Minority business leaders speak up in favor of for-profit colleges

In last month's State of the Union Address, President Obama called for a greater focus on education and a new "Sputnik moment" for our nation.

But his Department of Education continues its war on for-profit colleges. However, more people are fighting back, including minority business leaders such as Mario H. Lopez, the president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, who writes in the Daily Caller:

Private sector colleges and universities play a vital role in today’s economy because they provide the specialized training and skills that employers are increasingly looking for in their workers.

Javier Palomarez, who leads the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, says:

America's employers, including Hispanic Business Enterprises, depend on career colleges to train and prepare skilled workers to fill open positions throughout the economy. Each year, our businesses offer gainful employment to hundreds of thousands of career school graduates in dozens of demanding professions from nurses and health care aides, to computer technicians and chefs, from legal assistants and teachers to security and accounting professionals

What about African-Americans? Well, Harry C. Alford, the president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce scolds the DofE on NPR.org:

With that as background, we must examine the Department of Education's headlong rush to effectively remove career-oriented colleges from the quiver of educational arrows available to minority students. The new "Gainful Employment Rule" uses a formula that would disproportionately harm low-income students because their student load-to-income ratio or their rate of repaying loans would not meet the federal bureaucrats' threshold.