What stocks or derivatives would you use to short a possible bubble in higher education (similar to the way some hedge fund managers shorted the housing bubble)?
Never thought of it in bubble terms ... but boy is it a freakin' bubble. They have hustled billions and delivered a higher grade of ilitteracy. Just occured to me I may have spelled ilitteracy wrong ... lol ... and don't actually know how to spell it and ain't looking it up!
any of the edu stocks like another poster mentioned - here is a great list from bloomberg of the for profit education industry index http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USEDU:IND also if you could short student loan debt that would be ideal b/c it's the purest way to express the trade. NNI and SLM are two student debt stocks but they're in strong uptrends so i would at least wait until a change in trend (e.g. below 20 or 50 dma) before shorting.
the "American Dream" was obviously a scam to have you owned by your employer. buy a house near work. having a kid.....you will be pacified married......depends, but usually pacified school loans......LOL. I've never seen anything like this. can't be discharged and walked away from like a house.....and an online degree from phoenix seems like an absolutely horrible investment. for $80,000 before interest....LOL. are you kidding!!!?!?!?!?! but there are good things: for $200,000 after interest, you get to 1. learn to talk to girls, drunk 2. spend 11 hours talking about Africa and kids dying, how to save them 3. master of the iphone, ipad 4. have billions of facebook friends 5. learn to hashtag 6. wake up at noon 7. go to bed at 6, on a Wednesday 8. talk about grad school, because you know work will be bad 9. say it's ok if you fail because gates and jobs didn't graduate 10. and then, the kicker of all kickers.....after all that socialist propaganda....you get your first BILL..... you become a capitalist. LOL
my brother in law went to the equivalent of ITT Tech the day he graduated from high school. It was an embarrasment to my father when my sister married him because he had no college degree. But as soon as he completed his training in computer programming got a job, and worked at that same job (even though the company changed hands many times, as a matter of fact, at one time the company I worked for bought his company) until he turned age 65, and ended up with a creamy pension, house all paid off. If I had a kid in high school today I would tell them to do the same thing. You can always start working on your college degree part time after you get a job, on your own money, no loan.
One of the public tech schools has been advertising to go fill out the FAFSA and see what you can get, most likely you will be able to get our education for free. To me that says they will take whatever they can from the government and somehow rebate any extra cost back to the student without risking the guarenteed gov. money flowing into their pockets. Another scam of the taxpayers. I can't remember their name off hand, but I know they have changed their name 3 times over the last 15 years. At one point they said the tuition was $26,000 to get as many MSFT certificates as you could in 6 months.
You might just be right about an education bubble! One of my private investments is in a educational website that gets almost all of its income from a handful of education based advertisers through Google Adsense. Mainly the stocks listed on http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USEDU:IND plus a few other lead selling networks like collegebound and others like it. The last two months I have seen a 25% drop in my revenue. Something is up because my traffic is still really good (probably more than ET), the site is still dominating all of the key search terms but the pay per click these advertisers are willing to pay has fallen. I know these companies well because I have spoke to many of the upper management people. They bought up schools and turned them into schools for profit. They got rid of school tours and the old way of recruiting by replaced those people with used car salesman pretending to be some sort of education advisers. All they basically need to make money is a naive kid that the salesman can rush into signing for student loans. It is an easy kill and no matter if the kid gets a education or not they are on the hook for the loan for life. It has been a great business! That money seems to be slowing down fast. I am pretty high up the food chain so I hope I am not seeing the end of the trend. All of the above has got me thinking. These companies might be running out of money to burn, students are getting jobs or the gravy train ride is over and it is time for murders and executions to start happening. The strong companies need start to buying and sell the weaker players. It may be just like the real estate bubble again! I would like to hear what you think will burst this bubble?