You can nitpick the details of exactly what entities the money flows through, but the politicians aren't.

Organic giving from individuals who work in the educational sector doesn't come hand in hand with organized, well financed political pressure in the same way that a lobbying effort/targeted giving coming directly from a specific industry does.

Clearly the for-profit sector is vastly more influential.

This influence is proven by the fact that the politicians are making special rules for the non-profit sector and explicitly exempting the for-profits from them.

Oh wait, my mistake - I live in the real world, where $6.3M > $145k, and politicians target for-profits for special rules and throw more money at non-profits.

[1] Unfortunately OpenSecrets doesn't explicitly break the non-profit sector out of education as a whole.

This argument doesn't make any sense. He just spelled this out for you, but I'll try it again.

Individual donations from non-profit education employees are not lobbying on the part of an industry. They're citizens playing an active role in politics.

Corporations in the for-profit education business are lobbying in an attempt to further increase their profit margins despite providing a product that is comparatively worthless.

Oh wait, my mistake - I live in the real world, where $6.3M > $145k, and politicians target for-profits for special rules and throw more money at non-profits.

Just as they should. For profit schools are student farms, churning them out and providing predatory loans to their uneducated students.

Nobody gives a degree from a for-profit school any kind of respect, it carries no more prestige than a high school degree. That makes their product worthless. They're attempting to legislate around their failings, not improve their product to a competitive level with the non-profit education system.

Seeing as the non-profit schools are supposed to be public institutions created to better the country, it's appropriate for them to receive federal funding.

I'm confused. The "gainful employment" rule seems to target low quality schools. If, as you assert, non-profits are of higher quality, why exempt them from the "gainful employment" rule? After all, the rule won't affect them (if you are right).

The answer is, of course, that if you are wrong and some non-profits are also low quality, the employees of those schools will have less money to donate to Democrats.

But I'm sure no politician anywhere cares about that.

As for your questions.

I'm confused. The "gainful employment" rule seems to target low quality schools.

Incorrect. Your false assertion here completely derails the remainder of your post, making it irrelevant. If you would like a correct explanation of the gainful employment rule, let me know.

Yeah right.

Interestingly enough, no one makes that distinction when it comes to oil company executives.

> For profit schools are student farms, churning them out and providing predatory loans to their uneducated students.

You seem to think that everyone at a non-profit works for free. They don't. They benefit from the money that comes in.

The only difference between non-profits and for-profits is whether the investors get any direct dividends. There's no difference wrt the employees.

And, non-profits do figure out ways to indirectly compensate their donors.

For example, they arrange for and vigorously defend various tax breaks.

In fact, they lobby for high tax rates to make deductible donations more attractive. Gee thanks - I'm paying for your donation.

Shouldn't we ask whether they actually do better the country at some point? And, suppose that other institutions also "better the country", shouldn't they get money too?

> That makes their product worthless.

Really? Where do you think that your auto mechanic learned his trade? How about the plumber? And so on.

The for-profits tend to serve people that the non-profits have largely abandoned. Why don't those people count?

As long as you don't count union lobbying as "organic giving from individuals".

Conservatives have to donate money to buy ads. Stanford gets to post its political campaign messages directly as "news."

Meanwhile back on campus, every effort is made to indoctrinate thousands of students and send them out as an army of "individuals" to do heroic things in the service of those who people at Stanford are expected to support. I had to break off my work a few weeks ago and go to another building when the second floor was taken over by a law professor who was leading a pep rally for Obamacare called a "discussion of the issues."

The notion that universities such as these just have some left-leaning individuals acting privately while the institution itself remains resolutely neutral politically "seems rather disingenuous to me."

Okay, then, your credibility can be judged by other readers on that basis: no way there's any systematic liberal bias at a place like Stanford.

I claim that these universities are powerful, overwhelmingly liberal-leaning, highly-politicized internally, highly-influential externally, and that their internal politics heavily impacts the nature of their significant external political influence. The corporate comptroller at Harvard does not have to write a check to an individual politician for Harvard to exert its political influence. Harvard has plenty of ways to influence people that don't require paying for political ads. The politician may even be writing checks to Harvard, hoping to get his son admitted.

And readers can judge the credibility of that claim, too.