The Washington Post runs some charter schools, most of them via the aptly named Kaplan Virtual Education, a subsidiary that runs charter schools in six states that affords kids the awesome opportunity to attend school entirely on the Internet after fifth grade. I do not know how this works or who decided that was a reasonable idea, but with so many states and municipalities more broke than the newspaper industry, I can’t imagine that such a low-overhead method of educating the next generation would not represent a “growth industry.” And that is good news for the Washington Post Company, because the online college degree business that comprises the biggest chunk of its revenue stream—about 60,000 of Kaplan Higher Education’s 65,000 enrolled customers in 2009 were online students—is under serious fire. Ninety-one percent of the division’s annual revenues come from federally-guaranteed student loans, but only 28% of Kaplan alumni are paying them back. That’s because they can’t find jobs, even though getting a job is the only reason anyone ever signed up for an online college degree to begin with. With dismal statistics like that, you’d think Kaplan would have to do a lot of lying to get people to enroll in its programs, and you would be right, as the undercover GAO investigators learned when they talked to recruiters:

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