I find the whole debate over for-profit colleges fascinating. They are clearly a scam (EDIT: they aren’t all scams but Kaplan and Phoenix are), but the Washington Post shills for them, because they’re a bit source of revenue for the paper’s parent company, and conservatives like them because they’re “free market” and they may finally break the librul hold on higher education. Bobo recently made the hero in one of his parables a University of Phoenix graduate and young Conor thinks it’s all just so complicated, with no “‘good guys”, so we shouldn’t be too quick to condemn for-profit colleges’ practices.
This profile of the founder of University of Phoenix, John Sperling, is a fascinating case study of the rise of a Galtian overlord. He started out as an lefty educational reformer type and it seems that U of Phoenix filled a valuable role — as a flexible way for people to get college education while working — before it devolved into a huge way to bilk unsuspecting students and rip off the government. Now Sperling raves against Obama, bansksta-style.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
I have mixed feelings about them largely because I have a number of friends whose livelihood is dependent on them. I don’t want my friends losing their jobs, and I know they do the best they can at actually educating the students they come in contact with, but they’re also the first to tell me that 1) the students they tend to come in contact with would fail out of a traditional university or community college inside of 6 weeks and 2) that they’re under a lot of pressure to make sure that any student who pays, passes. And it doesn’t really matter if they’re the ones paying or if the government is.
What I hate about the system more than anything isn’t the graft–it’s that there’s a lot of people who are getting these degrees who think that they’re going to be able to move up in whatever business they’re already in by virtue of the piece of paper they have now, and in the vast majority of the cases, that’s not true. It’s not true for a fair number of people who finish a 4-year degree at a traditional university, but for the person getting an Associates degree in Hotel Management at Evergreen college, it’s a virtual certainty. And they don’t know that because they don’t have the necessary knowledge base to see the scam for what it is. If you explain it to them, they get it, because they’re not stupid, they just don’t have the experience to see the difference between the two systems.
mistermix
Textbook hippie man.
cleek
Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.
Shalimar
the first item from “ads by Google” under this post is to get a degree from the University of Phoenix. At least they’re efficient scammers, getting the message out everywhere.
DougJ
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Personally, I have fairly radical ideas about education that put me in sympathy with some of the ideas behind a place like University of Phoenix, but….there’s no question that these places now operate essentially as scams. Low graduation rates, high rates of loan default, etc.
maye
@cleek: lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
DougJ
@cleek:
I’d think of things I’d never thunk before
Then I’d sit and think some more
MattF
Noted, towards the end of the profile, that Jack Welch is getting into the for-profit education game… Tough to get more galtian overlordy than that.
BR
If you haven’t seen the Frontline report on what goes on behind the scenes at for-profit colleges, it’s well worth watching.
Omnes Omnibus
I am actually teaching a course at one of these schools. I am teaching business law, a subject I am quite qualified to teach, and I believe I am doing a good job. When I was was going through the faculty certification process, however, I was appalled that another attorney, someone with about a year of professional experience, no real brains, and a casual dose of arrogance, made it through the process as well. When visiting a an Econ class in the MBA program as part of certification, he asked the instructor if he taught about the invisible hand. This points to one of the biggest flaws I have seen in the educational model. Some of the faculty is good, but they need so many people that they are willing to hire people who meet their nominal qualification standard but are not well suited to teach.
PurpleGirl
I have BA from NYU. About 6 months ago I looked into some of the for-profit schools who offer certificates in medical billing. (When did most companies stop doing on-the-job training?)
I object to the way they handle recruitment and the parceling out of information on costs. They won’t give you written information, they want you to talk to a “recruiter”. The recruiter is really a high-pressure sales person (hey, I worked for Matthew Bender legal publishing at one time, so I know high pressure sales). After I said I wasn’t interested, four other recruiters from the school still called; one implied I wasn’t the right sort to do medical billing as I was unwilling to take a loan to pay for school (as I already have a BA, I’m ineligible to get a grant or scholarship he said). I told him, “I’m X years old, I have a BA from NYU, I’ve worked lots of types of careers with similar core skills, I know something about value and evaluating it.” I then hung up the phone. Oh, the medical billing certificate… 10 month program, on-line; cost $14,000.
TheMightyTrowel
For a bit of contrast, here in the UK we have the Open University:
I’m a big fan.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@DougJ: I’m in sympathy with the ideas as well, and I’m definitely not a technophobe in the classroom. I have reservations about the way technology is most commonly used–that post a while back about the prof at USF who caught a third of his class cheating crystallized a lot of those for me, especially given that he didn’t call himself a teacher, but rather a “content provider” for starters. But online classes can be effective as long as there’s actual one-on-one communication between teachers and students.
The problem is that most schools–the scam schools and traditional universities–are looking at online classes as a way to reduce costs rather than as a way to be more effective educators, and that’s never going to work out to the benefit of the students.
Nylund
Without a doubt, there are many problems with higher education in this country. I am sympathetic to the idea of people paying to gain marketable skills, learn a vocation, etc. I think a private system could indeed lead to valuable innovations. But, unfortunately, the profit motive always kicks in and its no surprise that in the end, it becomes, “how can we make as much money as possible while doing as little as possible?” The fact that they’ve also figured out a way to bilk the government out of huge sums of money just makes it that much worse. So, despite all the potentially good ideas and possible motivations, in the end, in practice, these schools are an abomination.
Its also one of the more flagrant examples of right-wing hypocrisy, rail against government waste while simultaneously doing everything you can to expand that wastefulness as long as that waste lines your own pockets.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: @Brian S (formerly Incertus): FWIW the course I am teaching is in a brick and mortar building. There is a lot of online communication, but the teaching is done in person. I am not sure how I would teach an online course.
Bill Murray
@PurpleGirl:
When they realized it was a cost they could push off on their possible employees without consequence to themselves
Tim in SF
Here’s an resource of students’ stories about being ripped off by these for-profit colleges (Kaplan, etc.):
http://protectstudentsandtaxpayers.org/
(disclosure: I’m helping them with their UI re-design)
Scamp Dog
From my experience, they’re a mixed bag. I teach at electronics at a DeVry campus, and we’ve had student graduate with bachelor degrees and get jobs at Sandia Labs, definitely the big time. Others haven’t done so well, particularly the ones in the associates program—although some of those have gotten good jobs.
At another school, [state name] Technical University (name left out so I don’t catch any flak), I taught two sections of a class, each with 4 students. In the evening section, two of them (fresh out of high school, I think) didn’t do a lick of work, one did a little bit (also fresh out of high school), and the fourth guy was in his 40s, working at a high level tech job, but figured he needed the piece of paper. He aced the class, the others got Ds.
The daytime section was better, with a retired NCO, a 20-something guy coming back to school, and two other guys I don’t remember the background for.
The three high school kids were definitely getting ripped off. The 40-something guy wasn’t, but he’d do well anywhere, and the piece of paper will be helpful for him.
I’m not sure about the four guys in the daytime section. They learned some stuff, two of them not as well as I’d like. But they were all serious about school, and I think it will probably work out for them. That’s a guess, though, because I haven’t taught at that school for two years now, and haven’t seen them since the class.
I interviewed at another local school, but they had a weird schedule and I couldn’t make it work. That school has had some accreditation problems, but a couple of years back, I attended some final project presentations from their game development students. They seemed to know their stuff, and some of them were invited to interview with local game studios. Of course, I have no idea how many flunked out and got saddled with some possibly large debt.
I’d like to see enough of a crackdown to get rid of the scam schools, and make the good ones stay on their toes. DeVry is definitely one of the good ones, in my not-entirely-unbiased opinion.
Anybody else have some experience to share?
SiubhanDuinne
@Brian S (formerly Incertus) #13:
For the record, it was UCF, not USF. But it probably happens at USF and UF and FSU and UGA and GSU and — well, name your institution.
/USF grad, but not in Business (if there’s a way to cheat as a Music major, no one ever told me)
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Omnes Omnibus: Given the kinds of things I teach–creative writing, literature, composition–I don’t know that I could teach a class online either. And I don’t know how my friends do it, except that they try to communicate as well as they can with their online students. I have done online tutoring, and that can be effective, but only when it’s one-on-one (at least for me) which means that your lowered costs go out the window. The whole theory of online teaching, it seems to me, is to make it possible to load up the teacher with more students than could normally fit in a classroom, which means that one-on-one tutoring doesn’t happen.
DougJ
@Scamp Dog:
I shouldn’t say they’re all scams, I just mean the ones in the mold of U of Phoenix and Kaplan University.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@SiubhanDuinne: Sorry about that–should have gone back and looked it up to make sure which school it was. And I have no doubt it happens at FAU, where I teach. That’s going to happen when you make it easy to cheat.
Omnes Omnibus
@Scamp Dog:
I think this is one of the primary uses for these schools. They provide an opportunity for people who have a set of skills but lack a paper qualification for a promotion or one that will get them through an online HR system.
Pongo
One way U of P got so big was to contract with major corporations that offer tuition reimbursement. At one point, they were the preferred institution for a number of fortune 500s until the companies got wise to their low standards and quit offering reimbursement for U of P degrees. I think there are good teachers and sincere students at these schools–in fact, I know there are–but the focus has been on quantity, not quality.
My brother-in-law is an adjunct professor teaching finance at the U of P and his impression is that maybe 1/4 of the students enrolled actually should be there. One of his favorite pastimes is to send us emails or segments of papers he has received from his students (without any identifiers, of course) so we can commiserate with what he has to contend with.* The grammar and spelling are beyond comprehension–often literally so. On the bright side, his stance has always been he would help anyone at any time who truly wants to learn the material, but if you don’t make the effort he is not one of those teachers who sees students as ‘customers’ and passes them regardless of performance. He has a higher fail rate than most other U of P professors AND he was named one of the ‘teachers of the year’ at U of P last year–voted on by students. So clearly there is a desire to have high standards from many members of the student body.
*We have been trying to convince him to start a blog with this material. It is funny, tragic and an amazing snapshot into modern American education.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Practicing more than the others would give you an “unfair” advantage as would be more talented.
azlib
I applied to teach online at U. of Phoenix several years ago. At that time they only recruited professionals with full-time jobs. After going through the interview process, I understood why that was the case – the pay for teaching was meager at best. In the end I concluded it was not worth my time.
The basic problem with for-profit education is the ruthless drive for growth and expansion, especially if you are a publicly traded company like U. of Phoenix. This point was alluded to in the article on the founder. Rather than focusing on building a business that serves its constituents well, the pressure is to always grow. Growth is rewarded, quality is not rewarded by our financial and investment overlords. In the end it is not surprising the house of cards eventually falls apart.
There are very good reasons for keeping education as a public good with public funding. The unrelenting profit motive of Wall Street in pressuring public firms to always grow is one of them.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@azlib: Just as an aside, this is a part of our economic psyche I’ve never really understood–the valuing of growth above everything else. Why isn’t stability rewarded in the same way? It seems to me that any organism that grows without limit is doomed to collapse at some point–why should a company be any different?
Scamp Dog
@DougJ: I kinda figured that, actually. I’m just curious to hear from other instructors, like @Pongo. Or almost-instructors, like @azlib.
Now if we could just get pundits to seek out facts, there’d be some hope for the media.
PurpleGirl
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): …any organism that grows without limit is doomed to collapse at some point—why should a company be any different?
I once heard cancer described as a cell that grows without limit.
Mark
@Scamp Dog: What kind of class were you teaching that only had four students in each section? I went to two large state schools for my BSEE and MSEE and class size never got below about 12.
cleek
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
i wish i knew this answer, too. all the explanations i’ve seen amount to little more than greed.
Walker
While I obviously work at a traditional university, I know a couple of the people at DigiPen. That is an interesting example of for-profit education. Some of it is because they do not want to be held to the traditional criteria of a bachelors programs; they want their students working on games all the time and not having to worry about distributive requirements in “meaningless” fields. I don’t agree with this philosophy, but they have gotten several employers in the industry to buy into it.
The issue is what to do about people who go to a place like DigiPen and cannot get a job in the games industry. I have heard from higher ups at DigiPen that only half of their graduates make it into the industry. That is a pretty good track record for a competitive industry, but it sucks to be in the other half.
Walker
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
We did this at one time. It was called “dividends”; you return part of the stable profit to your investors. And then everyone decided that this was a waste of money, and that if you really wanted that type of return, you became a bondholder.
Amanda in the South Bay
I guess I dont get why more students dont go to community colleges rather than try the for profit model Regardless of if you are looking for a 2 year piece of paper or looking to transfer to a 4 year school…CCs already do the job of a for profit school, without the crippling debt/
BGinCHI
I teach at the Uni that ranks #1 in the Midwest for students with the least amount of debt upon graduation and top for the lowest percentage of students graduating with debt (from US News and World Report). While some of what we do as an institution is not perfect (though given our budget I’m amazed at how good we are overall), we offer our diverse student body an opportunity that allows for lots of choices. Opportunity. And that’s the key to this whole thing, isn’t it?
When you obscure the facts, the costs, the benefits, of something like education, you are already fundamentally harming someone’s education. They are less able to function in the world if the people who are supposed to be enabling them are, essentially, disabling them. Saddling them with debt and suggesting that there are easy fixes for complex problems.
It’s not the faculty at these places who are at fault. It’s the system of for-profit education with all the wrong incentives.
Roy G
I taught design in an online school for several years, and had students all over the world, many of whom did not have access to a bricks and mortar design school. Ime, I had many students who excelled, and went on to successful professional careers, as well as a not inconsiderable number who were wasting their time and money. While there are obviously innate differences, the biggest factor really was how much extra work a student was willing to pour in, besides the bare minimums of the course requirements.
While all students received personalized critiques, and most received custom debugging of their projects, the school definitely slid towards more of a conveyor belt, and I left because they downgraded the pay, which in turn downgraded the amount of time available per student.
Like other professions, the business around teaching has become something of a parasite; teachers themselves are like soldiers, in that they get the highest praise (which is free, of course), while often being treated like a grunt sent out in an unarmored Humvee, while the REMFs are busy drinking coffee and impressing each other with Powerpoint presentations.
The military aspect is even deeper, since a lot of the for-profit colleges are geared towards attracting mil students, and their generous GI Bill education grants.
Btw, anybody who lives here in California knows how hard it is to get into the State U system, not to mention that tuitions got jacked up 33% last year. However, you can apparently sail in for a free education… if you join the Army.
Which brings me to my last point: for-profit colleges are not the only higher education scam. The UC schools are being gamed for profit by the trustees and senior faculty and administrators:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/29/MNDC1GUSCT.DTL
Interesting backstory blogging here:
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/the-crisis-in-higher-education/
Ultimately, I think the problems are the same in most schools, and they have to do with entrenched interests. The for-profit schools may be more opportunistic/scammy, however, the same problems are also endemic at many, many more august institutions of higher learning – which is why tuitions have skyrocketed in the last two decades.
BGinCHI
@Roy G: Tuition has skyrocketed due, directly, to the loss of state funding for higher ed. Period.
If you want to hack away at administrator salaries, that’s fine. That won’t hurt higher ed whatsoever.
But if you think faculty salaries are the problem, then you don’t know what you’re talking about. There will certainly be some salaries at flagship state schools that are pretty big, but overall, if you look at averages, cost of living, and so on, there is no substance to the accusation that faculty are in any way “scamming” students.
You want to see this in action? Read the Chicago Tribune. Nearly every day there are articles bemoaning the state of education, while at the same time they cry about teacher salaries and benefits. It’s all just know-nothing, non-analysis bitching by people who want to sell something. In their case a bunch of shit that precedes the Sports Page and Sudoku.
dslak
I taught briefly at the University of Phoenix, but I taught a humanities course (Introduction to World Religions). I would concur with Omnes Omnibus and Pongo about the downside of Phoenix, but it is even worse when it comes to humanities courses. Such courses tend to demand some amount of critical thinking from students, outside of their intended career path.
I realized about two weeks in that many of the students in my class did not belong at a university, but I still dedicated a lot of time trying to lead them to understand some of the basic facts of religious studies, and spent a lot of time correcting student papers with constructive criticism.
Regardless, I ended up being dismissed about four weeks into my first course. My co-workers at a traditional, state university say it’s something I should wear as a badge of honor.
Davis X. Machina
Brad DeLong is fond of saying that the only educational model that actually works is a student on one end of a log, and Socrates on the other.
It seems that while the internet is neither a dump truck, nor a series of tubes, it’s not a very good substitute for a log either.
Someone’s going to have to get DL right soon, though, at least at the secondary level. Consolidated district high schools, one-hour bus routes, and $5.00+ diesel don’t mix well. All those buses will stop running in our lifetimes.
Karen
Have you seen the ads that are “pro” for profit online schools? They shade it as “The government wants to take away your self improvement.” Sickening.
I hope the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (and their satellite offices) is a legitimate school because my friend has been studying web design for over a year from there and she has real talent.
ruemara
Let’s check out the ads the google bots have generated for this post. Liberty University online-A scam, even if you actually sit in our classrooms. But you will be prepared to swear fealty to a president, target anyone not republican enough and be a pundit.
Full Sail University-A scam. Sort of. High pressure cram school for creative type wannabes. Extremely costly, high drop out rate and many, many complain about the loan products and costs after dropping out.
USC-A real university. But fuck them, I hated their campus.
Nothing you can do on any of these that a good community college can’t do. I also say this as an NYU alum.
@Karen:
I wish her much luck. Art Institutes is a lot like Full Sail. Very expensive, a lot of cram school pressure, but and this is a big one, there are decent teachers and opportunities for networking. Speaking as a designer, as long as she has talent, is in a good market and really pushes her portfolio to the max, she’ll be fine.
Omnes Omnibus
@dslak: I am teaching a grad course there. From what I have seen, there is a significant difference between the grad and undergrad people.
BR
@ruemara:
The key thing (talked about in the Frontline episode I linked above) is that the federal government is guaranteeing the loans, so the school takes no risk – they effectively screw the student and take the government’s money and run.
The incentives for for-profit colleges are the same as for mortgage lenders that sell their loans for bundling into MBS – they take no risk, so they push their product too much – and with the same results.
Karen
@ruemara:
Thank you for easing my mind ruemara! I’ve been worried about it since I started hearing the news about Kaplan and U of P. She is extremely talented so that definitely eases my mind.
PeakVT
@Roy G: I don’t think the actions of the execs means the UC system is a scam. It just means that the outlook of some of the senior staff has become like that of the executive suites in most major corporations. Maybe after (if) Brown gets the budget under control he can smack them around a bit.
ruemara
@Karen:
Please push the portfolio part on her. It has been the biggest crime of my career. I’ve worked for many agencies as a freelancer and often never got any of the final product, nor was there things like thumbnail drives way back in the stone age. It has kept me very much down. Right now is when she should experiment, volunteer and make sure YOU GET EVERYTHING FOR YOUR PORTFOLIO. Cull later, collect now.
fronobulax
I saw a popup for the “Jack Welch MBA” on TPM a couple of months a go and did a little googling. It is offered by the “Jack Welch Management Institute of Chancellor University”. Turns out Chancellor was a bankrupt traditional college that was bought up by an entrepreneur and reorganized as a for-profit institution. Why do this? So they can “inherit” the original school’s accreditation. Sounds like a variation on the “bust out” scam to me.
Mnemosyne
@BR:
The federal government is now threatening to stop guaranteeing loans at for-profit schools, which is what has the Washington Post running around like headless chickens.
Roy G
@BGinCHI: Thanks for responding, and I agree with most of your points, however, your first point isn’t wholly accurate, at least here in CA:
The scam is not that their investments lost money, but that big money financiers, like Richard Blum, aka Mr. Dianne Feinstein, were able to loosen investment policies to move UC investments into speculative private equity funds, which accounted for the big losses – though the trustees made money by their steerage, even though they were major conflicts of interest.
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/university-of-capital/
@PeakVT, I didn’t mean to imply the UC system is a scam, however, there are definitely players that are scamming the system; Zunguzungu does a great job of debunking the ‘competitive salary’ myth, and how it should be inimical to a university system.
Perhaps, i’m getting a bit afield of the OP, however, my point is that the for-profit schools may just be more apparent in their motive, and cruder in their execution in tuition raking.
Karen
@Mnemosyne:
Which is why the airwaves here have those “The US Government doesn’t want you to improve yourself through education” ads. I’m sure that there will be more ads if the fed does stop guaranteeing the loans.
IL JimP
There was a report that came out a couple weeks ago, it’s pretty interesting:
http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/~/media/Reports/SSO/Winning_by_degrees_Report_12Nov2010b.ashx
wmd
It’s difficult for me to separate Sperling’s financing of Drug Policy initiatives from UoP. He was one of the major funders of Prop 215 and has been a major funder of DPR ever since.
I have a nephew that teaches mathematics for UoP – finite math for the most part. I’ve taught that course at a brick and mortar University and it seems that the curriculum is comparable. Students know basic probability and linear algebra (pivot method of solving systems of equations) as much as they do on passing the same course at a traditional University.
I also want to point out that open coursework is available from MIT and Yale (I found MIT courseware for learning Mandarin, and a thread on the anniversary of John Brown’s execution here put me onto Yale) among others. Online learning is still in its infancy, and I suspect the for profit side of it will gradually become useful as a means of certifying knowledge gained anywhere, not just through their courses.
eemom
@Karen:
I live in the deecee area and I see those ads all the time. So easy for slimeballs in ANY industry to jump on the Big Bad Government bandwagon.
Walker
@wmd:
MIT has been on record saying that their online initiatives have not been as successful as they would have liked. A majority of students still want to come in for lecture. We have had similar experience at Cornell with online lecture videos — students claim that they have better experience in the actual classroom, even if the classroom has over 50 students.
Another issue with online education is doing just about anything other than lecture. Active learning and inquiry-based learning are hard as hell to do in online format, unless you are doing extensive one-on-one tutoring with each individual student. And unless the teams are colocated, project-based instruction is also pretty much a wash.
Ohio Mom
One thing to remember about the highly profitable U of Phonies: they are the model for those who are privatizing K-12. Charters can be VERY profitable.
Wall Street’s been dreaming about this for years:
http://ksdcitizens.org/2010/12/22/waiting-for-superfraud/
Ruckus
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Why should a company be any different?
They aren’t. Unfettered growth is exactly that. Long term (relatively to current WS casino practice) they can not sustain life without taking from some place else to continue their growth. When there is no where else to go to, they have to start consuming themselves. The whole system is a pyramid scheme. That’s not really fair. The concept of the system is not a pyramid scheme but the way it has evolved and is played is. And like all pyramid schemes at some point it comes crashing down. Ring any bells? The problem is the scheme is being played with our money and lives. And the scheme is so persuasive and ingrained in our lives that I don’t see any way to end it other than the crash of all crashes.
Like all cancers it will continue to grow until it is either killed off or the host dies.
Suffern ACE
@Karen: If the government stops guaranteeing the loans, they won’t be able to finance ads for very long. The pool of money for non-guaranteed student loans is much too small. These schools don’t have an endowment to fall back on, or student housing to sell.
wmd
@Walker:
I agree there are limits to on line learning.
I’ve listened to a number of Mandarin labs, but I won’t feel I’m gaining any mastery until I’m critiqued by a fluent speaker. Which means finding someone either local or online to do so.
Jeffro
I’m so confused…doesn’t the free market/private sector always deliver better results than soshulist public universities?
Karmakin
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): What Brian said in the 1st. These degrees are not worth what they should be, and that’s the problem. In the US and Canada (the problem is actually MUCH worse in Canada, TBH) we’re economically overeducated. We’re in the position where we have too many people with degrees in a growing number of fields that we need. Put on top of that, employers are using degrees as little more as class signifiers, and it’s a huge problem, and that’s opening the door to private collages who are offering said degrees.
Most large companies have their own processes and procedures that have to be followed anyway. Pre-existing information outside of creative endeavors becomes basically worthless. Eventually employers are going to wise up to this as another place to increase profits and you’re going to see the value of degrees drop even more. (Which will hurt the overall economy even more but who cares about that?)
The solution is to find an economic model that works for the uneducated as well as the educated, because in a matter of years, large portions of the educated workforce are going to be in the same boat as those without a degree.
Hal
@PurpleGirl
A Friend of mine accepted a position at a major medical center as an admin assistant scheduling surgeries, and did such a good job she was promoted to a position in billing where they are training her on the job, so it can happen.
My own experience in hospitals is that positions are available for those that work hard, and that the bosses like, but they don’t necessarily advertise any of that when they post those positions.
kay
@Mnemosyne:
It’s an upcoming financial train wreck for rural people. Online schools are really attractive to desperate, unemployed people in rural areas because they can’t make a commute to a public college. They don’t have reliable transportation and the travel time and child care investment for brick and mortar is huge.
The government-guaranteed loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, and there’s no collateral (like a house) to seize, leaving wage garnishment as the only recourse for the lender.
There just isn’t any way they’re going to be able to pay these loans back, even if they get a job. Worse, there isn’t any work here in the areas they’re studying, which is why the local community college doesn’t offer the courses the online for-profits do.
Criminal justice is the preferred course of online study here, and what are they supposed to do with that degree? The county isn’t hiring parole or police officers and they don’t need a degree to get a job at the jail.
This is going to implode unless Congress reigns it in. It’s going to crash. It’s unsustainable. It can’t work.
I wish media would focus on the government guarantee aspect, because that’s the public interest here. That’s why Congress should be on it.
Scamp Dog
@Mark: Digital logic. The for-profit schools tend to run small classes, while the classes at the state-funded community college I also teach at always start out full, and not many students drop, besides.
AuldBlackJack
The default rate on student loans associated with for profit colleges is much higher, in fact they account for 44% of defaults and 25% of student loan debts but only 10% of student population.
Mike
The hardest-hit students are those that go to the art institutes and technical schools for associate programs. It’s very likely that there’s a community college nearby with the same program (and probably better faculty) for a max of $3k. A number of students that I’ve seen end up at the for-profit places for shorter programs, due to high school coursework or aptitude test scores, would have to take remedial math and/or reading before starting the program at the community colleges. The for-profit places did not have such requirements.
d0n camillo
From the Bloomberg article on John Sperling (italics mine):
The Bush Administration never missed an opportunity to help the wealthy and powerful and fuck over the little guy. Christ, we’ll be cleaning after W for years if not decades.
kelley rose
Intercoast College is a rip off I worked there and I was a student before attending this disgusting so called college that has 11 locations in several states would love info. I was a whistle blower on all the fraud I saw and walked out after being sexually harassed many times. These schools need to be shut down ASAP… [email protected] contact me so I can give you the heads up on all the info… SCAM….