To the Editor:

It is unfortunate that the primary question posed by Stephen Burd in "The Washington Post and the Perils of For-Profit Colleges"—Are private-sector colleges a good value for students?—can be answered only by torturing the data and arriving at a conclusion different from the original question (The Chronicle, November 7).

The value of the education provided by private-sector colleges such as Corinthian cannot, and should not, be determined solely on the basis of loan-repayment data. Many students of public and private institutions graduate with significant debt and take many years to pay off those loans.

The value of the education obtained in a career college should rightfully be assessed based on job placement in the field for which the student was trained. The Detroit campus mentioned in the article provides a case in point and demonstrates the value of our career training for students. In an economically depressed area, in the midst of a nationwide recession, placement rates at Detroit campuses average 74.7 percent. For those placed and for those still to be placed, our lifetime placement-assistance commitment sustains this positive track record over time.

We know that repayment and default rates are not closely related to the type of school a student attends, but rather to certain socioeconomic factors. Corinthian has implemented a number of policies to improve repayment rates and continues to work with students to address this important issue. To judge, as Mr. Burd does, any college on a single criterion does a disservice to a thoughtful discussion on this subject, and, in fact, fundamentally misses the point.

Kent Jenkins
Vice President, Public Affairs Communications
Corinthian Colleges Inc.
Washington