"government should not erect barriers that get in the way of honest Americans trying to secure work." True. And many for-profit schools do just that.
But there is too much evidence that some schools take students' money to train them for jobs that don't exist or for which graduates will not qualify, or that charge so much for jobs that pay so little that students will never recoup their investments.
The government should erect barriers to get in the way of schools that are selling worthless snake oil. The more schools resist this basic consumer protection, the more one wonders what they have to hide.

@ DrJ, I am with you. Government should protect citizens from burying themselves in debt for a near worthless certificate. Well put.

"But there is too much evidence that some schools take students' money to train them for jobs that don't exist or for which graduates will not qualify, or that charge so much for jobs that pay so little that students will never recoup their investments." Not as much evidence as you might think. The GAO report, trotted out again and again as such evidence, appears to be fraudulent.

Regarding the cost of colleges vs. how much students earn? This is not an issue of for-profit vs. non-profit, my friend. It's everyone.

Most every Career College offers some programs that produce graduates who will succeed, and in the end, will likely repay their student loans. The same holds true for the Traditional undergrad and graduate programs.

The secret, in my opinion, based on nearly 20 years in the guarantor and lender community, along with a year behind the screen at a Career College, is not incentivizing the entry point, (the admissions process), but instead focusing on the Traditional and Career educational/career advising/placement processses so that departing students understand their rights and responsibilities related to their student loans, both Federal and Private, and they have a degree that will position them for a job that pays the kind of salary that enables the student to repay within the guidelines available. All sides of the formula are so closely intertwined that to disregard one will negatively impact the entire repayment process.

Bag the useless exit counseling process, (everyone knows it is a joke, and a non-value add that produces little to no postive outcomes). Instead, institute a structured training regime at all post secondary educational institutions that has teeth to it.

I have seen some Career College candidates truly turn their life around in the unique, supportive Career College environment, but I have also seen others who know how to work the system to maximize the student lending process with little or no regard to ever repaying the funds they borrow. If any school, Career or Traditional, enables that type of negative behavior, may the Force take you down!!

I guess everyone needs to be more focused on the "Gain Employment" issue. What is good for the goose, well, you get the idea.

We are talking about huge amounts of Federal dollars, and where are the $'s coming from? Hmmm, rumor has it that the Federal Government is going to China to secure the needed funds, while the American banking industry is poise to re-enter if given the chance. Seems like a win win to me.

tgraham13 - I don't need the GAO Report - I simply needed to talk with a niece's spouse who is still paying off a large debt for a certificate program that prepared him for a health care job that DOES NOT EXIST!!!

"The guarantor and lender community...incentivizing the entry point...a degree that will position them...all sides of the formula are so closely intertwined...a non-value add...institute a structured training regime...the unique, supportive Career College environment."

We at Murray's Discount University (formerly EduLobbyMetrics, Inc.) absolutely LOVE that kind of talk! In fact, at MDU, we incentivize the entry point until it just can't take any more, but we also focus on all that other impressive-sounding stuff, too.

If blugolds wants to give us a call, we might have a position--behind the plexi shield at our Borrow 'n' Go lending counter--just for the asking.

Good luck at the White House!

Would this effort to discourage the pursuit of useless certificates apply to mainstream colleges' English and Fine Arts programs? Just wondering. Is anybody reading this accepting resumes? www.granitesentry.com

Why should I borrow only for tuition when I can enroll in something easy, borrow the max, live on my financial aid refunds, which are larger than my tuition, while I attend classes online and work full time. The tuition at my school is $4000 a term, but the school says I can borrow up to $12,000 per term! I can pay off my car, repair my house, and pay my credit cards with financial aid. You see, I have bills to pay. I don't have to worry about paying the loans back in full, becuase I can enter the income based repayment plan and pay a fraction of what I owe.

I don't see a problem with this do you?

"Would this effort to discourage the pursuit of useless certificates apply to mainstream colleges' English and Fine Arts programs?"

I have many criticisms of English Departments, but given that English is just about the only department on campus focused on developing productive literacy in every single class, I find your assertion that a degree in English is "useless" indicative of nothing more than your own failed intellect.

Everyone should have to work that hard.

Some of the comments here (and on other columns) suggest a lack of awareness about student loan defaults. Individuals who default on their loans (i.e., are 361 days delinquent on a loan payment) ruin their credit. There are no additional loans available: no car loan, no ed loan, home equity, mortgage, etc. Default is not minor; it is a serious status with serious repercussions.

@akprof -

"tgraham13 - I don't need the GAO Report - I simply needed to talk with a niece's spouse who is still paying off a large debt for a certificate program that prepared him for a health care job that DOES NOT EXIST!!!"

Just a factual question: what is the certificate that your relative earned and what is the ostensible job title that was claimed to rest on it?

I'm curious because I see so much immoral behavior in the form of blatant lying lying on these posts. I just read about a poor student who was "robbed" by ITT's Culinary Arts program because he could not get a job. When I contacted that school, it turns out they don't have such a program and never have.

While we're talking about what a scam private colleges are, we might consider the little presentation in these same pages -- "So You Want to Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities: 9 Years Later"

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/so-you-want-to-get-a-ph-d-in-the-humanities-nine-years-later/31402?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The newly minted Ph.D. with a dissertation on 'Shakespeare, Emerson and Death' is offered a job as a receptionist but told to hurry because there are several high-school graduates applying for the same position.

Would anybody argue that the 'gainful employment' rule should apply in situations like this?

Of course not. (Does the term 'sacred cow' seem appropriate?)

akprof conducted a research study with a population of one - "a niece's spouse."

Hardly seems like a reliable sample.

Especially as a friend of my neighbor's cousin's brother-in-law's second-cousin-once-removed went to a for-profit school and has a great job!

Are people serious about not seeing this coming? I mean, this day was marked on the calendar as "sooner-or-later" the day we got into the public funding/public guarantee game. Public monies are acquired through the coercive mechanism of taxation of private citizens, and thus, are really private funds. That means that the polis enjoys a vested interest in how public monies are used, and they owe this interest to the citizens whose funds they have acquired through taxation for the sake of some perceived "common good."

Now, the argument is that an educated citizenry is a good common to all citizens, and not only those who actually acquire that education for themselves. But the problem is that, today, we do not agree, as a society--we really have little consensus at all, culturally--concerning what is really a "good common to all", nor concerning the criteria according to which specific objects of potential valuation should be assessed for inclusion in, or exclusion from, that class goods.

So the tendency is reduce our assessment to some measurable, quantifiable standard--i.e. to a "yield on investment." But how do we measure that? The tendency, again, is to exclude whatever cannot be quantified--anything that has to do with the unrepeatable dimension of human personal uniqueness--and to focus on the measurables of time and money. We can assess the average life-time earnings of those who hold this degree against the lost earnings of delayed employment, the monies paid to the degree-granting institution, the interest paid on student loans, and the opportunity costs of delayed investment in one's retirement. We can compare this data between disciplines, and against those who do not pursue higher education at that same level or at all, and we can begin to rank the economic "worth" of the degrees public monies are funding. We will ask, whether these graduates can support themselves and pay back their loans, and whether they can provide for their retirement at rates that justify the reallocation of citizen-owned monies through government coercion in the interest of some "common good--a "common good" that rests, concretely, in the success of our efforts to particularize that good in THIS individual who sought an education through this means.

These questions are already the motivation for the whole accreditation process as a prerequisite for participating in the Federal student loan program. Why should we think that it wouldn't eventually get as far as--yes--whether an English major or a History major could really be justified, or whether graduate studies in these fields could be justified, for that matter, on the Federal dime?

We no longer have a common value structure as a society, so, again, finding a way to justify these goods is going to get more and more difficult, until the whole thing really becomes unsupportable. If it isn't science, technology, or medicine, it won't be considered a justifiable public interest at all. That won't mean that other programs would become illegal, but it would mean that they would only exist insofar as the already dwindling number of interested students could pay their own way through them, without help from public funding.

. . . and we're still waiting for 'akprof' who said:

"I don't need the GAO Report - I simply needed to talk with a niece's spouse who is still paying off a large debt for a certificate program that prepared him for a health care job that DOES NOT EXIST!!!"

. . . to tell us the name of the certificate that his or her relative earned and the ostensible job title that was claimed to rest on it.

I'm keeping an open mind but health care is a rationalized market where job titles and their roles are prescribed in detail and generally tie to certifications. Schools link their curriculum directly to prescribed outcomes and proficiencies as established and controlled by national professional bodies. Variation is not tolerated.

If he is not simply lying to bolster his convictions, 'akprof' has uncovered a situation so rare that I have yet to see it in my 16 years of research in this area; namely: a school offering a certificate program X for health care job Y where Y doesn't exist.

@new_theologian,

An observation and a question for you:

- Half of the nation's college student are adults, most of whom work, have families, civic responsibilities, are struggling to get ahead and meet their personal obligations, etc. For all we know, they may be better citizens that you or me -- at least as good. How does this fact fit into your world view?

- If, as you seem to suggest, much of what you teach cannot be measured, how do you: (a) measure what individual students learn to assign a reasonably valid grade to each individual and (b) how do you enjoy some valid measure of confidence that the differences in grades you assign reflect real differences between students. (I withdraw part 'b' if you assign the same grade to all students.)

Re #11:

I did a Google search for ITT and "culinary" and came up with this page (and a following one) that says there are 105 ITT Technical Institute campuses offering "Culinary Arts & Food Service" as an area of study.

http://www.campusexplorer.com/colleges/search/?location=&majorgroup=31E7F165&online=&rows=25&family=0AD009BA

Maybe the fellow who was robbed cited the wrong campus. It's easy to mix up, say, Arnold and Bensalem. Or maybe betterschools contacted the wrong campus. Sometimes Internet & phone lines near ski lifts are a little sketch.

Retired senior teachers have trouble understanding the Internet much less the complexities of digital lead generators and aggregators, and how they misrepresent the services of actual providers. Go to the school's website: http://www.itt-tech.edu/

More to the point, this is but one of the many ways facts are distorted by those who don't know what they don't know, fail to understand the limits of their comprehension, but nonetheless find it acceptable to blather on.

@betterschools: It's not clear why you ask about my worldview, since I did not really talk about my worldview in my post. I talked about the fact that, in our society, we no longer share very much of our worldview across the general population. But, since you ask, I personally value the betterment of the individual as a good significant enough that I do not have any real objection to using public funds--to taxing citizens--to provide this good to the less fortunate. There are pragmatic questions, of course, which intelligent people of good will should try to work through, concerning how best to make the good of personal betterment through education available to anyone able and willing to pursue it. And the answer may be that government subsidy is actually counterproductive. I think arguments could be made that such subsidies as contributed to the wild inflation of the cost of college, but that is another matter. There are also questions about paradigm--failed approaches should be abandoned, even if they are supported by powerful unions.

As for providing grades that make some sort of sense, I have never really found this to be a problem. I was urged to develop a rubric for my oral exams some years back because some students had complained to the VPAA that they did not know what they were being graded on. I introduced the rubric mid-semester in a semester in which I had required two oral exams--one in the first half and the other at the end of the semester--and discovered, upon reviewing my grades, that students tended to perform within range of themselves in both exams, with or without the rubric. The rubric created an artificial quantification system for what is essentially a qualitative assessment.

We do the same thing when we grade papers. How much is one misplaced comma worth? How much is a faulty pronoun reference worth? These questions can only be answered in the overall context of the paper itself. Arbitrarily assigning 30% of the grade to grammar means that an unreadable paper could, in theory, still earn a 70%, where I would give it an F. So we create qualitative descriptions of grades, to which we then assign some numerical value, translating them into quantitative form. But this act is like the relationship between the digital record of a musical performance and the performance itself. They're not exactly the same.

@new_theologian,

Thank you for taking the time to outline this. Your initial comments suggested that your view of students was fixed on the needs of 17 year olds. To be appropriate, the debate on public subsidy, etc. needs to address the fact that roughly half of students are of majority age with all attendant rights and responsibilities. Their needs are, on balance, different. Higher education has been slow to accommodate that change in its culture, rationale for policy, definitions of outcomes, and in many more areas. It also seemed that you were making a case for not being able to measure outcomes when you said, for example, "But how do we measure that? The tendency, again, is to exclude whatever cannot be quantified--anything that has to do with the unrepeatable dimension of human personal uniqueness--and to focus on the measurables of time and money." This view reflects a common error in reasoning about measurement. Values, for example, can be quantified (and are very day) when we define them, count how many people hold a particular one and to what extent it it held, measure the relative change in two or more values or the change in precedence or valance, etc. It's a large discussion -- too large for this forum -- but non-measurement folks tend to think that any quantification of human beliefs and values is somehow reductionistic. It's not. As for non-repeatable, we generally view someone as insane if changes in their value system (elements, attributes, and relations) are radical and discontinuous. Values are among the more stable of human mental constructs, followed by beliefs, etc. They do change over time but in a way that can be measured, directly and indirectly, in ways that are rich and real. For example, one set of metrics examines value system congruence and reflects the degree to which values inferred from behavior (always risky and fraught withe measurement issues) differ from stated values. And so on . . . its a complex professional domain. Most people who thought that values and the relations among competing and conflicting and subsuming and subsumed values (value systems) cannot be measured are pleasantly surprised when they see that nothing need be lost in the process.