Is the for-profit sector of higher education worth preserving from the current onslaught of regulatory challenges coming from the Obama administration? In the first two parts of this series, I described those challenges and outlined a reason why we should resist the urge to drive the for-profit colleges and universities out of business. My answer is that we need them not for what they are now, but for what they are likely to become as the old models of not-for-profit higher education falter. In this third of four installments, I contrast the difficulty that the not-for-profit sector has with containing costs to the streamlined approach of the for-profit institutions.
(1) Not-for-profit education’s cost problem
The “bubble” in higher education—the risk that the public will in significant numbers draw back from college because it perceives that a college education is likely not worth the investment of time and money—is a prognosis of tough times ahead for all of higher education. If the bubble bursts, however, it will be the not-for-profit sector that is hit hardest.
There are several reasons for this, including the likelihood that public disaffection with mainstream higher education will mean an unwillingness on the part of legislatures and taxpayers to bail out the industry. The rhetoric of higher-education lobbying about the personal advantages of getting a college degree won’t avail. Why should the public pay for a private good, especially one that increasingly looks self-indulgent and impractical for many students? Nor will the rhetoric that emphasizes that higher education spending promotes “national competitiveness” (or mutatis mutandis, prosperity in individual states) carry the political debate. Higher education promotes national or regional competitiveness when students learn internationally competitive skills, but not when they graduate in large numbers marginally educated and maladapted to jobs requiring secure knowledge, self-discipline, and intellectual adroitness. In higher education we do a good job of extolling to each other the importance of our institution, while failing to notice that fewer and fewer people outside our institutions put much stock in these conceits.
The emptiness of the rationalizations, however, is only the foyer of the problem. It leads to a great room packed to the rafters with other difficulties. Most of them involve long-term debt and on-going expenses that can’t easily be reduced. All the excessive infrastructure of dorms, athletic complexes, and palatial classroom buildings; all the florid overgrowth of supernumerary administrators (diversity provosts, vice presidents of student success, assistant deans of institutional effectiveness); all the ideology-driven sacred cow academic programs (e.g. women’s studies); all the thinly disguised remedial programs necessitated by the admission of underqualified students; all the big-league sports programs and the huge component costs of keeping those programs Title IX compliant and NCAA-approved; all the regulatory burdens for research labs; all the lawyers needed to comply with regulations and fend off suits from aggrieved students and employees; all the acres of landscaped campus needed to maintain that collegiate image—all-in-all, the whole lumbering enterprise of the modern college and university is colossally expensive and probably beyond the reach of sensible budgetary repair.
An outsider might wonder at that beyond-the-reach-of-repair observation. What would be so hard about eliminating surplus administrators and closing white-elephant programs? But the reality is that it is very hard indeed. Colleges are ferociously attached to these component costs, each of which has its own powerful constituency. Colleges and universities, we now see, would rather jettison parts of their core academic programs, such as foreign-language instruction, than take on a single one of these massive cost-drivers.
It isn’t hard to see why. The nonprofits built themselves by creating programs calculated to win the assent of interest groups; and then found they were in competition with other colleges and universities pursuing the same strategy. An arms race ensued. The arms had to be paid for, of course, and that meant jacking up the tuition year after year until it was a high multiple of the 20-year rate of inflation. And the whole strategy was made possible by the combination of direct state support and the federally guaranteed student-loan program. The latter meant that colleges could thrive on borrowed money they would never have to repay.
The not-for-profit sector amounts to an ideology-amenity-sports-research-remediation-and-regulation-and-student-loan complex where the underlying tensions among the beneficiaries are kept in check by the need to keep the whole thing afloat.
The economics of nonprofit American higher education is a very peculiar thing. It is a system of runaway expenses fueled by 50-some years of relatively easy access to cash and credit, favorable demographics, political support, and a consumer psychology that led large numbers of people to believe that student loans were virtually a no-lose proposition. The student-debt maneuver, however, works only so long as students believe the long-term benefits make it reasonable to borrow now and pay later. If this piece of the model breaks down, everything else crashes.
(2) The streamlined for-profit sector
Included in that crash, presumably, will be those for-profit institutions that also built themselves on the assumption that federal loans to students would flow into their coffers. But there is this difference: The for-profit sector carries only a small fraction of the locked-in-place expenses I cataloged above. That gives them a freedom to change and adapt that most colleges and universities in the not-for-profit sector lack. They do things in frank disregard for the pieties and preferences of the higher-ed establishment. The University of Phoenix, for example, pared its curriculum down to work that can be completed in six- to eight-week terms. It is not alone in offering students academic credit for “life experience.”
When I judge this by the ideal standards of liberal education, I deplore many of the results: A good portion of the for-profit sector consists of thinned-out degree programs that offer very little of the intellectual and cultural context that ought to be the matrix of higher learning. But when I judge this situation by contrasting it to the actual quality of liberal education in much of mainstream American higher education, the differences don’t seem especially large. The nonprofit sector has been busy thinning out the intellectual and cultural contexts as well. The main difference is that the non-profit sector pretends otherwise. It tirelessly enunciates its commitment to things like “critical thinking,” civic literacy, and global citizenship, while delivering programs of minimal rigor and cogency. Only a few of the nonprofits care enough about that civilizing context to give it more than gestural support. Phoenix and its cousins have just dropped the pretenses. If a large number of Americans want a stripped-down credentialing service in lieu of a real education, the for-profit sector will give that market what it demands.
That is, however, a sour way to put it. Alternatively, we could say that the for-profit sector has emerged as robustly independent of the education establishment, its cliches, and rationalizations. And it is also, by contrast with the non-profit sector, insouciant towards the ideological preoccupations of the Obama Department of Education. The attempt to extinguish the for-profit sector through regulatory smothering was launched in the name of correcting abuses. The abuses are very real and need to be corrected but they are not the whole story.
Serving the Underserved?
In part 2 of this series I quoted Barmak Nassirian, Associate Executive Director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, who warns about for-profit degree mills, the debasing of academic standards, and the counterfeiting of credentials. I take his warnings seriously, but I also see some power in the defense that the for-profits have mounted.
One version of that defense comes from Diane Auer Jones, former assistant secretary for postsecondary education, and recently appointed vice president of external and regulatory affairs at Career Education Corporation. CEC is an international for-profit company that has some 90 campuses and 116,000 students. Much of its curriculum is vocational, and much of its business model, like other for-profits, depends on encouraging its students to take out Title IV student loans. But Jones sees that practice not as “a way to exploit the federal student aid program so much as we are willing to provide second chances to a group of students who traditional universities do not want to serve.” These are students who often have not done well academically in secondary school and who aren’t much interested in liberal education. But they are educable, provided someone is willing to teach them in the right way.
Jones explains the industry’s heavy reliance on federally guaranteed student loans as a matter of the life histories and circumstances of these students:
Our students tend to be independent students, so their parents aren’t paying or saving or borrowing on their behalf. Without parental support, most people do rely on Title IV funds to go to school.
And she contrasts the funds from student loans to all the other streams of taxpayer monies that make their way to the nonprofits:
In addition, our schools do not enjoy the tremendous state and federal subsidies and tax advantages that defray some of the costs at non-profits. These subsidies cost the taxpayer more than $9,000 per student per year at community colleges (for general-studies programs and as much as four times that amount for career and technology programs) and at a minimum $12,000 per year at four-year schools.
If we looked at all of the money that goes to all institutions, it would become clear that the taxpayer spends far less for a student who goes to a for-profit college than for one who goes to a nonprofit college.
Our schools have asked congress for the authority to limit student borrowing to just tuition and fees and not everything under the sun since much of the borrowing our students do is not related to educational expenses. We know they borrow too much and we want to stop it. [...] But Congress will not give us that authority. Low-income students don’t have the support of parents who pay for their health insurance, give them access to a family car, buy their clothing and incidentals, or even send them the occasional care package or $20 bill to help out. Our students frequently borrow to buy cars, pay for their cell phones, put their own kids into private school, and even take vacations. We try to tell them not to, but we are prevented by law from disallowing them to borrow whatever amount the Department makes available to them.
Which is to say that the for-profit sector, though streamlined in comparison to the non-profit sector, is very clearly an instrument of public policy. The question is not whether it should be regulated, but how and to what ends. If the for-profits were willing to forgo government monies and operate solely as private enterprise it would be a different story.
Jones’ account of the for-profits is starkly in contrast to Nassirian’s. Where he sees degree mills, she sees second-chance vocational opportunities. Where he sees counterfeit credentials, she sees practical training. It is not hard to imagine that both are partly right, and that the situation is maddeningly complicated because of the oceans of state and federal money that are spent with so little regard for the actual benefits to students no matter what kind of institution they attend.
What’s Next?
Jones is, of course, not alone in extolling the idea that the for-profit sector colleges serve a public good. Her refutation of the image of them as piratical exploiters of students and efficient grabbers of federal dollars has been put forward forcefully by the industry’s lobbyists, and it bears real consideration. But the task I set for myself in this series of articles is to judge whether those of us who focus on liberal education, scholarship, and high standards of intellectual inquiry have any reason to be concerned about what happens to the for-profit sector. The merits of serving students who have no interest in the liberal arts don’t really bear on that question.
We are, however, closer to an answer. The success of for-profit colleges in escaping the cost structure of the not-for-profits points to a way these institutions can potentially serve liberal learning. And Jones suggests another consideration: that the for-profit sector is creating a new institutional division of labor between market-oriented vocational training and liberal arts education. That division is a very old idea but one that has been out of fashion for half a century in the United States as “multiversity,” mass higher education, and community colleges sought ways to blend a liberal-arts curriculum with credentialing for the marketplace. We may be at the point where that effort to blend the two has begun to unravel. These are threads I will pull together in the fourth and last part of this series.
20 Responses to Examining For-Profits and Cost Structure
annon1234 - January 10, 2011 at 4:35 pm
At the moment I work at a for profit that is, surprisingly, regionally accredited and offers AA, BA and masters degrees. The have both online and face to face classes. This is a large, well known university with campuses all over the USA and is not the school mentioned in the above article.
Frankly if this is the model of the future then we really are in trouble. Last quarter I was directly ordered to pass some marginal students and in another case ordered to accept as many revisions of a paper as it took, for as long as it took, for the student to pass. ALL tests are open book open note, one hour for every 20 multiple choice questions and at least for the classes I teach these questions come straight from the test bank. At the masters level (I teach in the undergrad and MBA program) there are NO tests just 5 papers (cases except the questions the students have to answer are superficial compared to when I taught the same class at a public third tier university).
The courses are standardized to the point I am told what to teach, what discussion questions to ask, tests are made with no input from me, assignments and their grading scheme also have no input from me, I have no control over anything in the class at all. I am not allowed to change a single solitary thing in any class. The attendance policy means that if you rig it right you can attend 2 classes out of 11 and still pass. HUH??? You get automatically removed from the class if you miss 4 classes but they have to be 4 in a row. So you miss 3, show up 1, miss 3, show up 1, miss the last three and you pass as long as you turn your papers in and if an undergrad take your online quizzes. The number of points attendance is worth would only ding you a letter grade.
For the most part the students I teach are grossly under prepared compared to the ‘if you are breathing we will admit you’ traditional educational universities I have taught at where there are a number of under prepared students. While there is one remedial math and one remedial english class for those students, I think community colleges and many state schools do better at addressing those needs because they have a remedial math sequence, etc. One class in each isn’t going to cut it with students who can’t multiply 2×2 without a calculator and have forgotten almost everything they knew in math.
If the for profit model is followed by everyone we should just bag higher education completely. After teaching here I realize why many of these for profit schools have no respect. What is going on there is only marginally education. It doesn’t have to be that way, but the place I work at is a diploma mill spread out over a bunch of years (all the better to fleece you of more financial aid) rather than sending in your check and immediately getting your diploma in the return mail.
annon1234 - January 10, 2011 at 4:52 pm
PS
I forgot to add that I am being paid about 2/5 less than the going rate for my field. Some faculty the rate is even lower than that. The amount of money wasted where I work floors me. For example, there seems to be an endless supply of money to fly people all over for “training” – doing so at the last minute and sending so many people like this that thousands of dollars would be saved if they’d fly the trainer to us.
The faculty are treated as if we are valueless. We have no access to anything (supplies, keys, rooms, nothing), our office is a bull pen and we have tiny 3′ long desks that aren’t even in cubicles. Even the sales reps (opps – admissions counselors) have more privacy and bigger digs than the faculty does.
There is an endless supply of free food, pop, expensive coffee… Frankly I’d rather have a bigger paycheck. I could easily cut thousands from the budget here by cutting all this crap out. Our dean told us that the people over the dean level were all millionaires. Yeah at the expense of faculty and students.
Benefits suck. Much more is put into retirement by private and state universities (the for profit I work for puts in 3%), heath insurance is both better and cheaper at private and state schools. I have no sick days, I am given a schedule of when I have to work, that I have no control over, that schedules a 40 hour week – even if we have to sit there and do nothing, I have no time off between quarters. I can’t come in on Sunday to get anything done because faculty are not to be trusted in the building. They check up on us to make sure we are doing the secretarial work that we have to do for them. We function as a call center manually enrolling students in classes (and while faculty do advising on regular campuses this is qualitatively different). If we do any work at home it isn’t counted towards our 40 hours.
I was forbidden to talk to students about sensible borrowing, the implications for that in terms of monthly payments later, and the fact that you can’t dump student loans via bankruptcy. This place has students taking out unsubsidized loans – as freshmen. That is NOT a good idea. If you are qualified for financial aid or can pay out of pocket we will admit you and pass you.
Obviously I am trying to get out of here. This is NOT education. If this is the future of education I’m moving to Canada. The USA will sink even lower in the educational arms race.
dr56coll - January 10, 2011 at 5:13 pm
It saddens me to read the comments of instructors from for-profit colleges. In defense, not all students are as “dumb” and academically disadvantages as you claim. I earned my BA and MPA (3.80 GPA) from a traditional college.Competition and requirements for Ph.d or Doctorate programs are unbelievable. But with our changing economy returning to school to change careers is essential. Why are we not working to improve the educational standards of for-profits? Traditional colleges have made it impossible for the “average” individual to attend college while holding a full-time job. I attend a for-profit as a Doctorate Business Admin student, all instructors have Ph.d from your traditional Universities and we work a rears off! Making blanket statements regarding the student body and educational standards of all for-profits is irresponsible and insulting. Fix the problem, and take a closer look at the how many people attend these institutions as an alternative to your traditional colleges and ask yourself why. It isn’t all about the money(FA), how about an investment in our future! Let’s stop pulling the “poor,irresponsible, can’t pay their rent” mentality…some of us just want a better opportunity, one that an education can provide….or is that no longer the case?
11640919 - January 10, 2011 at 5:40 pm
Having worked as a faculty member and administrator in both the public and for-profit sector, I believe that Peter Wood provides an accurate and dispassionate analysis of the structural problems facing higher education.
While I lean toward a laissez-faire approach to regulation, my experience in the for-profit sector left me with the conviction that accreditors and state licensing officials must oversee the for-profits with some rigor to deter their natural tendency to degrade legitimate educational standards.
lizziec - January 10, 2011 at 6:11 pm
@annon1234: I share your frustration and can support your description of many of the for-profit students academic preparation for college. Similarly the waste and abuse I see at public R-1s align with the article’s criticisms. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the degree will become a useless measure of anything: for employers and degree holders. Employers will soon need to turn to other means of screening for candidates as the credential of the BA/BS degree no longer represents a certain level of skill/ability or intellect/knowledge. Where that leaves the droves of people with superficial understanding of some aspect of a subject and much more student loan debt than their work capacity will ever afford them to pay will be the stuff of news magazine documentaries.
I keep hearing what service the for-profits provide to disadvantaged students, but I cannot see how falsely raising hopes of better jobs and pay in combination with extraordinary debt (that is not dischargeable via bankruptcy) is really such a good thing…
lizziec - January 10, 2011 at 6:26 pm
@dr56coll: here is the comparison I see between the undergrads at the public vs the for-profit where I teach:
My public/non-profit classes are comprised of predominantly capable/prepared students with a handful (less than 10%) of students who are simply not academically prepared for the studies ahead of them. In my for-profit classes, this proportion is reversed, with most of the students in the “not academically prepared” category. Even the least creative, non-critical thinker at the public institutions can – at a minimum – write a coherent sentence and do basic math (like calculate a percentage), which is rarely the case in the for-profit populations I have seen.
I agree with annon1234 that if this is THE model (for-profits), this country is in big trouble.
director19 - January 10, 2011 at 9:57 pm
Anon1234. Face it, you’re a whore! bad mouth your employer and take their money. Pitiful.
I work in proprietary eduaction and have for a long time. All colleges are not as bad as you make yours out to be. If you are correct, shame on them. Have some pride. Leave.
studentperspective - January 11, 2011 at 9:03 am
Shame on you director19! Are you not capable of making a comment without such name calling? You stated that you work in proprietary education and your brash remark to anon1234 does nothing more than prove his/her point about the caliber of the sector as a whole.
jstice - January 11, 2011 at 10:31 am
State and private non profits can be selective in their admissions policy. Incredible scholars and indecisive teens choose them. Once the student drops out, the options for employable skills are reduced, and they continue down a zig zag path of life (not all, but where do all those drops go?).
Many for profits provide a “last chance” opportunity for the many under served constituencies. Eliminate or reduce their effectiveness and you impact the populace most vulnerable and in need of protecting. Improve school performance and oversight? Of course, at all institutions.
Can’t we all just get along?
betterschools - January 11, 2011 at 10:56 am
Thank you Peter for attempting this dispassionate intellectual appraisal. I worry that too few among us value this kind of objective self-appraisal.
In the context of my appreciation, I offer four suggestions: (a) I believe you would benefit from additional information on innovation in a few of the for-profits (I can point you to that); (b) some of your generalizations would change were you to examine value-added across the types of institutional charter, controlling for inputs; (c) your analysis focuses on a few of the very large for-profits whereas there are roughly 1,000 of them; on many dimensions of interest, I find that the within-charter differences are as large as the between charter differences; and (d) your analysis would be more complete were it to address the differences that exist across charters with respect to the incorporation of modern learning and evaluation sciences into teaching practices; none of the major types are doing what they might but a few of the large for-profits are leading the way here; your treatment of compression fails to address this scientific dimension; what we can learn in a given amount of time is partly determined by how it is taught to us; this is true with the sciences and the arts.
11312609 - January 11, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Better schools: thank you for the suggestions. I think you will see some of these anticipated in part 4 of the series, which is now posted.
Peter Wood
quidditas - January 11, 2011 at 3:39 pm
“In higher education we do a good job of extolling to each other the importance of our institution, while failing to notice that fewer and fewer people outside our institutions put much stock in these conceits.”
I disagree. While they may not always agree educators are doing a great job or they may think certain subjects are needlessly self indulgent, most of the US public has about as much “faith” in the power of education as an economic cure-all (and as a cure for much else) that US educators do.
The problem is you’re both wrong. Economic forces beyond your power to affect as educators–albeit not beyond the power of Fedgov to affect, as it actively makes domestic industrial policy–are much more powerful than your touching shared faith in the capacity of educated individuals to pull themselves up their bookstraps that you’ve inherited from the rough and tumble (not to say barbaric!) 19th century.
quidditas - January 11, 2011 at 3:42 pm
In other words, you can grind down a student’s education to the barest nub, deliver it on-line via video feed, and cut costs until you’re blue in the face, and it will still turn out to be a bad investment in an even worse economy because you missed the real story.
quidditas - January 11, 2011 at 3:59 pm
“Competition and requirements for Ph.d or Doctorate programs are unbelievable. But with our changing economy returning to school to change careers is essential.”
Why? So you can trade jobs with the other guy whose job was eliminated last week?
It’s become a shell game, people. And you’re the mark.
jkytle - January 11, 2011 at 4:16 pm
About ten years ago, I served on several evaluation teams looking at one of the largest for-profits located in Arizona. We visited several existing sites and headquarters. It was a strong team that was sympathetic to the claims for serving adults and innovation. What we found was “McEducation,” not my invention. You can find the article in The New Yorker. Standardized, high fat education that I felt was not academic. They did several things quite well: training of enthusiastic teachers, marketing, and a certain version of student services. But it is not a liberal education, or wasn’t at that period. I also later discovered another one of their operations providing curriculum shells to a small catholic school in CT, without acknowledgement! I just don’t trust what they say.
I’ve also visited for-profit family colleges in New York State, which are serious, committed to nontraditional students and worth supporting. So, I fear most the “big box” for profits with their claims about quality but deep disregard of academic values. Finally, I’ve also written to the Chronicle about the co-branding with this one rapacious institution. This sector has to be tightly regulated, in my opinion.
moongate - January 11, 2011 at 4:58 pm
I appreciate that Mr. Woods is attempting to be objective and non-judgmental here, but I think he’s actually being a bit too kind to these money pits of education. And I do hope that Mr. Wood is also going to take a look at what actually goes on (I will venture) behind the doors of most for-profits—that is, incredibly poor instruction done by underpaid and under-qualified instructors who are strong-armed into passing students as if they were paying customers at a fitness center.
Probably most of us would agree that the non-profits are watering their courses to accommodate a growing mass of underprepared, under-motivated college students, but I bristle a little when I hear things like “Only a few of the nonprofits care enough about that civilizing context to give it more than gestural support”—that’s not really fair. Certainly the non-profits could and should do a better job, but that would mean unswerving support from parents, politicians, tax-payers and, yes, even students to hold standards high (and which would probably also mean giving adjuncts actual careers and doing away with student surveys) and a monetary commitment to the liberal arts. But that’s another story…
Suppose that the for-profits dropped the pretense of being “college” and simply taught in an abbreviated quarter or two the specific skills needed for the types of jobs their students are likely to get ascashiers, receptionists, or data entry, for instance, approximating the old secretarial colleges? Could this be a happy if less profitable version of for-profit education?
jfauvell - January 11, 2011 at 6:01 pm
Like the first commenter, I too teach (online only) at a well-known for-profit that is accredited and that maintains abnormally careful standards for its faculty. Supervision is tight and I see little difference, if any, between what I do there and what I have done at not-for-profits. By the way, I’ve been teaching for about 30 years. I am not sure what is happening at some of these schools, but this seems to be an unfair generalization.
klabacka - January 11, 2011 at 8:57 pm
I have been working with students and their federal student loans since 1990 with the company I started called http://www.defaultprevention.com and I can assure you that students at for-profits are a quality bunch. However, their demographics are different than the traditional 4 year student and their credit is and was different upon initial enrollment; hence, it should be different when they graduate. If the for-profits are not in the picture then who is going to fill the void? The traditional 4 years institutions cannot and will not fill the void. Look at history.
disgusted2 - January 11, 2011 at 9:27 pm
annon1234,
I echo your sentiments! Not sure what FP institution you are employed with, however, your story “rings true” for the 3 different ones I have been employed at. Now what is different is my work has been exclusively with ADVANED graduate programs (EdD and PhD), with the same IDENTICAL behaviors of providing grades that students don’t earn, accepting substandard work and the BIG one these Universities will ignore plagiarism. YES! There are students who have taken published dissertations and COPIED portions of them and are allowed to do so. The degrees were awarded and they are allowed to participate in graduation hooding ceremonies.
You are correct; as soon as you are able to get out do so! Don’t compromise your soul for wrong doing. As for the comment about faculty having credentials, YES we all do, that is another ploy, accreditation would be questionable or not possible if the institution could not provide evidence that they have qualified faculty. The VAST majority of faculty hired or in their directory do not teach full time or even very part-time. What about a ratio of 2 FULL-time faculty in a College of Education that has over 1500 advance graduate students in 4-5 programs? At most there will be 3-5 very part-time people who teach 1 or 2 courses a term anywhere from 8-16 weeks to 50-75 students at a fee of $2500-$2800 before taxes. Compared to each student paying $4000per course per term so who is making the lion’s share of the student loan money these students borrow.
I am fully aware of that fictitious formula (I was a Dean at one of these institutions) until I uncovered [the dissertation stealing ring] used to pull the wool over the public’s eyes that FP tuition costs less that NFP institutions tuition.
Say it again annon1234, “if this is THE model (for-profits), this country is in big trouble.” Pack your bags and let’s move to the otherside of the world, they are egar for building sound educational structures…..
annon1234 - January 12, 2011 at 10:25 am
do56coll
I never said all were dumb or underprepared, but enough are that I am surprised that we don’t have more remedial classes to bring these students who are up to college level. Every community college I am familiar with has MORE remedial coursework for underprepared students than this for profit (which has 40,000 to 50,000+ students – forgotten the exact number). Teaching this high % of underprepared students one would expect MORE not FEWER remedial courses. The explanation I am given is that students don’t want to pay for classes they don’t get degree credit for. Umm yeah I can believe that – especially not at 3 times the cost of public community college education costs. Trouble is when we treat our education menu like a McDonald’s menu – buy what you want and complain to customer service (the customer -opps the student -is always right) to get what if you aren’t happy with what you earned – then education and educational standards goes out the window. Instead education is dumbed down to a level that students who need, but are not getting, sufficient remedial classes, have to have in order to pass. This rips off both the bright, prepared student who would be successful anywhere and the student who needs significant supports but instead of getting that is getting a substandard education.
11600919
I agree that the accrediting bodies need to dig significantly deeper and ask why, for example, open book open note tests are 20 questions per 1 hour (I taught an online course for a state university and this was NOT a problem I had to contend with); why MBA students have no tests at all. i just looked at the MBA “attendance” for last week for one class I teach. I have 41 students in that class. Only 5 clicked on the online lecture, only 3 clicked on the added resources link. Most participated in the online discussion – most in the last 5 hours of the week so just what kind of discussion can you have in the 9th hour when students log on once to the discussion, post their three required comments and are done. They needed one substantive comment (and the ones who posted near the end generally offered nothing new, instead they reworded other student’s comments) and needed two short comments on other student’s comments. That is it. Looking at the 5 written assignments, they can get by in this class by reading precious little of the book, never listening to the lectures, never accessing the additional activities. THAT is education???
director19
This kind of name calling is inappropriate amongst civilized people, never mind the educated. My attempts to teach at a level that is appropriate for higher education has been met with resistance and I have been explicitly told all students will pass. THAT is NOT education. And as I stated in my posts I am trying to leave. Like most of the rest of the human race I need a job and health insurance. The hiring cycle for higher education means I am stuck in this place until fall presuming I get a job elsewhere in this era of frozen budgets and hiring freezes.
klabacka
Different demographics is no excuse for a substandard education. Having poor credit is not an excuse for substandard education. What is going on, in my opinion, is theft and fraud and the victim is the student. These for profits are preying on students using high pressure tactics… at my school the most important acceptance factor is ABILITY TO PAY via financial aid. Students are pressured into taking 2 classes per quarter because the credit system is rigged to make them full time at 2 credits. Students who only want to take one class (which would make sense for the load that some of them are carrying) are strongly discouraged.
jstice
Most community colleges have open admissions policies, have evening classes, are a heck of a lot cheaper than for profits and offer more remedial classes to help under prepared students “get up to college level”. In my opinion the for profit sector, if they are choosing their niche as the “last ditch opportunity”, needs to actually serve that niche appropriately. Instead of watering down education, they need to provide the extensive remedial coursework that is needed, teach students how to approach an education to be successful, and provide the significant support these students may/will need. They need to teach about study skills, work to identify and diagnose learning disabilities as I am convinced a larger number of these students have undiagnosed learning disabilities, offer more remedial classes to plug the gaps and do this at a significantly reduced tuition rate (at the school I work at all it takes is 5 students for a class to break even. You do the math at the profit level. The remedial classes should be offered at cost).
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The for profit sector is under attack for some very valid reasons. Their pockets are deep and they are fighting back like a corporation fights back – spin control, superficial changes, working to bury what might be found objectionable…
I disagree that they should be the only ones targeted for student loan default rates. ANY institution that has abysmal repayment/default rates needs targeted, not just the for profits.
They should be attacked for the RIGHT reasons – which is watered down education, questionable standards, not having in place the tools needed to actually serve appropriately the niche they target… Just as in the non profit and state education sectors faculty are complaining that student teaching evaluations contribute to grade inflation, in the for profit sector it is more than just grade inflation. Students have learned that if they threaten to complain at a level over the head of the campus, that deans react. Deans are mindful that their evaluations depend on clean campus surveys and a student complaining is treated with the “the customer is always right how did you screw up?” mentality. This translates into a trickle down where deans back students regardless of the truth, students learn that complaining results in being bought off with good grades (eg instructor is ordered to pass the student)… and the downward spiral begins.
The real underlying need that is not being addressed in this debate of for profits vs non-profits/state is the following:
1) There are students out there who have forgotten everything they ever learned in K-12 but want more education to get ahead at work, there is no way their current educational level is anywhere near college level but they possess a high school diploma.
2) There are students who need shorter, more concentrated class offerings in the evenings due to work schedules
3) There are students who need a part time program that is as coherently put together as the full time progressions in terms of scheduling of courses and their progressions so that they can complete school in as fast a time frame as possible under their own set of circumstances.
4) There is a large group of students who need financial aid to pay for school and the model of full time/part time status for pell grants and student loans perhaps needs to be redefined as financial aid based on the number of credits taking sliding scale as it forces schools to play credit tricks to make 2 classes a week look marginally full time (as in get out of school in 5 years not 4 kind of full time) and forces some students to take more credits than best serves them. This drives up their student loan borrowing because they are “full time” for more years since they are at the minimum level of credits for full time, not the “usual” number of credits.
5) At for profits you pay for each and every credit you take. Unlike private and state schools where, once you are full time, you can take 12-18 (and sometimes 21) semester credits for the same tuition level, at the for profits you pay per credit regardless.
6) Something needs to be done about the bankruptcy laws and student loans. While it should NOT be easy to discharge them, there needs to be more situations where students can do this.
7) The issue of almost exclusively staffing education with adjuncts (a huge percentage of only have masters degrees) needs to be looked at.
8) In addition one needs to look at who is steering this ship. When a fresh PhD (fresh from a for profit) who has worked 3 months as a faculty member can be promoted to associate dean one needs to question just what is going on. THAT would never happen at a state school or a non-profit. In addition state schools and non-profits give at least lip service to research and keeping current in your field. I can’t even get this for profit to put a statistical program on my computer because I don’t teach statistics. That I want to analyze data for some research I am in the middle of is an irrelevant reason. By they way I can’t even BUY a program myself to put on my work computer because a stats program is not an approved faculty program to have on computers. I can’t even put MS Word on the desktop to get to it more quickly.
My list is a lot longer but I have to go punch a clock and since there is probably keystroke tracking on my work computer (I wouldn’t put it past them), and I know for sure they read the e-mail as it has happened to me and others where I work, I don’t dare spend any of their time on their computer reading about or responding to anything related to my profession at work. I only dare do things related to the work they want me to do.