= Premium Content

  • Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Previous

Next

New York Joins List of States Known to Be Investigating For-Profit Colleges

May 19, 2011, 10:37 pm

Bridgepoint Education Inc., which operates the for-profit Ashford University, acknowledged in a filing this week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had received a subpoena from New York State’s attorney general related to an investigation of the company’s business practices. According to reports by Bloomberg and The New York Times, the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, is also looking at business practices of three other companies that operate for-profit colleges—the Career Education Corporation, Corinthian Colleges, and Lincoln Educational Services—as well as an online school founded by Donald J. Trump. Mr. Schneiderman’s office declined to comment. His inquiry makes New York the sixth state known to have such investigations under way.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment
  • http://www.nixhome.com/ J. Vincent Nix, PhD

    still not enough!  the total should be 50!

  • jtfrank

    Let’s hope that no “settlements” are made and that full disclosure of the allegations, findings, and punishments come out. 

  • betterschool

    Several for-profits schools on this list need this kind of scrutiny. Hopefully, they will adapt to everyone’s benefit. We’ll see.

    But there is much more to the picture. It would be a good thing if all of the issues associated to NY higher education — problems and solutions, efficiencies and costs, triumphs and abuses — were to come out. They will not. New York’s public postsecondary education system is the least innovative, most protectionistic, and most wasteful system in the US. No facts will be admitted into evidence that would allow the public to see these problems and gain a balanced view of higher education in this state. Please don’t bother responding to me. Use the energy to divide the state’s public university budgets by the number of students it enrolls and graduates. Add the per-student taxpayer support to the per-student tuition. When you have a rough approximation of how much it costs to graduate a single student from a NY public university and how much it costs to support the system’s failures, bring this information back to the table to compare with other types of institutions. You will not believe what you see unless you do the math for yourself. The data are easily accessed.

  • goxewu

    Of course it costs more to educate a student in a public university than in a for-profit one. However:

    * The public university is a public institution, not a private subcontractor, and the costs of maintaining a public institution (and I think we should have public institutions such as universities) are more than simply doing business.

    * A decent, four-year undergraduate education, with some kind of core-course foundation, with some for-itself, for-enlightened-citizenship education in the humanities, and some sort of student life, is available almost exclusively in not-for-profit higher education. Yes, a certain sort of near-autodidact student could get a reasonable undergraduate education in a for-profit, but they’re relatively few and far between.

    * For-profit education is best left to occupation trade schools which grant certificates, not degrees, and some graduate programs.

    * The graduate subject areas appropriate for the for-profits are nominally limited to basically high-end bullsh*t programs in Educational Policy Management Administration Consulting Studies, or the like, and really should be limited to business. (To learn to be a shark, study in a shark tank.)

  • betterschool

    I agree with the overall thrust of your comments, the first two points especially. Two of my degrees came from public institutions and I attended four in total (five if you count a British institution). I was afforded exceptional opportunities at a, then, very affordable cost. I am a strong supporter of the very notion of public universities. Calling attention to how they are failing and becoming marginalized is my best effort to preserve that notion for future generations. This said, my comments above were limited to the state of New York where, I suspect, you may join me if you take a look at their numbers. (Sidebar: remember that just less than half of college students are working adults, who vote (I guess or at least they may), have families, etc. and took some core courses in the past, when they were younger. Some of your concerns for humanities, etc, which I share for the young students, do not apply or do not apply in the same way to the 28-32 year olds (mean age in for-profits).)

    I disagree with your point #3. I know quite a few physicians, psychologists, physicians assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, and physical and occupational therapists who earned their degrees at for-profit institutions. At a technical level, I am not qualified to judge the competence of these individuals but I know them because they hold responsible positions, some of them very senior positions, at distinguished health care institutions. They seem very smart and their peers and subordinates appear tho think they are competent. Yes, most of these individuals earned a terminal degree at the graduate level, as you noted in your comment, but some are BS and, equally important, some of the graduate level individuals also earned their undergraduate degrees at a for-profit. 

    On your point #4, I am greatly concerned that we, as a nation, restore focus and support on the non-degree programs that contribute to our infrastructure and our manufacturing capacity (electronic, health care, construction, transportation, security, etc.). In a perfect world, my first choice would be a balance between community and career colleges with the latter picking up the slack where needed. Unfortunately, it is the other way around in 2011. Community colleges represent more of a statistical than practical opportunity. For most career training programs, community colleges turn away roughly 3-5 times the number of qualified applicants than they have seats to accept. The situation is getting worse and will continue to do so as state budgets decline. These ratios are not guesses but are based on specific research in most major markets. I have a few friends who are serving as presidents at community colleges. All of them have told me that they are cutting back further on certificate programs because the new (July 1) Gainful Employment regulations will apply equally to the certificate programs of the community and career colleges, even though to the degree programs of only the for-profits. While the for-profits got busy adapting, many of the community colleges huddled and decided to take their marbles out of the game. I like these guys personally, but this is not public service and I told them so.

  • betterschool

    I need to amend an impression I may have left that the for-profits are sticking with it on the certificate programs. Large, established businesses are risk-aversive and I see many of them deciding not to take the risks incurred by offering certificates for the lowest paying (therefore in some ways, the most needed and beneficial) occupations. It isn’t worth it as a business proposition because you are dealing with a socially and economically disadvantaged class that has a lower probability of succeeding however valiant your efforts. In the past, when the feds would accept a floor of 70% placement as evidence of success, a school could, if it worked hard, hit that target for even the lowest paying occupations. Now . . . maybe not. I don’t know who is going to educate these people and it is a concern. Perhaps the new, small for-profits can find a way.

  • willynilly

    Be patient Dr. Nix.  The parade of states has begun and is growing weekly.  The cadence is loud and clear.  The days of the scam school operators are numbered. We all look forward to three outcomes. 1.) The rogue schools are closed. 2.) The principals, aka thiefs are prosecuted, fined handsomely and given jail time. 3.) Student victims are made whole. Fines are sufficient enough to pay the loans of the students who took on debt under fraudulent claims by the schools that they would benefit from the instruction – which, of course, they did not.      

  • goxewu

    * Point taken on nurses, healthcare professionals, et al. But *doctors*? I don’t want to see a diploma from a for-profit medical school on his/her office wall. A little whirlwind will be caused by the speed with which I leave the waiting room.

    * Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, about almost half of college students being working adults. This (and, of course, betterschool isn’t the *cause* of the situation) is similar to the Republicans “starve the beast” strategy of gutting a public institution, then pointing out that it’s not working, and then using its “not working” as an excuse to gut it even more. It functions like this: a) Gut the number of jobs available to people without college degrees (e.g., offshore manufacturing, phone banks, record-keeping); b) force those erstwhile “working adults” to go back to college to get a degree to get anything better than the minimum wage; c) point out how not-for-profit higher education can’t really service these people, who need school schedules ordered around their lives rather than the reverse; d) funnel these people into for-profit schools.

    * I’m a liberal and I’m in favor of raising taxes to keep public institutions in the shape that they should be in. Federally, putting income tax rates back where they were before the Bush tax cuts (in the middle of a war!–first time in American history) went into effect, would solve much of the problem, and , e.g., statewide, there’s a proposal in California to keep its public universities in the shape they should be in with a one percent state income tax increase on incomes $500,000 and over.  

    * The average crap quality of the for-profits has been abundantly testified to on these threads. The arguments that only such-and-such percentage of the for-profits are really bad, and that only such-and-such percentage of the big chains (that’s what they are, chains, like McDonalds, and not universities with “branches”) have corrupt officers and underqualified faculty is like saying that only such-and-such percent of a major city police department is corrupt. It has to be as near-zero as possible, and big deals have to be made out of transgressions. Police departments will reluctantly do that because all they’ve got is their reputation. Big non-profit higher education chains won’t do it because in attempting to salvage their reputations, they’ll lose business and their investors’ money.

    * As best as I can make out, betterschool’s saying in his addendum that the big for-profits won’t offer certificate programs in blue-collar and ring-around-the-white-collar jobs because there’s no money it, so the only hope is for the little ones to do it. And if the “gainful employment” requirement were racheted back to 70 percent maybe they could, because they’re allegedly not so risk-averse as the bigs. Sounds like a recipe for fly-by-nights to me.

  • http://twitter.com/#!/ProprietaryEd ForProfitEd

    The scrutiny and information requests (or CID’s) must include residents enrolled into fully online programs, even if the OPE ID is registered to an out-of-state campus.

  • http://twitter.com/#!/ProprietaryEd ForProfitEd

    “Perhaps the new, small for-profits can find a way.”

    The good for-profits without the corrupt business model based on targeting low-income and minority students with deceptive recruiting/retention tactics should start speaking out in support of holding the bad actors responsible.  It is time the smaller reputable for-profit schools start an organization to counter the Career College Association (APSCU), the Coalition for Educational Success, Harry Alford, Lanny Davis and the NBCC.

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.