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[Forums Moderator]

With for-profit colleges the fastest-growing sector in higher education, investors have flocked to education-industry stocks. Critics say that officials at some of the companies, in order to show growth on Wall Street, have pumped up their enrollment numbers by making false promises to students and fudging admissions standards -- a tactic that has also cheated the government out of financial-aid money. Do the pressures that the stock market puts on publicly traded, for-profit colleges encourage them to misbehave? Is tighter regulation the answer?
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[Former CEC employee]

Burden and his colleague's article is excellent in its coverage of the abuses CEC engenders among its 86 colleges and schools.  What requires further investigation is the following:

1) One must note that a compelling reason that senior CEC executives and school administrators have in inflating numbers is that their compensation is tied directly to achieving budget targets in order to receive monthly, quarterly and annual bonuses.  This directly affects not only admissions directors but also the directors of education, placement, chief financial officers, presidents and CEC regional directors responsible for managing groups of schools.  It is this emphasis of budget-based performance standards that makes CEC and other publicly traded corporately owned schools similar to Enron in its abuses.  Larson and Pesch are disingenuous at best to attribute violations to individuals within CEC since the system that they have constructed directly engenders these violations.

2) The article does not do as well as indicating how the admissions abuses translate into poor education, not just for students inappropriately admitted, but also for students who deserved to be admitted.  It is not just that admissions officers mislead students into schools, promising non-existent or insubstantial programs.  It is also that the chief academic officers of the schools, whose compensation is tied to monthly retention budgets and targets, must "play games" to meet those targets to obtain bonuses, even if this means adulterating a student's education.  Thus, it should come as no surprise that grading is lax and students complete curricular requirements out of order.  Also, it is not a surprise that, to minimize personnel costs, poorly credentialled individuals are retained as teaching staff.  On this matter, accreditation agencies and state education departments have done a poor job in academically reviewing these schools.

3) On the positive side, the only reason why these school succeed with any students is because they have a sufficient number of qualified, caring faculty who try to do their best under very demanding circumstances.  CEC's relentless effort in cajoling faculty to surrrender academic standards to maintain enrollment and retention must come to an end!

4) One should also examine CEC's blatant anti-educational culture when it comes to how they deal with individuals who voice differences of opinion regarding administrative and educational policy.  Terminated employees are essentially pressured to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to receive final pay checks and other monies owed.  CEC senior management simply does not tolerate any views that are at variance with their corporate directives.

There is much more that I could add on this topic, but I am too angry to write!

[Peter]

There is an interesting premise raised in the article, that inflating admissions numbers is just something that the "for-profit" sector engages in.

From the article...
>>"It was no longer, Are the students getting the education they need to progress in their future careers and lives?" says Mr. Lynch, who worked at the Los Angeles university as a professor and academic administrator for more than a decade before Career Education purchased it, and then served for a year, starting in September 2001, as its vice president for academic affairs. "It was, How many students have we brought in today?"<<

The last line "How many students have we brought in today?" is a statement I have heard from VP's of Finance (CFO's) from every institution (non-profit) that I have worked with.  We would be foolish to think that only the "for-profit" sector worries about admissions numbers.

How many community collegese deal with "false" starts?  

The admissions discussion is one that comes up at every faculty/ administration meeting at my current position.  I know for a fact that we have admitted students this institution who were not prepared for college level work.

Rather than focusing our attention on the "for-profit" school, attention should be focused on the ethics of admissions practices in general.

[A.D.]

When the tag-line for a field is "politics are so intense because so little is at stake," you've got problems. Yes, there are for-profits that are run poorly. That is opposed to the endemic "I'm not taking responsibility" in taxpayer-funded HE that is reported on by CHE, NYTimes, et al.

If every HE dollar lost to poor management and poor performance was accounted for, it would make ENRON look like peanuts. And the public knows it.

Charters and vouchers will increase accountability.

[%sig%]

[Former CEC employee]

Peter-

On the one hand I think you are correct that admissions and other kinds of academic abuses are committed by non-profit as well as for-profit institutions.  Someday someone with sufficient courage will, for example, investigate in detail how communit colleges engage in a wide array of egregious practices to boost enrollments and secure state funding.

On the other hand, one ought not to unerestimate the sheer arrogance of the virulent and abusive admissions practices engaged in by corporately controlled colleges, which far exceeds abuses one finds in either public or private non-profit colleges.  I have personally butted heads precisely with a CEC admissions director who cajoled her staff and their relatives and significant others falsely to enroll in courses to "make budget," just so that this director could obtain her quarterly bonus.  Note that these falsely enrolled students do not pay any tuition, so their is no profit realized by the college in this act of deception.  The profit motive here is differently situated, both in the director's own greed and in CEC's relentless need to boost stock value.

[Observer]

There are some lessons to be learned from for-profit education, particularly that conducted through the internet.  The first is that one can reduce costs by letting others build libraries.  This has always been a fact of life in 'higher' education, where some institutions have invested in IT that provides access to other institutions' collections rather than investing in books and serials themselves.

The second lesson is that for-profit education makes the most minimal of investments in student services.  Traditional institutions lament the fact that costs have risen, salaries eroded, and so forth, but there is very little discussion of the fact that student services have grown immensely (perhaps as a corollary to the fact that expectations have been lowered and the principal emphasis placed on enrollments [= survival]).

If we cut back dramatically on services we could lower tuition, raise salaries, and invest in academic programs.  Universities are no longer providers of education alone, but little cities with elaborate service and entertainment components.  This feeds both the touchy-feely segment and the jock/collegian segment.  The only thing lost in the shuffle is academics.  For-profit education reverses this completely.  While it can never replace certain on-campus and in-class experiences, there are lessons we can learn from it.  First and foremost, it appeals to the self-directed, pragmatic students who wish to advance themselves without paying for student counselling services, student health services, recreation complexes, big-time athletics, minority culture centers, and so on.

Modern universities are, increasingly, nanny states, as one would expect, given the left-leaning faculties and administrations that govern them, but it is useful to pause every now and then and think about the cost (and inefficiency) of such polities and the things that we are sacrificing in order to sustain them.

[Peter]

Former CEC Employee
>>On the other hand, one ought not to unerestimate the sheer arrogance of the virulent and abusive admissions practices engaged in by corporately controlled colleges, which far exceeds abuses one finds in either public or private non-profit colleges. I have personally butted heads precisely with a CEC admissions director who cajoled her staff and their relatives and significant others falsely to enroll in courses to "make budget," just so that this director could obtain her quarterly bonus. Note that these falsely enrolled students do not pay any tuition, so their is no profit realized by the college in this act of deception. The profit motive here is differently situated, both in the director's own greed and in CEC's relentless need to boost stock value.<<

What you state here is a matter of ethics.

[Student of CEC]

I don't believe that for-profit schools need to be any more regulated than a traditional school. What needs to happen is better oversight by those accrediting these institutions.

In addition, I wonder about the employees of such a corporation. If you know this sort of practice is happening why would you "enroll yourself" lowering your own ethics to keep a job that is going nowhere.

I know jobs are not easy to come by but to knowingly mislead someone into thousands of dollars in debt that is just plain wrong and I don't buy the "my employer made me do it" bit.

I think as employees we have think for ourselves and if you know that something is not right and even more so illegal you need to get out. Therefore, I would say I hold not only CEC responsible but the recruiter/admissions counselor who mislead students.

Just my opinion,
Graduate of a CEC Owned College

[Another ex-CEC employee]

For-profits colleges (I use the term colleges loosely) particularly CEC owned schools, are in reality much worse than the article stated.  Corporate and divisional executives, who are certainly not educators, control and corrupt every aspect of the so-called educational process.

As a former 'at-will' department chair for a CEC owned school, I saw the writing on wall quickly and began searching for another position.  It took two years.  I could not get an interview within 50 miles of the college, despite good credentials.  I and others with whom I worked were regularly questioned  by search committees about working in a proprietary institution. In the end I took a $10,000 a year pay cut to salvage my career in academia.

I have seen committed educators completely demoralized by the constant ethical battles that one is forced to fight to try and make sure that there is some hint of academic intergrity.  I can also honestly state that that I have seen students graduate that I knew to be functionally illiterate. And as the other former CEC employee in this forum, I would write more if I wasn't so angry!

[%sig%]

[Librarian]

>>>There are some lessons to be learned from for-profit education, particularly that conducted through the internet. The first is that one can reduce costs by letting others build libraries. This has always been a fact of life in 'higher' education, where some institutions have invested in IT that provides access to other institutions' collections rather than investing in books and serials themselves.<<<

This is one of the questionable practices of for-profit institutions.  

In the library world resource sharing takes place, for sure.   This is all well and good; consortiums of colleges and university often join together to share the costs of providing online databases to their campuses by sharing the cost of licensing.   However, for-profit schools usually want to draw off this, often without contributing themselves.    

As a former librarian at one of these schools, often administrators are not interested in resource sharing or joining a consortium, but moreso in dumping their students on the local [state, or non-profit] university to use the library, and absolving themselves of the responsibility, and the costs,  of providing a library for their own students.

[%sig%]

[Instructor]

Can someone comment about Grantham University's business practice and their educational integrity please?

[accredited]

You can tell a thing or two by who their accreditation agency is.  In this case, it's a national body called the Accrediting Commission of the Distance Education  (www.detc.org).   A regional accreditor is much more reputable than a national one.  Also, look at the company the school keeps: other schools accredited by this place include places that prepare paralegals, medical assistants, and grant degrees like certificates in urban ministry.

It looks like a vocational school.  If you want to be an academic and go to graduate school, don't go here.  If you want to be a certified beautician, it may be the place for you.

[Peter]

Which Schools are owned by CEC?

[Correction]

Just correcting the prior post, the agency is actually the Distance Education and Training Council and the degree may have some utility, depending on your situation.

The school falls under the umbrella of being accredited, but definitely less weight than regional accreditation.  Classes are available in everything from business to teacher continuing education.  DETC can offer degrees up to the masters level.

Places that often accept national accreditation are the military (which Grantham is somewhat geared towards), government positions, and teachers, just to name a few.  Their requirements often say "accredited", which it is.

National credits will generally only transfer to nationally accredited institutions at the next degree level, though some Regionally accredited institutions might take them.

So, whenever possible, you'll want to get a regionally accredited degree, and know the limitations before you procede.  Implying that is only for hair stylists is very uninformed though.

[another CEC expatriate]

You can find all CEC-owned schools on their website, www.careered.com.