By Professor Doom
So
I started looking at an essay making the case against for-profits, an essay
that makes two key errors in its argument:
1
It ignores the corrupting effect of the student
loan scheme, even as it repeatedly points out that for-profit education WORKED
before the student loan scheme buried schools in money, whether these schools
were legitimate or not, due to the bogus accreditation. Don’t get me wrong,
today’s for-profit schools are primarily frauds…but it is not, solely, because
they are for-profit.
2 The essay also ignores that much of its
criticisms of for-profits apply as well to state schools, which in many cases
are only a few shades better than the worst for-profits.
One of the complaints leveled in the essay
seems like it has no comparison to what’s going on in state schools:
about 700 advisers
work in two buildings -- and that's just to service online students in the
central United States.
For-profit
schools have buildings filled with people who serve no purpose to education.
Instead, these people work as high pressure recruiters, fighting for the
scraps, the few people remaining that don’t know the fraud and worthlessness of
for-profit education. These “advisers”, once they suck a student in, then work
hard at “retention”, a major goal of state institutions as well. Much of the
money for-profits suck in via the student loan scam is spent on marketing, recruiting,
and retention.
State schools
need not have buildings filled with recruiters, nor do they have massive
marketing budgets, because they have such a big advantage with the public school
system. Thus, they don’t have buildings filled with recruiters or pay hundreds
of thousands of dollars every day for
advertising.
Does that allow for savings to be passed on to students?
Heck no. Instead
of buildings filled with people who recruit for the institution, many state
schools have buildings packed with administrators, people who, well, nobody
knows what they do, although often “retention” is used as justification for
their jobs. What is known is that now full
time educators are a small minority of campus employees, while top the top
heavy administration gets ridiculous pay.
Thus this
particular criticism of for-profits may not identically carry over to state
institutions, but the parallel is very strong: both spend huge amounts of money
on personnel that have nothing to do with education.
Another criticism
hardly applies merely to for-profits:
“…particularly
concerned about low-income and first-generation college students, who may not
know much about how college works…”
While
for-profits’ hands are not clean, the gentle reader should realize that community
colleges specialize in exploiting low-income and first-generation students,
extracting Pell Grant money from them, along with years of their lives, in
exchange for “work” that is not college level by any measure, with only a
minute percentage of 2 year college work being actual 2nd year
college work. I’ve been on a campus that, even though they’d been around
over a decade, had not a single course that would count as second year college
work…it’s tough to view this sort of “2 year education” as effective when
literally nobody is making it to the second year.
“…some schools use aggressive or
misleading tactics to get students to sign up…”
Oh? This is
hardly restricted to for-profits. State schools are shameless about
exploiting the mythology of college to get students to gamble their lives
away. I defy anyone to show me a state institution’s web page where it gives an
honest assessment of graduation (under 20%, and taking 6 years, at many 4 year
schools, and under 10% at many 2 year schools). Instead, no different than the
for-profits, the state schools promise success and wealth to their graduates. They
don’t mention the millions of college graduates that found their degrees
useless for their job.
So, yeah,
for-profits paint a rosy picture for prospective students…so do all the other
schools.
“…recruiting managers
at some companies "created a boiler-room atmosphere, in which hitting an
enrollment quota was recruiters' highest priority. Recruiters who failed to
bring in enough students were put through disciplinary processes and sometimes
terminated."
The essay
continues with its valid points against our higher education system, and
finally starts to address all the “free” money pouring in from the Federal
government:
“…One of Harkin's
biggest problems with for-profit colleges is the amount of money they get from
the federal government….”
Hey, no kidding,
for-profits are soaking up lots of tax dollars. Of course, it’s pretty obvious
the state schools get a great deal of tax money as well (well past $100
billion). I certainly agree with the essay’s criticisms of for-profit schools,
mind you…but these criticisms are just as valid for other institutions.
It’s weird how
the essay just never seems to realize this, however:
Students who attended
for-profit colleges account for close to half of all federal student loan
defaults.
So, um…that
means students at the other colleges ALSO account for close to half of all
federal student loan defaults. Again, I agree with the essay’s assessment, but
really want to point out the criticisms can easily be extended to most all of
higher education today.
The hard solution
to all these problems is to make
accreditation legitimate, instead of the total
joke, fraud,
and sham,
that it is today. Fixing accreditation would be tough, I must admit.
The easy
solution? End the student loan scam. Naturally, the essay doesn’t suggest that.
Instead it offers more government regulation, more rules against recruiting,
and, in short, more laws that will accomplish
nothing. I mean, accreditation regulations run dozens of pages, and
still have nothing on them to make education legitimate. I have no optimism
more government regulation will help.
To give some
idea of how idiotic the ideas are here, let’s just look at one suggestion:
Require that
for-profit colleges receive at least 15 percent of their revenue from sources
other than federal funds. (Current law requires that for-profits get no more
than 90 percent of revenue from federal financial aid programs, but that does
not include military or veteran student assistance programs. Critics say this
is one reason for-profits recruit veterans and students in the military; by
enrolling them, for-profits can increase the amount of revenue that doesn't
count on the "90" side of the so-called "90-10" rule.)
So, apparently
it’s a problem that for-profits get most of their money from tax dollars (uh,
where do you think state schools get their money?). But will this 90% rule on
“revenue” make a difference? Of course not. Suppose the school rakes in $100
million tax dollars. It pays $90 million to the Poo-Bah, who in turn “donates”
$80 million more to the school. So, the school has $180 million in revenue,
although it loses half of it to expenses paying the Poo-Bah right off the bat.
But now only 56% of the revenue is from tax dollars…pretty simple stuff.
Yeah, this rule
is easy enough to work around. Too bad the “easy solution” of just turning off
the student loan scam spigot just can’t get on the table. No accounting
legerdemain can solve the issue of no free money coming in.
Bottom line, the
essay makes a very strong case against for profit schools today…too bad it
makes an equally strong case against much of higher education as it stands
today.
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