By Professor
Doom
So I’m looking at a typical institution of
higher education, this one passing itself off as an art school, the Academy of
Art University (AAU). Alas, higher education has fallen so far that “typical
school” means “school focused on drawing in as many students in as possible,
sucking them dry of their student loan money, and spitting them out.”
Mallory
Lynch, a former admissions representative who resigned in February, says
managers told her to woo students with success stories and avoid mentioning the
dropout rate. She felt uncomfortable selling the school to people who were
clearly unprepared (including an unemployed mother of four, those who couldn’t
afford the $100 application fee or prospective online candidates who had no
computers).
How do
people that can’t afford college, nevertheless pay for it? Well, student loans
of course. How do bogus institutions that charge ridiculous amounts of money
for worthless degrees nevertheless get students to qualify for those student
loans?
Accreditation.
Accreditation
assures that the school is legitimate. The government trusts the accreditor’s
word that AAU is legitimate, so the government will send money to it. Trouble
is, for the most part, accreditors trust the institution’s word that everything
at the institution is legitimate. It’s why we
have scandals going on at even our state schools that go on for well past a
decade, without accreditation, or the government, ever catching
on.
The accreditor in
this case is the Western
Association of Schools and Colleges, WASC, which has a
(should-be-illegal) regional
monopoly on accreditation. The only way AAU can get accredited is to satisfy
WASC’s rules.
So, did AAU, a
school with serious legal trouble for lack of integrity in recruiting, and
actively deceiving students about its programs, satisfy the accreditation
requirements? Of course it did:
Although
WASC reaffirmed AAU’s accreditation for another seven years in July 2014, it
issued a “formal notice of concern,”
--hey, if
anyone wants to give me a billion dollars, 7 years of no oversight, and a
‘formal notice of concern,’ please use the contact form. It’s a great deal.
It’s also the typical deal accreditation offers schools in exchange for
lucrative accreditor fees.
So, as far as
accreditation is concerned, AAU is just dandy, and won’t have to worry about
accreditation again for a long time. Accreditation really is a license to
plunder. There is no
penalty for any violation of accreditation, as I’ve discussed before. “Formal
notice of concern” is laughable—the school (or the family that owns it) has, at
worst, six more years of plundering, then has to close up shop, if they feel
like it. I’ve seen just about every act of fraud, incompetence,
unprofessionalism, and outright theft go on at institutions, and never has an
accreditor said “hey, that’s a problem, we’re not accrediting you anymore. Good
luck getting students to pay tuition with their own money!”
Ok, there’s one
violation I’ve never seen: failure to pay accreditor fees. Keep this in mind:
if an accreditor doesn’t accredit the institution, the accreditor doesn’t get
paid. This is
just one of many conflicts of interest in accreditation.
The student loan
scam is key to the corruption of higher education today. Accreditation is the
gatekeeper, but the flood of student loan money has long since unlocked the
gates. Accreditation is now so useless, so far removed from education, that the
gates to corruption are now thrown wide open.
Allow me to
demonstrate by looking at WASC’s own rules for accreditation and see that it
could shut down AAU, and many other schools, just by being a legitimate
regulator.
Let’s go to the very first thing WASC
claims it does:
And, game over. AAU sucks in every student
it can, tells the student he can be an artist even if he’s never drawn so much
as a stick figure, and tells the student that he’ll get a high paying job with
his degree from AAU. It doesn’t tell the student his chances of graduating are
slim at best, and, in violation of federal law, refuses to release the data
showing how likely graduates are to get a job that would pay off the student
loan:
AAU also
tracks job-placement statistics…but it doesn’t publish them despite the federal requirement to do so.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education says schools that don’t comply
with the rule may be cut off from federal student aid if violations are deemed
“egregious.”
--emphasis
added.
In what
universe is this sort of behavior “trustworthy?” And yet the accreditor says
the school is fine, and won’t have its accreditation reviewed again until 2021.
Talk about a free ride…
Ok, “trustworthy” is in the eye of the
beholder, I guess. Is there anything else in the accreditor’s rules that might
be a problem?
Well, sure:
Again,
the ol’ “not meeting Federal requirements to release their data” means we’re
done, again. This school should not be accredited, it’s not meeting its legal
requirements.
Ok,
maybe I’m just harping on violating law. Lots and lots of schools openly violate the law. Any other issues?
Of
course:
“…its commitment to successful student learning.“
The school’s online programs (and online
is a big part of the school) have a 6%, six year graduation rate. A school
committed to successful student learning would completely shut down those
programs instead of continue to push for their growth through recruiting and
online advertisement. As long as those programs are open, as long as the school
continues to seek to expand them despite the solid track record of failure, the
school is in violation of accreditation, and should not have accreditation.
Any other issues? Of course, it’s simple
to just review the regulations to find yet another clear cut problem:
The
institution must have a functioning governing Board
responsible
for the quality, integrity, and financial stability of the institution
As I mentioned in the previous post, the
Poo Bah buys buildings for her personal ownership, and leases them to the
school. Uh, can someone say “conflict of interest” here? The Poo Bah makes the
ultimate decision regarding what buildings a school has, and how much is paid
to rent them. Shady insider dealing is why many institutions (fully accredited
institutions, I might add) are loaded down with construction projects, even as
ever more coursework is moved online. A legitimate accreditor would be looking
into those deals, and shutting the school down. Instead, WASC gave AAU a free
pass. Again.
I could continue to go through the
accreditor’s rules, but it’s pointless: the accreditor isn’t going to follow
them, and, in exchange for accreditation fees, will continue to assert that AAU
is a completely trustworthy institution that is honestly trying to offer
legitimate education and help its students succeed, despite all the evidence to
the contrary.
AAU is a private, for-profit institution,
and something of a family business. I have no problem with that, but it’s very
clear the primary business here is just plundering our citizens with the
student loan scam. The Federal government is catching on to this scam,
but even when it shuts down these schools, it leaves the students in debt. The Poo Bahs remain fabulously wealthy, keeping
their golden parachutes as well as all the student loan loot they’ve plundered.
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