By Professor Doom
“I’m going to be an engineer! I get free
tuition for taking the classes!”
--So many
female students walk on campus saying something like this. I have no problem
with scholarship, but there’s a trap here many “female engineering students”
fall into…
Every year, students
come to campus, and many are clever enough to understand: they need to take
courses that lead to a job.
The students file
into obvious choices like engineering, and then find out the reason engineers
get paid bucks is because they have to know things, things that not everybody
can understand without effort. I promise the gentle reader, if building complex
machinery were easy enough that everyone could do it, and pouring coffee was a
very rare skill, barista would be a high paying job, while engineers would get
minimum wage. It’s basic economics.
“I really couldn’t handle the engineering
classes, so I changed my major to nursing. There’s good money in that!”
--trust me,
I’ve heard this or the like plenty of times from 2nd year students,
female and male.
The kids that
figure out they can’t survive an engineering program (and really, there’s no
dishonor in this) then move on to other degrees which are high paying, like
nursing. Of course, the same economic principles apply.
“I decided nursing just isn’t for me. I’m
going to get a degree in Theatre. They’ll transfer all my credits from my
engineering and nursing majors, so I can still graduate in five years, six at
most.”
--I’ve
heard the like of this too, many times. Students come in, try for the
hard-to-get and thus valuable degree, and then shift down, down, down,
eventually grabbing an easily acquired but worthless degree.
The end result is
the students stumble from major to major, falling ever downward until they
finally get to some degree with coursework that anyone can get through (hi
Education!). I’m not picking on Theater degrees in my anecdote above (although,
yeah, this
seriously is not worth paying for), but we churn out lots of degrees
that truly have no market value.
Sadly, after being
cheated by higher education once, many of these kids figure grad school must be
the secret to success. Having already been pummeled with technical and
professional programs, they know better than to head off in that direction
again. So, many go for the MFA, the Master of Fine Arts…which is basically the
graduate level Theater degree.
Our institutions
of higher education, in order to qualify for that sweet, sweet, student loan
money, have to promise in writing to act with integrity. They must make this
promise, but because
there are no penalties for violating accreditation, many
schools jettison integrity to make room for more student loan money.
Grad school is expensive,
and students can accumulate amazing debts here, quickly. The Federal government
has helpfully identified the most predatory schools, and somewhat consistently,
MFA schools
end up on top; this is pretty much the degree where graduates are least
likely to make enough money to pay off the loan within a lifetime, as well as
the degree program most likely to attract those least able to understand how
they’re being cheated.
One of the programs she was accepted to was
the American Repertory
Theater/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at
Harvard University, which, according to The
Hollywood Reporter, was one of the top 10 schools for drama
training. There was one catch: Tuition for the two-year program was $62,593.
Sellers further calculated that her living costs in Cambridge, Mass. would be
$50,000 for two years. Despite some scholarship money and a meager amount she
raised via GoFundMe, Sellers—who’s expected to graduate in 2018—will be facing
close to $130,000 in loan debt.
---I’ll be calling
American Repertory Theater “ART” from here on out.
It is so nutsy
insane to go to graduate school to become an actor. Median
hourly wages are around $22 (and you have to use the median because the
multimillion dollar paychecks the top actors command make the average not a
fair estimate for pay). That’s a decent hourly wage, but acting isn’t steady
work.
Nick Basta is an actor and instructor at the
University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He
graduated from the institute in 2003, and from his graduating class he
estimates that around half are no longer acting. “I don’t know what that tells
you,” he admitted. “It’s an expensive way to figure out if you don’t want to do
it.”
Even the median is
a bit misleading, because most actors are unemployed, and work as waiters or
otherwise are not acting anymore, so their “average pay” shows up somewhere
else. The “predatory” description here is quite generous: it’s predatory only
for those who actually try to make money from the degree. For those who realize
the degree is worthless, it’s more like “robbery” than “predatory.”
I grant that $22
an hour is still better than minimum wage but it’s poor pay for unreliable work
after years of graduate school…and
you’re going to have huge debts to make payments on as well. What typically
happens here is disturbing:
According
to a poll of 500 theatre graduates released by American
Theatre in 2014, 27 percent of respondents had
$16-30,000 in debt and 22 percent had $31-50,000 in student loan debt. And 29
percent had $51-100,000 in debt.
I really need to
point that this place saddling students with huge debts is classified as a “non-profit”
school. That’s the latest craze in higher ed—non-profit schools which are in
fact about the profits. See, for-profit schools were getting a (deserved) bad
rap for ripping off students, but the only reason for this is our government
only looks suspiciously at for-profits. Using a bit of accounting legerdemain,
you can rake in student loan money and avoid scrutiny if you get classified as
non-profit, even if nothing changes as far as pay for administrators using the
shifty accountants. If our government took a look at state and non-profit schools,
especially the incredibly bogus community colleges, it would find out that
for-profits are only a small part of the ripoffs of higher ed today.
He
explained that the ED [Department of Education] only evaluated for-profit
schools…
This blog has
covered other “non-profits” which nonetheless rake in the money while destroying
the lives of students (for examples, see here, or here). Let’s
get back to this school specifically:
Such
programs are deemed predatory by the federal government and are at risk of
losing access to federal financial aid.
As
result of this report and the threat to its financial aid access, ART announced
in July that it will take a three-year hiatus while it reevaluates its program.
“It would be irresponsible to continue, especially if our federal financial aid
was taken away,” said Diane Paulus, ART’s artistic director.
--hey,
her title isn’t twice as long as her name, that’s promising! Do note, however,
that she must please her masters higher up in the bureaucracy, and it’s clear
from her quote integrity is irrelevant: she knows that it’s the student loan
money, and nothing else, that pleases her masters.
To its credit,
ART, upon being deemed predatory, has decided to reconsider its evil ways,
although it’s sad that “you are hurting people” doesn’t seem to be as strong a
motivation to change as “government will cut you out of the student loan scam.”
Harvard won’t shut down entirely, of course, but, being an old school, they
have a sprig of integrity that’s managed to survive the deluge of student loan
money. They’ll stop preying on people, for a bit.
Most schools, even
when declared predatory, will press on, manipulating their postgraduate
employment statistics to make it look like they’re not doing as much harm as
they are, actually, doing. They’ll keep on guzzling that loan money by suckering
all those students who, 6 years earlier, walked onto campus thinking they’ll
get a good job with an engineering degree.
One school is
slowing down the destruction because they feel threatened they might not get
more student loan money. As I’ve said many times, we need to stop the student
loan scam. There’s no way we can mandate integrity in our schools, but without
the loan scam, at least we won’t be promoting corruption, and that’s still a
win as far as I’m concerned.
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