By Professor Doom
Admin, addressing full time faculty: “We’re
going to put more of our programs online, for more efficiency. I know we’re
asking for a great deal of work from you, but you’ll be helping to build a
great institution.”
Admin, 6 months later: “Thank you for your
hard work developing these courses. We’re going to hire a Vice President of
Online Education and a full complement of support staff for our four faculty
teaching online courses.”
Admin 6 more months later: “We really
don’t need as many faculty for online courses, so we’re letting three of you go.
Also, we’ll be hiring another Dean to handle the extra students. Feel free to
apply for that position, but we’ll need someone with recent experience working
in the last year as a Dean.”
Admin (one semester later, after
considerable growth): “We have an open part time adjunct position to teach the
online courses. We’d be quite happy to see a resume that doesn’t have any
online degrees on it, so we can finally hire someone. If you know someone, have
them apply.”
---It’s a
real joy working for these people.
Online education has been a huge
growth industry for higher ed. It barely existed 30 years ago, and today just about
every student takes at least some online work to get a degree.
Trouble is, many
online classes, even whole degree programs, are fraudulent. It isn’t just the
obvious cheating, the content of the coursework is so minimal that it doesn’t
actually help a student learn anything, much less train for a job. The latter
detail is the important part, since much of online college is sold as “train
for a new job without leaving your old job!”
But it’s mostly fraud. The administrators
of online colleges know its fraud, too, since they refuse to hire people with
online degrees. If the people running the “jobs training” programs won’t hire
anyone trained in such programs, it’s little wonder that the real world
generally won’t hire online graduates, either.
After decades of
such fraud, the Federal government has finally, after seeing much of a
generation destroyed by this type of fraud, decided to do a little something
about it, by instilling basic rules like “the college must inform students that
their degrees are of limited, if any, market value.”
Naturally,
colleges are having a tough time adapting to such draconian rules:
The implication of
the above needs to be drawn out a bit. One of the big justifications for online
education was that students from anywhere could take the courses. But, the
colleges had been selling their online job training courses knowing full well
that their “certifications” weren’t worth the paper they were printed on in
most states (and by “most” I mean 49, possibly 50 of them).
Now, if we give
the schools benefit of the doubt (not my inclination, to be sure), it still
makes little sense that so many kids were “accidentally” misled about the value
of the job training. Our schools are drowning in admin, after all, it would
have only taken a few phone calls to find out if the training would have passed
muster in another state (assuming they bothered to check their own state, there are only 49 other states to check certification rules
in…and that’s a worst case scenario, it could be done every year without a
problem).
Under the new regulations, all higher education
institutions that offer classes online must demonstrate that they are authorized
to operate in every state where they enroll students who receive federal
financial aid. The rules also mean that institutions must make clear their
refund policies and procedures for receiving student complaints.
Again, the
implications of the above bear highlighting. These schools knew what they were
doing, and knew that the students, once they graduate, were going to come back
and say “hey, this certification is absolutely worthless. I want my money
back!”
And the schools
doubtless responded with “No refunds, even when we knowingly sold you something
worthless. Sorry.”
The students
complained to the government, and the specific types of complaints hinted at
above came up so often that, yeah, the Federal government decided to make the rules
very clear about how schools sold their training programs, and about that whole
“no refunds” thing.
I should also
mention, accreditation forces every school to put, in writing, that they
operate with integrity. But, alas, accreditation has no penalty whatsoever for
violating accrediting rules so, integrity is jettisoned shortly after a school
becomes accredited. Accreditation now only serves to grant a school access to Federal
student loan money, which, again, is why the specific wording above clarifies
for whom this new rule applies.
If accreditation
were legitimate, you wouldn’t need that specific wording at all, because
accreditation would already be forcing schools to act with integrity, or, more
accurately, removing accreditation from schools acting without integrity.
Additionally, institutions must provide
specific information to students who are pursuing professions that require
state licensure, which is common for nurses, teachers and counselors, among
others. Institutions will be required to inform students if they are taking a
program that will not qualify them to practice their chosen profession where
they live. This means every institution must track the requirements for
professional licensing in every state where they operate. Failure to meet these
requirements could result in institutions losing eligibility for federal
financial aid.
Not to beat a dead
horse here, but the above rules were created because, obviously, schools weren’t acting with integrity as far as their
license-required jobs training courses.
Sooner or later
the Federal government is going to realize what a mistake, what a waste of
time, it is to have accreditation as the gatekeeper for Federal funds. When
that happens, they’ll simply change the rules to remove accreditors from higher
education completely. They already serve no purpose, mind you, but I reckon
it’ll be another decade or so before our government will make them obsolete.
I don’t think
this will be a good thing. Accreditation came into existence because schools
legitimately wanted to do honest work. All accreditation rules were written
with an assumption of good faith in the participating school. Accreditation was
never meant to be a gatekeeper for over a trillion dollars of student loan
money, and, with that kind of money on the table, assuming good faith is,
simply, stupid.
Maybe after the
government annihilates our current system of accreditation, we can hope that a
new system of accreditation will come back into play, but I have my doubts: as
long we’re talking over a trillion dollars on the table, the entire idea of
good faith will be an antiquated concept.
Now, like any set
of rules from the government, they’re pretty confusing and subject to arbitrary
enforcement. So, colleges are complaining, and to some extent I see their
point.
But the fact
remains: if colleges acted with integrity, or if accreditation was legitimate,
these new rules would never have been written…and the fact also that none of
the “leaders” running our schools get this important concept speaks more about
the state of higher education today than any number of pages of new Federal
regulations.
No comments:
Post a Comment