Frontline on For-Profit Universities
 

Frontline ran a piece tonight, College Inc. It's a very disturbing analysis of US universities which use federal funds to pay for tuition at institutions of higher learning with the purpose of profiting shareholders and management. These schools have very high default rates on student loans and often offer degree programs which do not lead to jobs which pay enough to repay the student loans.
The biggest player in the field is the University of Phoenix. I had some experience with them back in the late 80's and early 90's. I think it's pretty accurate to think of the school as a degree factory, pumping out degrees based on federal funds and corporate tuition reimbursement. Initially the school required that students have 2 prior years of college and be of a certain age (28?). That business model, while meeting an under served population, didn't have enough potential for expansion so they started accepting more and more marginal students unable to perform within the constraints of their curriculum.
It concluded with the view that US higher ed is going to have rely more and more on for-profit colleges. All in all, a pretty depressing prospect for higher learning since it seems to be following the general pattern of the capitalization of medicine in the US over the last 30 or 40 years.

am watching it right now, mr. "mountain time". :D

its just about another way to suck on the government sugar tit. or so it seems. anyway, don't tell me the ending; i think is was the butler, or maybe col. mustard in the library with the paring knife?

Curious as to your take on the subject. About 3 or 4 years ago I met a women ( I can't remember at what conference) who was an administrator at Grand Canyon University shortly after it had been purchased by private buyers and been turned into an on-line school. I found it odd at the time that there seemed to be a fusion between a capitalist for-profit corporation and conservative Christian religion, not to mention the general oddity of someone buying a failing college to make a profit. The show clarified that connection quite well. Give the poor and the down-and-out a little opium while using federal funds to line your pockets.
The accrediting agencies are not doing their job in a lot of these instances, particularly with on-line education.

you are correct on all counts. by the way, i live down the street from the "dream center", founded by aimee semple macpherson many moons ago - she of the miracles and godliness and scandals and collection plates. hucksters seemed to often join forces, and wrap their scam in several seemingly sacred garments.

there was a piece on npr about "retraining" workers, a few weeks back. most of the "retrained" did not get jobs involving their new skills - though schools and teachers got paid- because the newly trained were not that capable and the jobs weren't there. it all comes back to lack of manufacturing jobs and the panaceas/cons that get thrown out there.

to be honest, i'm in the same boat as a lot these people; i have a liberal arts bachelors degree, and i've worked in the retail specialty paint business and as a house/set painter. both those fields are dead now, i need a new career, and i don't see much out there. (certainly not going for an over priced m.b.a. from the university of phoenix)

The lenders for student loans should figure out an art major will never have a decent job and will have trouble paying the loans back. But an analysis of this type would slide into racial studies and they won't go there. So, just like the sub-prime mess, Uncle Sam is the fallback.

do you mean majors like "african american studies" and "latino studies" and "feminist history"? those are all ridiculous programs which should be absorbed by regular departments like history and sociology etc. ( wow, the texas oilman and i agree on something?) these programs overreacted to the problems of traditional - and limiting - nature of 1960's academia, insisted on complete independence instead of integration with the existing curricula, and in the end marginalized themselves.




but, back to the topic at hand, the real issue is the "for profit" business model, which means we have the ethics of goldman-sachs applied to education.

From my safe distance my take is that too much starry eyed devotion to getting a "college degree" is out and about. As though paying some sort of college attendance dues automagically gives one and inside track to success.

Too many people don't have a clue about what they're studying and why. And bankers vying to loan money to students, complete with kickbacks to college administrators. Not sure how widespread the latter is.

That is true. People who forgo college are basically told they're going to be failures.

unfortunately, internet based college education schooling is on the rise. while I realize it is difficult for some to squeeze school in with work, I'm beginning to question the real value of internet based schooling. it offers no interaction with other students or the instructor.

speaking of the University of Phoenix, I understand the founder lives in a house that might make Bill Gates a bit jealous. think "Trump Castle".

all off the backs of people trying to make their own personal dreams a reality, only they are going down the wrong educational road........

The show said that Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix is a billionaire. It also said that the school was larger than the University of California system. Sperling himself has a Ph.d. in the Classics as I recall.
I agree that the problem is rooted in the loss of a manufacturing base which itself in turn is rooted in the globalization of the labor market. The resultant erosion of the middle class, widening gap between rich and poor and loss of decent paying jobs for the non-college educated, opened up the market for the for-profit schools. I'd like to think of it as WalMart education, but it's not really like WalMart. WalMart markets to the working classes at the lowest possible cost. Because of federal student loans, these for-profit schools market to the working classes at Ivy League prices. The budget for advertising and marketing at these schools far exceeds their budget for teachers.

I didn't realize the Dream Center was founded by Macphereson.

The issue of internet education is very important and central to the $$ being made here. In the system in which I teach, there is widespread agreement that College Chemistry cannot be taught on-line with the same results as teaching the class in a Chemistry lab. Same could be said for Biology and Anatomy and Physiology. Yet the administrators in our system, have forbidden the faculty a voice in the decision as to whether to teach Chemistry online or not. They simply asserted that it will be taught online. A fair portion of the for-profit schools were offering nursing degrees. Do we really want nurses who took their BioChemistry online?

They're not called kickbacks. They're called profit sharing plans to the administrators and ROI to the shareholders.

Its part of the culture today - good paying blue collar factory work is gone, so everyone feels like an academic career is the only way to go. The world still needs good craftsmen, plumbers, and electricians but good luck convincing young Johnny's parents that their son is really cut out to be in the service industry, instead of being a doctor.

well said. it's just the old "correspondence classes" scheme writ anew.

as to "sister aimee", her angeles temple has been rebranded as the "dream center". its the same old temple from the teens? twenties? california has always been full of quacks and charlatans.

wikipedia (not the ultimate source, i know) has some basics on sperling ( old left turned new era entrepreneur) and u of phoenix (lots of litigation and fines and returned money "without admission of guilt" etc.etc.)

off thread: what is your field of study?

University of Phoenix has an interesting history in CO. They were hired to create an Adult Education program for a Jesuit University. To their credit, the University broke their contract with UoP over disagreements related to quality(?), and set out to create their own program. UoP in an act of revenge set up their own college to compete with the Jesuits and sued the Jesuits for breach of contract and won.
I ended up teaching for UoP at that period because UoP simply took the curriculum which they had developed for the Jesuits and moved it over to their own school. It required courses in religion and philosophy (my fields) which I am quite sure would not have been there had it not been for their original agreement with the Jesuits.

wow. so you have been in "the belly of the beast". :D perhaps you were an off the record source for last night's broadcast? seriously, do you have more to tell?

(p.s. always enjoy your posts - i am an amateur philosophy student, so feel free to correct my misinformation and logical fallacies anytime. i must say that i do love the "parable? allegory? of the cave".)