For-Profit Colleges Mislead Students, Report Finds

AWilliams said:
Can someone link me to a non-profit college? I have yet to find one.
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Isn't it the set of schools that are not for-profit? The issue would be more of whether a school is nationally or regionally accredited.
Many for-profit institutions of higher education have national accreditation rather than regional accreditation. Regionally accredited schools are predominantly academically oriented, non-profit institutions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For-profit_school

cestlecutee said:
which MFE programs would be classified as for-profit program??
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None that I know of. And let's hope it's not going to happen.
 
cestlecutee said:
which MFE programs would be classified as for-profit program??
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It pleases you to jest with us. With the exception of Baruch, they're all cash cows. As Sylvain Raynes pointed out in a piece published on this site a while back.

Meanwhile, if you're predisposed towards BS (or just want to laugh your head off), here is a promo video from Kaplan U. I wonder why they've disabled comments?


More seriously, here is is the inimitable Charles Hugh Smith writing insightfully on the racket in this essay:

Of all the exploitative systems in the U.S., none is more rapacious than the Education Cartel. Like the proverbial frog that is unaware that it's being boiled because the water temperature rises so gradually, college students and their parents are unable to recall what higher education was like before students were herded into debt-serfdom.

There is nothing remotely educational or liberal about an exploitative Cartel that provides no measurable value to its students while graduating 10% of them. As reported in The New Republic, when General Accounting Office (GAO) investigators posing as prospective students applied to 15 major for-profit "colleges," every one made misleading sales pitches.

The largest for-profit, the University of Phoenix, graduates less than 10% of its students within 10 years.
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Saw that Smith essay today and thought that it was a bit overblown in rhetorical terms, but in essence the idea is right. Its larger scope is that the higher education system turns out an astonishingly large number of heavily, heavily indebted students right out of college. I frankly think it's a pernicious dynamic. In that context, the for-profit colleges can be seen as different in degree but not, perhaps, in kind from traditional institutions.

Since the name of Kaplan has been raised, I can say that toward the end of the days when I fought in the test prep wars, they had gotten into the "college" business and were turning immense profits at it, to the point where the test-prep business basically became a sideline for them. I worked for a competitor who, for all its many faults, really did top to bottom believe, with very few exceptions, that our purpose was to help students and not fleece them. I was very glad that the question of following them into that business was never seriously considered. One of my coworkers in fact sent around a mock-ad for their "Quincy Medical School," where they would confer medical degrees by having students watch old episodes of Quincy, M.E.

Of course, the coda to all this is that the company eventually wound up getting acquired because it was in too much debt, and the founders and management were all forced out. Not that it excuses anything, but part of the reason for-profit education is viewed as sleazy is that there is a powerful political impulse that promulgates this view, and another part of it is that making money in education is so astoundingly difficult from a cost-control perspective that you have to apply a fair amount of sleaze to make the operation work at all.
 
Another insightful essay by Charles Hugh Smith today here. I don't feel like giving any excerpt as I think it should be read in toto, but to whet readers' appetitites:

There is a "long tail" characteristic to the relative value of various university degrees. Below the top tranch of a dozen or so elite universities, the value in the marketplace for degrees drops very quickly. A second-rank university degree is worth considerably less than an elite degree, but not much more than a third-tier university degree.

The well-known "secret value" to an elite education is the contacts you make there. It's who you know, definitely. But even if you're not in an elite university, you can build a network of useful contacts in the real world.

The person who enters a field half-heartedly seeking a steady job will probably lose out in the real world to someone who actually enjoys the work.
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Postscript: A piece in the NYT. I don't agree with the overall tenor as it's way too sanguine. But some pertinent comments:

Students who borrow to attend for-profit colleges are especially likely to default. They make up about 12 percent of those enrolled in higher education, but almost half of those defaulting on student loans. According to the Department of Education, about a quarter of students at for-profit institutions defaulted on their student loans within three years of starting to repay them.

“About two-thirds of the people I see attended for-profits; most did not complete their program; and no one I have worked with has ever gotten a job in the field they were supposedly trained for,” Ms. Loonin said.
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