The reason: "We have made a strategic decision to become more selective in the students we enroll."
???
How does laying off a ton of admissions salespeople make your college more selective?
Why doesn't Harvard know about this strategy to become more selective by firing lots of employees?
It will make a difference but only if they are serious about upping their standards (I didn't realize they had any to begin with). When you are in the red, you (you = U. or college) are more likely to accept anyone who is willing to pay the tuition. And you need a lot of admissions staff to handle processing all those snowflake applicants. If you aren't desperately strapped for cash, you can afford to be more selective. You aren't locked in this miserable race to enroll more students or your staff gets the axe. Because you've already given them the axe! Problem solved!
ReplyDeleteOne shouldn't have any bearing on the other, but that's like saying no one should ever go hungry. It doesn't affect Harvard for the same reason that malnutrition isn't decimating Beverly Hills.
This is not a defense of Kaplan or their business decisions or even the accuracy of their self-reporting. They could have laid off their um, faculty, or career counselors, or any other people who work with students, or kept their admission standards low, or slashed some other budgets, to avoid operating at a loss.
It's more than that.
ReplyDelete"Admissions Officers" is code for cold-calling telemarketers. If you ever go to Kaplan's website, there are people watching you poke around. There is a chat box that will open up if you start looking at courses and it is a person trying to cold-sell you into signing up for classes TODAY!!!!!1!!!11!!!!
They have hundreds of these people who are currently required to sign up a quota of new students every week. Even if (especially if) these students never finish, they can qualify for govt loans and Kaplan gets paid whether the students have a real degree or not.
Harry Reid and Dick Durbin are trying to hold these sham people more accountable for their govt money, so Kaplan and Phoenix are scaling back their telemarketing style scam and trying to go "straight."
Will it last? Hard to say. But a couple thousand gullible people will save a few thousand dollars because of this move.
I fondly remember my audition to be a Kaplan instructor back in the day when Kaplan was face-to-face. We were required to do a 3-minute presentation teaching the other auditioners something. I showed everyone how to put a condom on a cucumber. And yes, that can take 3 minutes if the cucumber is a bit soft.
ReplyDeleteAh, Kaplan, you don't know what you missed by not hiring me. But at least I'm not fired.
@Marcia: Say it ain't so! And I always thought of you as a good girl! But then, I couldn't help notice the murky rumors I've been hearing all these years about the Brady girls.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, having sent out about 150 applications during my 10-year tenure journey, there's no shortage of jobs I can look back on and be glad I didn't get. One of them was where Mike Huckabee got through college in two years. Nowhere on the biology department's web page is the word "evolution" even mentioned.
The Brady girls had an ongoing incestuous lesbian threesome involving a lot of fresh produce (Cindy is very particular about pesticides, hence the condoms). But you didn't hear it from me.
ReplyDeleteEwwwww...Still, it isn't as bad as the Brady boys, after they got those PERMS...
ReplyDeleteI wish my fifth rate private school would fire half the admission officers. Fuck. I would do it free just to get the glee from telling these sad sack of shits that they no longer draw a salary.
ReplyDelete