The for-profit college industry has long list of failings. The schools are expensive. They educate about a tenth of all undergraduates, but account for almost half of all student loan defaults. Their alums are more likely to end up unemployed than peers who attend nonprofit schools and, if they find a job, may well earn less.
But for all its warts, the for-profit sector does get a few things right. Chief among them: their graduation rates for two-year programs. About 60 percent of students at for-profit schools earn their associate's degree or professional certificate within three years of starting their education. At community colleges, just about one fifth of attendees graduate on time. The graph below shows the results for the entering classes of 2000 and 2007, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
And this is [likely] due to expectations? That's my guess. The CC that transfers students into the local uni requires rigor.
ReplyDeleteOne reason for profit institutions have a decent average time to graduation when compared with cheaper community colleges is because students are paying a lot for their education and so have every incentive to get out quickly. I would also think that those that enroll in for-profits, by the very fact that they are willing to pay more, are more motivated or driven people to begin with. The comparisons aren't particularly useful.
ReplyDeleteIf what I saw in the one for-profit uni in which I taught can be extrapolated to for-profits, I would say that the higher graduation rate also has to do with lower standards. Students in the for-profit in which I taught got credit for classes that never would have counted in the public community colleges in which I have worked.
ReplyDeleteWe evaluate coursework from the for-profits frequently as their students tend to run out of money and end up at the cheaper CC doorstep. When my department started looking at their English courses, we discovered pretty quickly that most of them don't even come close to what we require in terms of standards. Students are crushed when they discover that they thought they had "gotten English out of the way" but took two classes equivalent to our developmental sequence with perhaps a smidgen of what we require in freshman comp.
ReplyDeleteFor profits generally pay their "teachers" a pittance and focus mostly on the student as consumer. At for profits, you can actually buy your degree with money.
ReplyDeleteThus, higher graduation rates.
I'm no fan of the instrumental view of college, but this passage seems to me to sum up the problems pretty well:
ReplyDeleteThey educate about a tenth of all undergraduates, but account for almost half of all student loan defaults. Their alums are more likely to end up unemployed than peers who attend nonprofit schools and, if they find a job, may well earn less.
To the extent that there's a genuinely useful niche for the for-profits to fill, I suspect that it involves training (not education) for relatively straightforward, in-demand jobs that pay relatively decently. I'm thinking of things like phlebotomist, pharmacy assistant, and the like -- jobs that some of my students are using to support themselves and pay tuition as they pursue genuinely higher learning, and that would bring in something approaching a living wage for a single person, though I'm not so sure that would be the case if you piled student loan payments on top of ordinary living expenses; my students have generally gone to the local CC for training, and may well be able to defer loan payments while they're still in school.
Part of the problem is probably also that, though straightforward, these jobs require a basic level of literacy and numeracy. It's one thing for students who are well-qualified for college to take the training, get the certification, and then juggle work and school (and I suspect we'd all be better off if more doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc. had done the jobs of the support workers on whom they rely); it's quite another for someone who doesn't have a basic education to try to master work which relies on those skills.
Well if an associate's degree or professional certificate from a for-profit were actually WORTH anything, graduating on time would be an accomplishment.
ReplyDeleteDecades ago, I taught one one-month freshman comp course at a for-profit. My experience then was that the only book students needed was a checkbook. Because the pay was so poor, I cut my syllabus down to the very least I could live with, but even then, during the first class meeting, one student glared at me as I was going over my expectations for the class. After I was done, he asked me, "Have you ever worked at XY before?" I told him no, but I'd had years of experience elsewhere, so he wasn't getting a rookie.
ReplyDelete"That's what I thought," he said as he left the room.
But that was years ago. More recently my cc had some accreditation problems (all having to do with admin/campus climate/morale, none having to do with faculty or the quality of instruction). Since the accreditors were so hard on us, I wondered how for-profits managed to get accredited. The (oversimplified) answer: The Western accredition agency (WASC) is split in two. One part handles public/private institutions; another part handles for-profits.
It's like the same Hamster Fur class taught by two different teachers. One's an easy grader, the other isn't.
Oh yeah--when I got my miserable month's pay at the for-profit, I noticed that nothing--no taxes, not anything--had been withheld. I called to ask what was going on and was informed that I'd been employed as an "independent subcontractor," and taxes were my responsibility.
"If I'm an independent subcontractor, can I independently negotiate my contract for the next term?" I asked.
You already know what the answer was.
Ooh; that's really dastardly. Especially the part where your already-meager salary is actually 7.5% less than you thought it was, because you're responsible for the "employer's" portion of FICA. And of course when you're living hand-to-mouth anyway, the temptation to spend the money rather than send it to the IRS right away is strong, resulting in nasty bills come tax time.
DeleteDon't believe anything these fools at "The Atlantic" write; when Bush was pResident, they tried to get us involved in a shooting war with the Chinese (because of the idiotic preemptive Iraq war.) It's like reading the Libertarian "Reason" magazine; whatever they're for, do the opposite of what they say.
ReplyDelete