Good news. People are beginning to pay attention to Click-Thru U.

One example:

“[A]n online M.B.A. has virtually no measurable value with respect to [the] job search and career management,” says [Roy] Cohen, author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide.

Seems most online university stuff has much lower admissions standards than actual universities. Plus there’s this “stigma,” explains one observer, attached to online education.

Know why? Because it’s really crappy. Read this UD category – Click-Thru U. – for more information.

What a system!

You need to look at the nuts and bolts of free enterprise here in the States to fully appreciate it.

With a 7 percent decline in overall enrollment since 2009, a 42 percent drop in new enrollments between March 2010 and March 2011, a 9 percent six-year graduation rate (versus 65 percent for private colleges and 22 percent for all for-profits), a dependence on Pell grants and federal loans for nearly 90 percent of total revenue, excessive defaults on student loans, and intensified regulatory reviews, Phoenix wilted. Since March 2009, Apollo has ranked as the third-worst performer of publicly traded companies and the third worst among the S&P 500 in 2010. Apollo’s market cap nosedived 57 percent to $5.8 billion in 2011. In March 2011, Apollo reported a quarterly loss of $64 million and the stock price plummeted from a high of $90 in January 2009 to a low of $33.75 in November 2010. It currently trades in the mid 40s. Capital markets are no longer bullish on for-profit universities. Under the headline “Apollo Sent to Back of Class,” Barron’s declared in March 2011 that “shares are rightly getting a failing grade….We would steer clear of the uncertainty surrounding Apollo and its industry….”

Richard P. Chait and Zachary First, in Harvard Magazine.

There’s a great photo of a (Goldman Sachs-controlled, for-profit) college admission director’s vanity plate here.

There’s a great email from an admissions director here. Oh, let’s quote it.

Why are we letting them off of the phone? Are we making them push us off 3 TIMES?? We have proven that we can close the students we talk to but we need to talk to more students!!!!

Testimony from a former admissions person is here. Oh, let’s quote that too.

“The scales are so tipped; these people have no way of possibly making a good decision. …It was like we were used car salesmen. We would basically psychologically manipulate people into doing this. My master’s was in clinical psychology, and it was like I was using my powers for evil.”

And of course:

According to a JP Morgan Chase analyst report in 2010, [Goldman’s] schools have among the highest tuition of publicly traded corporations in higher education. Tuition at EDMC’s Art Institutes schools can average about $50,000 for an associate’s degree and between $77,000 to nearly $100,000 for a bachelor’s degree.

It’s predatory capitalism, folks: John Boehner changed the laws:

John Boehner, then the chairman of the House education committee, helped to eliminate a key provision that had moderated the growth of exclusively online universities.

The so-called 50 percent rule, which required half of all students to be at a ground campus in order for a school to be eligible for federal aid, had been put in place to discourage dubious distance education programs that offered subpar learning. Boehner helped to nix the rule in a budget agreement that took effect in early 2006, allowing schools to expand enrollments — and revenues — without having to invest in additional ground campuses. A spokesman for Boehner did not respond to requests for comment.

At which point fools rushed in. And the wolves ate them. They’re still eating them.

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Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, sat on the board of Goldman Sachs while it re-made for-profit online higher education.

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UD thanks Roy.

… will take place today on WBUR.

Christopher Beha’s adventures at Click-Thru U will be featured.

You need a subscription to Harper’s magazine to read what I just linked to; but here is the same author reflecting on what he’s learned.

[I]n broad social terms good educational outcomes follow from equality and not the other way around… [Thus,] the current prominence of Phoenix and other for-profit schools paints an even sadder picture than Phoenix’s critics might have thought. A society that can’t increase its roll of college graduates without sending billions of dollars in grants and loans to proprietary schools has problems that will not be fixed by the classroom.

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UD thanks Dirk for the heads-up.

Your tax dollars at work.

There’s a beautiful synergy in play at Click-Thru U. Keep elementary, secondary, and then of course university students in front of computers and expensive software all the days of their lives, until they don’t even know that education used to mean human teachers and classrooms full of human beings discussing, questioning, scoffing, yawning, laughing… The jostle of real life, real encounters; the unscripted moments when, prompted or provoked by a brilliant lecture or an intense verbal exchange, you perceive something you never perceived before… when you come to knowledge as it lives its life, as it restlessly evolves, in a classroom with a passionate lecturer and focused students…

This is what the Click-Thrus will never know. All they will know is a continuation into schooling of the screen life they live outside the classroom. Theirs is all one seamless daily experience – Facebook, Gchat, texting, algebra, history, Facebook, Gchat, texting. No change of scene. No talking out loud. You want to say something, hit the keyboard. Feel something? Tap an emoticon.

The synergy in this post’s headline should surprise no one – the process by which the parent of for-profit Click-Thru U scoops up all the software and makes it possible for every American student to experience an entirely digitalized education is well underway. As the Powerpointed, laptopped, clickered classroom becomes intolerably pointless for everyone, the software will be there waiting.

Of course the software isn’t teaching anyone anything much, as the New York Times, reviewing the studies, reports. But the United States is such a rich county, with such a booming economy, that it doesn’t really need educated people.

Online education programs at community colleges and for-profit schools have “serious” vulnerability to financial-aid fraud rings, which have become a growing problem, according to letter by a government watchdog agency made public on Thursday.

… Usually a fraud operation’s ringleader will enroll one or two “straw” students in a distance-education program in exchange for a portion of the financial-aid award.

We’ve had years to examine for-profit education results at the higher education level. Companies like University of Phoenix and others cost taxpayers money, provide subpar education, serve as diploma mills, and prey on students who may never be able to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars in student loans they take on. They even prey on military veterans and active-duty service members.

We should be terrified of this happening to our public schools. Yet here it is happening nonetheless, all across the country.

… Swedish style.

… Jan Björklund, the minister of education, moved to tighten central control over [for profit] schools and is soon to launch a parliamentary inquiry into competition and free schools.

“Loopholes in the legislation have meant that free schools can elect not to have a library, student counseling and school nurses,” he complained. “And as they get just as much money as the municipal schools, the owners have been able to withdraw the surplus.”

… Much of the learning at the 32 schools in Sweden run by the company is done alone by students, using an online system, with one-on-one guidance from teachers once a week, interspersed with lectures in classes of up to 60 students.

If students prefer to play cards and chat all day, it’s up to them.

[The author of a recent study] argued that such systems were brought in as much to save costs as to improve education.

Kunskapsgymnasiet’s IT-based teaching system allows it to cut the number of teachers it employs in Malmö to 5.1 teachers per 100 students, compared to an average of 8.2 teachers per 100 students at municipal schools.

“Many municipal schools are horrendously bad,” Vlachos said. “But the difference between the free schools and the municipal schools is that the free schools actually have a profit incentive to reduce quality.”

Hey! Same here!

Well, at least the ads remain. Whew!

And why don’t they ever learn?

Because they don’t care.

After all, it’s only your tax money.

Still.

You’d think that just one person at NASA might do a quick check of the universities from which their employees graduate, and the kinds of degrees they’re earning. After all, NASA pays their tuition.

The Office of the Inspector General has found that NASA misused $1.4 million in tax money by reimbursing dozens of its employees who pursued degrees outside NASA’s established programs at for-profit colleges, such as the University of Phoenix (the subject of an ABC News 2010 investigation) and Strayer University.

Now notice the non-reimbursable schools. They’re not diploma mills; they’re our old friends the scandalous tax-syphoning for-profits… So … Écoute: The beauty here is that you, the American taxpayer, are getting your ass whipped in two different ways:

1.) Your taxes pay tuition for the aggressively recruited flunkies at the for-profits;

2.) and your taxes pay for the compensation federal employees (like the NASA people) receive for illegitimately attending (not really attending, of course; everything’s online) the same for-profits.

[B]ecause this $1.4 million represents tuition payments for only a sample of employees at the four Centers and Headquarters where we conducted detailed audit work, we concluded that an examination across all NASA Centers likely would result in substantially higher questioned costs.

This is from the NASA Office of Inspector General. Great to know there are probably lots more cases.

The OIG found that 11 of the top 20 universities NASA employees attended were private or for-profit institutions that are on average 3.6 times and 1.6 times, respectively, more expensive than public universities.

So much for the argument that the for-profits make college affordable for poorer people. Of course you knew already – didn’t you? – that for-profits are extremely expensive? I mean, why wouldn’t they be? It’s only your tax money.

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You think this will change? This won’t change.

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Don’t enough people in this country hate the federal government? I guess not.

College President Elizabeth Tice’s office is locked most of the time. She is located in California and visits the Clinton [Iowa] campus maybe twice a year. That doesn’t seem to hinder her work there, thanks to technology that allows for easy communication, despite the distance, [Ashford University’s vice president] said.

… journalism is a distinction Christopher Hitchens introduces (new one on me, at least) in a recent post about Rupert Murdoch; but the distinction also works in ranking bottom-feeder universities. Gutter would be for-profit online tax siphons; sewer would be their kissing cousins, the diploma mills.

For those, like UD, who enjoy the spectacle of a real shitstorm, there’s this story out of Kentucky:

A Louisville-based ministry and a large Arizona church are suing each other over the disputed sale of an unaccredited online university last year, each accusing the other of fraud.

Child of the King Ministries of Louisville agreed to sell an entity called American International University for $400,000 to the Phoenix-based Church for the Nations in May 2010, both lawsuits say.

Okay, so straightforward sale of a diploma mill from one house of God to another… Happens every day… Only Church for the Nations is so dumb it thought a diploma mill… I dunno… was something… had assets or something rather than just being a website that sold pieces of paper…

The church’s lawsuit said the [diploma mill owner church] claimed the university had numerous accreditations, affiliations with other schools and a regular cash flow of between $15,000 and $30,000 from foreign students who wanted a credential from an American institution.

That church… Ah say that church didn’t get the no honor among thieves memo…

… describes the way a mainly online for-profit school with high tuition, a wretched graduation rate, and no doubt richly compensated executives, got included in state scholarship legislation.

Such a great deal if you can get it. Online for-profits remain at the center of a national scandal [scroll down], in large part because they continue to receive enormous federal funds — despite the fact that they’re primarily run to rake in money for investors and administrators. Now, in addition to its federal support, Post University in Connecticut will get state support.

How did this happen?

The old-fashioned way: corruption. A person on the Post board of trustees (a paid position) is also a state legislator, and he lobbied the thing through.

See, “As originally written, the bill would have given scholarship funds only to students at state and private nonprofit institutions.” Institutions legally compelled to use most of their money for the benefit of their students. Now lucky, profit-driven Post enjoys another source of public funds.