… I wouldn’t be too interested in hiring someone who went to school at the mall…. or online for that matter. You’re much more likely to get a well paying job and have a more successful future if you go to a real face-to-face school with a campus not located next to Old Navy.
A commenter makes the obvious point about cheesy for-profit schools, one of which is now the object of a class action suit from some of its students, who claim it took their money and taught them nothing.
The owner of the school, “[n]oting that she is African-American, …said she finds the lawsuit offensive.”
I hope her lawyer can come up with something better than that.
Why not? Why not blanket the nation with ads attracting unwary people to financial and educational doom? It’s a free country; and, after all, our non-profit education sector is not without sin … Why pick on the for-profit? If that industry – like the slave trade – wants to pay its people by the body, why not?
… let’s remind ourselves that the glories of big-class public schools, distance-ed for-profit schools, and computers instead of teachers, are reserved for children of the common people.
Of course, no member of the ruling class, … including [Bill] Gates, [Joel] Klein and [Michael] Bloomberg, would enroll their own children in a school that deprived them of smaller classes, because they want to ensure that their own children have the best chance at success. Indeed, all of them sent their own children to private schools with small classes. Chester Finn enrolled his children at Sidwell Friends (where Obama’s children attend) and Exeter; both schools feature small classes, with Exeter boasting of class sizes of 8-12.
Yet it seems for these same people, it is fine for them to recommend that other people’s children should be relegated to classes of thirty or more, and hooked up to computers for “differentiated” instruction.
Leonie Haimson takes a look at the track record of online learning. It ain’t pretty. But … you know… good enough for the little people.
And don’t you think someone should have told parents and their children about this before they enrolled in them?
[The] Department of Defense … ranks graduates of traditional high schools … “Tier 1” and those from [online schools] … “Tier 2” … Tier 1 graduates now make up 99 percent of all recruits for all military branches…
Those who’ve opted out of the traditional educational system just don’t stick with military service, [a military spokeswoman] said. That includes students from what she called “any computer-based, virtual-learning program.”
“Years of research and experience show recruits with a traditional high school diploma are more likely to complete their initial three years of service than their alternate credential-holding (Tier 2) peers,” Lainez said. Data collected since 1988 shows only 28 percent of graduates with traditional diplomas leave military service before their first three years in uniform, while those with non-traditional backgrounds have a 39 percent attrition rate, she said.
If you look at why many students drop out of traditional high schools and go online, you can understand why this happens. Of the two students interviewed for this Associated Press story, one was “barred from returning to his public school on a weapons violation.” The other wanted to play tennis. School was just an impediment.
Now the military is, first of all, supposed to believe that by going online – an entirely unsupervised environment – these two learned all their course content fair and square. It’s also supposed to forget the statistics that tell it exactly what you would anticipate. People who can’t stick it out in the relatively undemanding institution of a public high school are unlikely to be able to stick it out in the demanding institution of the military.
The military knows full well that online schools are incentivized to take the lowest performing, least motivated students and keep them in as paying customers until they graduate in some form or another.
Students who’ve learned that you can online your way through life are the least promising candidates for the military, where you actually have to physically show up at set times and interact with actual human beings.
So many online students say they go online because they’re shy, they have trouble speaking up, being with other people. In what way is this supposed to be attractive to the United States military?
And what makes you think your online college is any more attractive to the military? If anything, it’s less.
********************************************
…[A] review of [online education] research by the United States Department of Education in 2009 … concluded that few rigorous studies had been done at the K-12 level, and policy makers “lack scientific evidence of the effectiveness” of online classes.
The fastest growth has been in makeup courses for students who failed a regular class. Advocates say the courses let students who were bored or left behind learn at their own pace.
But even some proponents of online classes are dubious about makeup courses, also known as credit recovery — or, derisively, click-click credits — which high schools, especially those in high-poverty districts, use to increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions.
“I think many people see online courses as being a way of being able to remove a pain point, and that is, how are they going to increase their graduation rate?” said Liz Pape, president of the Virtual High School Global Consortium. If credit recovery were working, she said, the need for remedial classes in college would be declining — but the opposite is true.
e-schools eat shit, especially on the primary and secondary school level. Make a pledge to dedicate one half-second of your brain power as to why and you’ll get there.
University Diaries, of course, spends most of its time on the nation’s wretched online universities; but we need to keep reminding ourselves of the grand experiment going on at the pre-college level with our children.
Ohio, for instance, has been particularly excited about online schools, and the results are now coming in.
From the Plain-Dealer:
Ohio’s publicly funded online schools are a disastrous alternative to public schools that should be under more scrutiny, according to a study released Thursday by a left-leaning think tank.
Turns out their graduation rates are pathetic. Dedicate two seconds of your brain power to the online experience as experienced by a fifteen-year-old and you’ll get there.
The Columbus Dispatch:
With five of the state’s seven largest e-schools posting graduation rates lower than that of the state’s worst traditional public school district, and six of seven rated less than “effective,” a liberal policy group said yesterday that the state is wasting money on the poorly performing online schools.
Good old Treca Digital Academy has a 24.1 percent graduation rate. (Here’s their website, with Frequently Asked Questions. Turns out no one asks – even frequently – what their graduation rates are.)
A high-ranking politician, asked if his crucial legislative support for e-schools has anything to do with really big campaign contributions from e-school entrepreneurs, says that’s a “damn lie.”
Kind of strong language, huh? I think he’s e-nnoyed.
Truly lurid details here.
******************************
Think about it for a moment. Think of the life of an Ohio schoolchild, her high school career entirely online, and then her college career also entirely via distance technology. Ain’t it wonderful – to imagine that? That’s why hard-working, concerned parents throughout the state are fighting to make this their children’s educational destiny.
**********************************
Gail Collins weighs in.
UD says: More! More!
I know Goldman Sachs (which owns a big chunk of this lovely industry) is a fatter target, but we’re about universities here at University Diaries, and college stories don’t get any bigger, or more vomit-worthy, than the for-profit college story, with its CEOs taking tens of millions of dollars a year from our tax money and from poor people.
The New York Times and other newspapers have editorialized. But public radio is hitting the hardest, featuring not only a long interview on the Kojo Nnamdi Show about this national scandal, but also an interview with Daniel Golden (UD thanks Dirk for the link) on Fresh Air. A highlight:
I visited homeless shelters where for-profit colleges were seeking students… Often you’re dealing with people whose families do not include college graduates and do not have a lot of sophistication about the system and may just have seen an ad on a website or a late-night television program, called up on a whim and got themselves signed up for federal student loans almost before they knew what happened.
Here’s my favorite part:
In 1997 … Kaplan executives negotiated a pay package so large that it significantly reduced the bottom line in some years.
For instance, in 2002 the company recorded an expense of $34.5 million associated with the Kaplan compensation plan, an amount equal to the entire higher-education division’s profit that year. By 2010, Kaplan executives had cashed in $291 million of stock options.
… [One Kaplan executive who resigned] received his base salary, which was not disclosed, plus incentives and $46 million from the Kaplan stock option plan. There was also an agreement that if [he] didn’t go to work for a competitor, The Post Co. would pay him an additional $10 million in 2009 and $20 million in November 2011.
Alaska and Hawaii – already among the nation’s friendliest diploma mill states – are set to become the go-to places for the for-profit schools to set up business too.
More and more states, appalled by the scummy, exploitative methods of the for-profit tax siphons, are passing restrictive laws against them (UD‘s proud to say that her home state of Maryland has been one of the first to do this). As the list grows to include almost every state (forget waiting for the federal government to do anything), watch for Hawaii and Alaska to be the two hold-outs, corruption in those states being beyond your ability to imagine it so don’t try.
And watch, therefore, as all of the for-profits rush to those states to set up business — in close proximity to their diploma mill cousins.
… tries to protect his school from becoming affiliated with Click-Thru U. He will lose this fight, but how good of him to wage it.
[Western Governor’s University] does not offer a college education. A college education is about going through a process that leaves students transformed. That’s why it takes time. Learning is hard — brain research demonstrates that real learning requires students to struggle with difficult material under the consistent guidance of good teachers. WGU denies students these opportunities. In fact, its advertisements pander to prospective students by offering them credit for what they already know rather than promising to teach them something new.
By giving students opportunities to take courses in the arts and sciences, college prepares graduates for more than just their jobs. College graduates are expected to be capable of making sense of the social, political, economic and scientific challenges facing their country and world. Unlike at WGU, our college students do more than fulfill a small set of technical competencies. They become thoughtful citizens and human beings…