… notes the love affair between the right and the for-profit tax siphons. [Subscription]

[F]raud appears to be a standard element of the business model. Since the government guarantees almost every loan regardless of whether the students can pay it back, the institutions have an incentive to sweep in as many students as possible, regardless of their prospects of graduating. … The question at hand is whether the federal government should apply some performance metric to its college loans or simply hand out cash willy-nilly. Amazingly, handing out cash willy-nilly has become the conservative position in this debate.

The top executives for the top 15 for-profit colleges pulled in $2 billion last year. Two billion dollars, practically all taxpayer money.

And that student loan money?—the default rate at these for-profits is 43 percent!

So, only 22 percent graduate and 43 percent default on the loans, leaving us holding the bag because students have been sold a bill of goods by slick marketers.

You already know all of this if you read University Diaries. Just reminding you.

Conventional universities are forced into this one-to-many, someone lecturing to a timetable, because they have buildings to fill… In the online world you don’t need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don’t need to be trapped into a lecture timetable…

Gradually, determinedly, the online heroes lead us out of the darkness of the past.

Now, now, let’s not be hasty. As American taxpayers, we should continue to give our money to for-profit schools who, because of insanely high student default rates, are “manag[ing] (some would say, manipulat[ing]) default rates so they look better than they really are.”

CNBC calls it the “dirty little secret” of for-profit universities (most of their dirty stuff is public, not that anybody cares). They’re paying default management companies to “mak[e] sure default rates don’t exceed … statutory limits in the first two (and now three) years after a student gets a loan.”

Education Undersecretary James Kvaal frets about the “use of deferments and forbearances in a manner that leaves borrowers less able to repay their loans, but would delay any default until after the two-year window used to measure school default rates.”

Their worthless educations have made the students unemployable, or woefully underemployed. Now their loan repayments are going to go UP because the default managers are pressuring them to restructure.

A just-published Chronicle of Higher Ed analysis has shown that for-profits are “aggressively using ‘default management’ tools to mask problematic rates of default.”

It’s a beautiful thing when truly free marketeers get their hands on the education market, isn’t it? These aren’t non-profit pussies! Go go go boys! Take my tax dollars and do your thing!

William Bowen, former president of Princeton, in an interview:

I’m not a fan of huge salaries for presidents of academic institutions. These are hard jobs. But people don’t really do them for the money. What kind of message do you really want to convey concerning the nature of the institution and its leadership? I always thought that it was important to convey a message of we’re all in this together. If you as president earn so much more than everyone else, it’s hard to argue that we’re all in this together.

It’s an old-fashioned answer, and one that doesn’t really take into account profound changes in the American university. Under “huge salaries,” he has in mind presidents who earn more than one million dollars a year. One of Bowen’s successors at Princeton now works for for-profit DeVry, whose chief executives typically earn between twenty and one hundred million dollars a year, as do the leaders of most other for-profit universities. That’s the wave of the higher ed future, not a bunch of paupers pulling down $800,000 year and throwing money away on student scholarships and shit.

… has an eighty percent drop-out rate earn twenty million dollars a year?

In the for-profit sector, of course.

Astoundingly trashy.

The University of Kentucky has so much to be proud of: Its sports program; its stewardship of the state’s arts and letters… And now there’s something else: It’s hired its first invisible professor, a man students and colleagues will almost never see.

Boasting that he represents a world “now digital and global,” this education professor guy (Why should I bother going back to the article to check on his name?) will sit on his ass in Iowa and send emails to UK.

He does worry that he’ll “miss out on some of [UK’s] culture.”

Nah!

What a boon to the UK campus! I trust we’ll all profit from UK’s groundbreaking initiative and let everybody but our football players stay home.

Oh yeah? What’s so special about ‘academia’? What’s the word refer to at all?

Millions of people scattered over America, in front of their computers, clicking on to a distance-ed course?

That’s what academia is – or is quickly becoming – in the United States. How is that activity taintable?

Or do you have in mind the opposite of this, the high-end of academia? UD‘s friend Janine Wedel calls this group of people the shadow elite. (Laura Rozen elaborates on the idea: “[T]here are people who are transparent [about] working for paid interest and [then] there are people who have reputations as being scholars at universities. It’s not clear that they are being funded perhaps by a consulting firm that is getting paid by [for instance] the Libyan government.”)

Academia is professors like Andrei Shleifer and Benjamin Barber and oodles of others, who span the globe to enrich themselves. What’s taintable about that?

Or maybe you mean our sports programs.

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(UD thanks Dirk for the sports link.)

An Australian study confirms what any idiot would expect — encourage students to go online, and they won’t come to class. (Of course, if you allow them to use laptops in class, they’re not really coming to class either.) But this professor I’ve quoted in the headline, Jane Mears at the University of Western Sydney, says something very important that I’ve been trying to get at on this blog.

One of the many cynical, stupid things online advocates say is that We’ve got to meet students where they are, tailor education to them and their preferences… And who wouldn’t prefer to phone their education in? (A lot of professors, it turns out, prefer phoning their teaching in too.) But as Mears points out, education (as the word e-ducation itself implies) is about leading (she says dragging, which is also fine) people out of where they are, influencing them, enticing them into a certain mode of discourse and reflection, changing them. Online isn’t shaking up higher education. It’s killing it.

Or, as the article’s headline puts it:

ONLINE STUDY KILLS UNI LIFE

In an editorial, the Sacramento Bee states the obvious truth about tax-siphoning, student-exploiting for-profit schools. The editors agree with the California Student Aid Commission that “the state [should] not give Cal Grants to students at for-profit colleges unless those colleges use some of their profits to provide student aid.”

The commission also called for denying grants to students at schools that fail to graduate sufficient numbers of students and whose students have an unacceptably high rate of default on student loans.

…generates scathing responses from readers.

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And speaking of scathing: The author links to a recent study of online education. Excerpts:

Students in the online courses were significantly better prepared at the outset … [H]owever, students in the online course performed more poorly than those in the face to face course…. Students who took developmental math and English courses online were much less likely to subsequently succeed in college level math and English. … [C]olleges that are focused on improving student success should proceed cautiously in expanding online course offerings.

The study’s author, Shanna Smith Jaggars, notes the pathetic lost-in-cyberspace nature of the online experience. One student says: “I didn’t feel like there was an instructor presence… I didn’t feel like there was anything I was learning from the instructor. The instructor was simply there as a Web administrator or as a grader.”
(Longtime readers know that UD calls online professors air traffic controllers.) Other student comments: “[I was] sort of on this island, all by myself.” “Alone and adrift.” “I know nothing about these people!”

Online would be a great way to study Samuel Beckett’s plays. It allows you to feel his theme.

Oh, and:

Online communication can be easily misinterpreted, due in part to the lack of visual and facial cues. Online teachers are encouraged to provide timely and detailed feedback. However … they often do not have any information about how the student responds to this feedback. In fact, students may misinterpret a high level of feedback as negative feedback when in reality a teacher is merely posing questions to stimulate student thinking.

Yeah funny thing about that. Online interaction ain’t really interaction, is it? Interaction means back and forth, doesn’t it?

Since a number of studies show these results, one researcher concludes that, for instance, “[t]eaching economics courses online in community colleges is probably not good policy.”

Here’s what the NYT columnist should have said in defense of online education, for-profit or not for profit. It’s really cheap.

John Dorfman, Bloomberg:

For-profit colleges …depend on the federal government to guarantee the student loans that pay for their students to attend. Without loans, most students couldn’t go, and without federal guarantees few lenders would issue student loans.

Particularly risky is Corinthian Colleges Inc. of Santa Ana, California, which gets 90 percent of its revenue from the federal government, according to Barclays Capital. In November, I explained some reasons why I would stay away from Corinthian Colleges shares, such as the fact that many of its students are struggling to pay back their loans.

Lalala … to be sure…

Huh? … Fuck off…

So far this is what Columbia University, and its president, have managed by way of response to the scandal of Lee Bollinger remaining on the board of the company that owns one of the most notorious for-profit universities, Kaplan. It’s the same high-handed indifference Bollinger (and, equally notoriously, Berkeley’s Richard Blum) has shown toward the hundreds of thousands of ordinary American grunts being dragged into and ripped off by the schools.

All praise, then, to the students at Columbia for raising a stink about this. They’re eloquent on the subject of Bollinger’s hypocrisy, and they’re trying hard to get him to resign from the board.

The CU Democrats’ petition says that “Kaplan exploits the poor, the vulnerable, and the taxpayer to enrich itself.” As of Monday night, the petition had over 580 signers, some of whom are alumni.

… Blum, and now Lee Bollinger: Hypocrites of the Century.

… from an insider.

[T]he leaders of [for-profit] companies, schools, and departments do not typically see their main function as furthering the education of students and their success; some do things that put finances over learning, and that’s when trouble, the media, and politicians strike.

… Those who work at not-for-profit colleges generally cannot get monetary bonuses for doing their jobs and are certainly not stockholders with a personal stake in the schools’ quarterly earnings. They get a promotion or a raise for doing a good job but not a separate check, and their admissions officers do not get cash bonuses.