When you’re a for-profit online educational outfit, first you land the student and then you, well, land the student. Teaching is essentially air traffic control, bringing the on-screen messages that represent your student in for a Pass.
Given huge enrollments, we’re talking pretty unfriendly skies here, skies clogged with carriers. And given bottom-line pressures, the mandate is to make the skies ever more crowded, as well as to keep your immense student fleet intact.
The pressure to pass students on through their programs, and the pressure on the air traffic controllers of sheer numbers, creates the notoriously shoddy standards of these schools — a shoddiness easy to expose if you only take the trouble.
As did the GAO, which simply enrolled investigators at various for-profits and watched the schools do what they do.
Investigators attempted to enroll using fictitious identities or credentials and successfully did so at 12 of 15 colleges …
Duh. We’re running a business here! The GAO report goes on to note rampant cheating, and rampant tolerance of it… I mean, you get a double whammy cheating-wise at the online for-profits. Online, in any educational context, is a big fat invitation to cheat your way through a course (to begin with, there’s no way to verify that you are who you say you are); add the faceless drudge handling hundreds of students at the for-profit outfit, a drudge primarily motivated to move paying customers through courses, and whaddaya expect?
It all comes together beautifully when students at these outfits realize no one respects their degree. They can’t get a job. And now they have all these big loans to repay.