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.

… It’s always a beautiful day in the neighborhood for the Bowl Championship Series. Especially when you throw in tens of millions in profit, immense executive salaries, and barely detectable charitable giving.

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.

A bunch of UD‘s friends and neighbors are featured in this Fox report about the dire USPS situation.

Well, at least the ads remain. Whew!

Todd Nelson heads for-profit colleges. As head of the University of Phoenix, he “signed a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Education, which had found that Phoenix had ‘systematically and intentionally’ violated federal rules against paying recruiters for students.”

Competitor Education Management Corporation snapped Nelson right up, and now he’s overseeing a similar federal and state lawsuit which, one amazed observer notes, “spans the entire company — from the ground level in over 100 separate institutions up to the most senior management — and accounts for nearly all the revenues the company has realized since 2003.” The suit wants $11 billion in state and federal financial aid back from Nelson’s ed biz. Wow.

What’s next for this financial genius? He led Phoenix through a loss of almost ten million dollars; Education Management will certainly settle for around… let’s say one billion. Time to jump to Kaplan, where he can maybe work his magic on even bigger numbers.

This is an old story, and a most repellent one.

Cynical universities are in on the scam too, since it has the effect of pushing down their “admitted” percentages, making the schools look that much more attractive.

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.

Kaplan [has a] sprawling network of for-profit “universities”…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm dislikes quotation marks, but these work.

[The Washington Post, whose parent company owns Kaplan, is now] in the business of profiting off of lower-income students who pay for diplomas, often obtained via online classes… [C]orruption and abuses … pervade the for-profit education industry in general and Kaplan in particular (saddling poor people with debt in exchange for nothing of real value).

Since Kaplan gets virtually all of its money from federal dollars, it’s got to suck up to the government. Greenwald points out that this need doesn’t do much for claims of journalistic independence:

How can a company which is almost wholly dependent upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. Government possibly be expected to serve as a journalistic “watchdog” over that same Government? The very idea is absurd.

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.

… on a single football game?”

At least they’ve got a sweetie of a basketball coach.

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.