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.
A Veterans Affairs writer warns GIs.
Go to Google and search for “GI Bill schools.” The first link you get isn’t a page run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The first result is GIBill.com, and it uses the name of the most recognized public education program in existence to its financial benefit. It appears to be a legitimate site for information, but a cursory search of its privacy policy shows it is owned by an online marketing firm that, according to a major business publication, specializes in directing students to for-profit schools through its page. It’s a questionable marketing strategy that seeks to legitimize a page that serves little purpose other than to funnel student Veterans and convince them their options for education are limited to their advertisers.
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Update: Tom Ricks.
[The 2012] budget proposes no changes to traditional Pell grants, which are currently at their highest level ever. What it does is halt, after just two years, a program launched in the 2009-2010 school year that allowed students to apply for a whole second Pell grant for summer school or if they took extra credits.
That program turned out to cost 10 times more than expected, and there was no evidence it was helping anyone graduate from college faster. Instead, it appeared to be the case that for-profit colleges were gaming the system to encourage students to apply for the additional grants to take academically questionable courses.
The tax-profiteers play their games and ruin a good program.
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Update: Trash talk.
… 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.
Mike Shields, a retired Marine Corps colonel and human resources director for U.S. field operations at Schindler Elevator Corp., rejects about 50 military candidates each year for the company’s management development program because their graduate degrees come from online for-profits, he said in an interview. Schindler Elevator is the North American operating entity of Schindler Holding AG in Hergiswil, Switzerland, the world’s second-largest elevator maker. “We don’t even consider them,” Shields said.
This sort of outcome makes paying your loans back difficult.
… hit.
But with boosters like “Papa Doc” Bob Barr in their corner, they’ll be fine.
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Update: Nice and concise: “[T]he explosion in for-profit schools over the past two decades has created an environment in which schools whose primary purpose is to make money for their stock-holders sign students up for federal student loans, then turn huge profits while giving their students such a lousy education that when they graduate they can’t get a job and end up defaulting on the loans.”
… and what are they paying her for?
Results like this, I guess: Rensselaer Polytechnic University is ranked tenth in the nation for worst professors.
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I’ve been reading through the RPI Rate My Professors pages. The school has quite a few legendarily bad professors – professors known by all, for decades, to be insulting, lazy, incomprehensible.
My favorite comment from among many negative appraisals of professors there:
This professor does not like people or questions.
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To be fair, I doubt President Jackson knows about any of this. Too busy on corporate boards.
… universities, we should remind ourselves that there’s a whole other world of legitimate education out there, one which students are more and more ably defending.
Here, in an opinion piece titled Fordham Rightly Resists Offering Online Classes, a Fordham student gets it said. His writing’s a bit awkward, but he gets it said. Excerpts:
… The foundations on which Jesuit universities, particularly Fordham, have been built upon are not in accordance with online courses. Though it may be convenient for students, it does not provide the degree of education we are paying for. The realm of learning and studying is completely altered under these conditions, with a less hands on approach.
If Fordham were to offer online courses, its credibility in teaching would be strongly questioned. Even if a student was able to get beyond the idea of no personal interaction with professors and no thought-provoking ideas of classmates, there is still no guarantee that the quality of education in the online classes will be up to par with that which Fordham instills.
… Sure, online classes can reach a larger amount [should be number] of people, especially those looking to attend part time. This, however, compromises the integrity of the order devoted to education by lacking a creation of relationships and the true development of the whole person that cura personalis stands on…
Serious, legitimate education isn’t just for Jesuits.
“[I]nstead of providing a solid pathway to the middle class, (for-profits) are paving a path into the subbasement of the American economy.”
From a just-issued report on for-profit colleges.
Yeah. Well. This blog’s tag line up there says UD wants to change things. But you’ll never change this thing. These guys are too smart.
And, you know, they run the universities, their boards, and their endowments.
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UD thanks Ralph for the link.
Steven Salzberg, a University of Maryland bioinformatics professor, writes with admirable frankness about the for-profits in Forbes:
… [For-profit universities] offer low-quality, almost worthless degrees. They have virtually no academic standards. They will accept anyone who can pay, and they seem to care primarily about the bottom line. They also haven’t addressed (and virtually never mention) the elephant in the room: many online students are probably cheating to pass their courses, which aren’t very demanding in the first place…
[We should] immediately stop offering government-funded student loans to FPUs. If they really have a better model for higher education, then let them prove it in the free market, without subsidies.
… continues. Tomorrow, Senate hearings on deceptive and illegal student recruiting practices in the industry resume. IHE provides, in this and other articles, a good deal of background, as well as links to important documents.
Undercover investigators posing as students found that employees at all 15 for-profit colleges visited for the [GAO] investigations made “deceptive or otherwise questionable statements” to students about accreditation, graduation rates, employment outcomes, program costs or financial aid.
At four institutions visited, admissions or financial aid officials encouraged students to submit fraudulent financial information in order to qualify for federal aid, the GAO says in its report.
UD’s been covering the scandal for years. In ’07, she wrote a fight song for the University of Phoenix.
Sing it out!
To the tune of Rawhide!!
Enrollin’ …rollin’ …rollin’ …
Keep movin’, movin’, movin’,
Though they’re disapprovin’,
Keep them students movin’, Phoenix!
Don’t try to educate ‘em,
Just rope and throw and bait ‘em,
Soon we’ll be living high and wide.
Boy, my head’s calculatin’
My paycheck will be waitin’,
Be waiting at the end of my pitch.
Move ‘em on, head ‘em up,
Head ‘em up, move ‘em out,
Move ‘em on, head ‘em out, Phoenix!
Set ‘em out, ride ‘em in
Ride ‘em in, let ‘em out,
Cut ‘em out, ride ‘em in, PHOENIX!
… the ever-quotable Barmak Nassirian speaks.
… “This is now a sector in which the vast majority of participants are actually engaged in what I view as counterfeiting of degrees and consumer fraud,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Consumer fraud defined as over-advertised, over-promised, overcharged and under-delivered.
“For a group that reports to be market-based,” he went on to a room of education insiders at the New America Foundation, “what is a better measure of market failure than apparently nobody but the idiot federal government puts their money into these institutions? That is the single best indication that the product has no intrinsic value. People who spend their own money don’t spend it there.” …