9 ms·

The College For-Profits Should Fear

122 points by blatherard 15y ago

nazgulnarsil 15y ago
The 30% profit margin University of Phoenix makes is a signal to other investors to enter the field and innovate! This is a feature not a bug of markets. Non-profit just means they are maximizing more opaque measures of success. Of course the accreditation barriers to entry are still quite innovation stifling. also, I'd be shocked if WGU doesn't come under fire for 'disparate impact', otherwise known as racism at some point.
- mathgladiator 15y ago
  how does racism play into this?
  - nazgulnarsil 15y ago
    Sorry, talking about the history of standardized testing will get me downvoted. Guess how I know.
- bugsbunnyak 15y ago
  Disparate impact is orthogonal to education; it's a legal test that applies to employment, in disputes over the direct relevance of a criterion to job performance. This might affect WGU in some 2nd order way if it were claimed that credential requirements have a disparate impact (well duh, enrollment stats), but that claim would apply equally to any tertiary institution. It seems absurd, but I'm curious if that test has ever been tried against a national professional accreditation... Few quick searches didn't return anything.
- drbaskin 15y ago
  The 30% profit margin sometimes also signals that there are high barriers to entry. (You already mention what I think is the big one: accreditation.)
buff-a 15y ago
FTA: Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demonstrate that they have mastered the material. In fact, they aren’t asked to sit in a “class” at all. This article seems to suggest that at other US universities, you actually have to show up to classes to pass them? Is that actually the case????
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Good luck passing an in-class final without attending class at least once.
  - shard 15y ago
    Lucky for me most of my undergrad classes had take-home exams.
- sakura_k 15y ago
  Attendance-based grading is the salve a mediocre instructor applies to keep up the appearance that they're creating value for the university.
  - jseliger 15y ago
    Sometimes, however, attendance policies are also benevolent paternalism: I say this because I teach English comp at the University of Arizona. Students who don't show up tend to miss a lot of the material and don't do especially well—hence the attendance policy. And the stuff that's done in class (discussion, close reading, sentence construction, and so forth) is stuff that can't really be made up outside of class—as I tell students, if you could do it at home, I'd say, "Do it at home" and I'd do something else in class. Yeah, there's a correlation != causation problem with weak students who tend to miss class being the ones who most need it, but the overall idea of class doing things that can't really be done otherwise still holds. There are also a certain number of students who say or believe, "I'm already a good writer; I don't need to take a composition class." Out of the ~300 I've taught, that's probably been true of one to five, or so, but far more seem to have believed it. A school like the one listed sounds great. It also sounds like it'll work best for the highly motivated. One problem with the HN posts about how universities are wasteful, unnecessary, and so on, is that a pretty small percentage of people are willing to do university-caliber work without the structure of the university. HN posters tend to forget about the other 97% of the world. I tend to see them, and so do a lot of other teacher / prof types.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
The one they should really worry about is Khan Academy: 1. Free 2. Gamification of learning (aka certification) 3. Social web integrated into learning (a network to see your certifications) 4. Inverting the traditional model - do your homework in class watch vids/read at night at home. KA is on the way toward replacing traditional degrees the same way Stackoverflow and Github are replacing traditional resumes.
- dagw 15y ago
  Once KA starts offering courses that are at university level, perhaps. But as it stands the level of the topics covered on KA is far to superficial to threaten universities. That's not to say it won't happen, but so far I've seen no indication of it. PS. With all that being said, I'm huge fan of KA, and rooting for their continued success. I just think they're better suited to take on high schools rather than universities.
  - perfmode 15y ago
    Fundamental? Yes. Superficial? No.
    - tomjen3 15y ago
      I believe hé meant superficial in the way that the courses don't go into the deep end of the subject the way a university course might (which is absolutely ok, as it is not aimed at students at that level, but at the same time it means that it cannot replace a real university).
- rimantas 15y ago
  Really? I guess I am in minotrity, but after watching a few lessons on KA I I left with impression that quality of teaching is quite poor. Educational videos may be one part of education, but they cannot replace all. Teachers are there to stay for a long long time and it has nothing todo with technology.
  - 15y ago
aaronbrethorst 15y ago
single page: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/the_college_forprofits_should031640.php?page=all&print=true http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...
vishaldpatel 15y ago
Seneca College in Toronto has a similar thing going for its Computer Programming diploma. Or at least, this was the case when I went there: 1) You can take an exam for a class at the beginning of the semester if you think you know the material. There is a cost of this exam, but if you pass, then you save money on taking the whole class... and time too. 2) You must complete every single assignment to pass a given class. Your assignments must work 100%. You'll be graded on style. 3) Every class was offered every semester - even during the summer semester. And there was a section for most classes at night. There's just one issue: I thought universities were supposed to teach you how to learn, while community colleges were meant for specific job-related skills. Shouldn't doctors, lawyers, nurses, computer programmers etc... all be getting their job-specific diplomas, just like the mechanics and the electricians? And shouldn't 'degrees' be more research oriented anyway? Why are degrees more valued when whats needed in most cases is someone with a specific skill? Do people with degrees really think that people with diplomas are incapable of learning? Do employers feel this way?
- barry-cotter 15y ago
  Re: your last paragraph Degrees are less about learning than making sure you will do a certain amount of work for at least two years and more usually four, even if the work is dumb. So it signals intelligence and conscientiousness. Having a degree tells people you're at least capable of being a member of the middle class. You're intelligent and biddable enough. Elite university graduates also got some implicit training in the social norms of the upper classes, and by virtue of the intense competition to get in you can be sure anyone who graduated from them is smart. More accurately, anyone they accepted, the dropout rate for top tier US universities is very low (except for Caltech). And yes, people with degrees do think people without are dumber, and employers likewise, because its true. And alternative certifications for different modes of training/types of knowledge fall prey to the same problems. Having separate, respected educational systems, rather than one for the real people and one for the losers requires relatively low social mobility, or at least hard social mobility. Seneca College sounds real cool.
  - gte910h 15y ago
qrgnote 15y ago
IS WGU the only college of this kind?
- GBond 15y ago
  Some time ago I toyed with the idea of getting a grad degree for "resume dressing" purposes optimized for price/prestige/convenience. I was pleasantly surprised that there quite a few options after you get over the signal vs. noise problem: finding legit, accredited schools in the sea of diploma mills who spends a ton on marketing on spam (just google "online degree"). The best place I've found to do research on accredited programs (both undergrad & grad) school that cater to adult students is http://www.degreeinfo.com/forum.php http://www.degreeinfo.com/forum.php. It is the home of a community of people who are good at hacking the diploma game and share their info readily. Folks there tend to favor schools that are in the spirit of this school in the OP article (price/prestige/convenience) but there is quite a good range of schools discussed (for example Duke U.'s MBA program tends to be reviewed favorably as is Delaware for undergrad). There even intrepid individuals there who had foregone the traditional 4 year, "physical seat" undergrad for 2 years of working part-time and distance learning (can be with CLEP exams and the right program).
  - qrgnote 15y ago
    Nice Link! I've had experience with Baker College http://www.baker.edu/ http://www.baker.edu/ in the past, Online Degree... but it was a time-based / attendance base system... WGU "Competence" based accredited degrees seems pretty bad-ass...
mechnik 15y ago
WGU consists of 4 colleges: Teachers', Business, IT, and Health Professions. All well and good but I wish quality online programs were also offered in Math, Natural Sciences, Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Writing, Humanities, etc... In my view a good College of Arts and Sciences is what makes University good. A great Engineering program would be awesome too.
gte910h 15y ago
WGU seems to be looked at askance from some googling by positions seeking MBAs
herdrick 15y ago
The key paragraph: "WGU’s answer to the status quo is to offer a degree that is based on competency rather than time. By gathering information from employers, industry experts, and academics, Western Governors formulates a detailed, institution- wide sense of what every graduate of a given degree program needs to know. Then they work backward from there, defining what every student who has taken a given course needs to know. As they go, they design assessments—tests—of all those competencies. “Essentially,” says Kevin Kinser, a professor of education at the State University of New York at Albany, “they’re creating a bar exam for each point along the way that leads to a degree.”"
amalag 15y ago
I took a bachelors from WGU because I dropped out of college many years ago and went out of the country. I came back and just wanted one to say I had a bachelors. I can say I practically learned nothing from WGU and the coursework was incredibly easy. This is for the IT degree. To be fair to them, most courses were IT certifications. So the real problem was the IT certifications were useless, I mean really, what use is Security+ and related certs. Anyway that is my opinion. I did some IT admin work first, then got more into programming with Ruby on Rails. Probably my path is a bit atypical.
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  As someone who has interviewed candidates from physical universities with IT degrees I can say the same is probably true of them. I see candidates all the time who can recite the OSI Model by heart but can't figure out a Windows XP system isn't connecting to the network because it doesn't have an IP Address.
jeremyarussell 15y ago
I found this article really interesting, Read all the way through it on my phone and made sure to come online to comment. I have to find myself agreeing that the competency based off of actual employers is one of the best way to get stuff done. And now if KA can get actual teachers and setup actual accreditation systems then all these for-profit groups will be under even more pressure. As people that want these services to thrive I feel the best way for us to allow this to happen is to help them market their schools. Blog posts etc etc that link to the site will hopefully make a google search for "online college" send WGU and Khan to the top. I for one may be signing up. (I already attend Khan to learn about linear algebra.) Having a business degree from WGU would round out my current repertoire rather nicely I think.

122 points by blatherard 15y ago

The 30% profit margin University of Phoenix makes is a signal to other investors to enter the field and innovate! This is a feature not a bug of markets. Non-profit just means they are maximizing more opaque measures of success. Of course the accreditation barriers to entry are still quite innovation stifling. also, I'd be shocked if WGU doesn't come under fire for 'disparate impact', otherwise known as racism at some point.

mathgladiator 15y ago
how does racism play into this?
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  Sorry, talking about the history of standardized testing will get me downvoted. Guess how I know.
bugsbunnyak 15y ago
Disparate impact is orthogonal to education; it's a legal test that applies to employment, in disputes over the direct relevance of a criterion to job performance. This might affect WGU in some 2nd order way if it were claimed that credential requirements have a disparate impact (well duh, enrollment stats), but that claim would apply equally to any tertiary institution. It seems absurd, but I'm curious if that test has ever been tried against a national professional accreditation... Few quick searches didn't return anything.
drbaskin 15y ago
The 30% profit margin sometimes also signals that there are high barriers to entry. (You already mention what I think is the big one: accreditation.)

buff-a 15y ago

FTA: Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demonstrate that they have mastered the material. In fact, they aren’t asked to sit in a “class” at all. This article seems to suggest that at other US universities, you actually have to show up to classes to pass them? Is that actually the case????

sliverstorm 15y ago
Good luck passing an in-class final without attending class at least once.
- shard 15y ago
  Lucky for me most of my undergrad classes had take-home exams.
sakura_k 15y ago
Attendance-based grading is the salve a mediocre instructor applies to keep up the appearance that they're creating value for the university.
- jseliger 15y ago
  Sometimes, however, attendance policies are also benevolent paternalism: I say this because I teach English comp at the University of Arizona. Students who don't show up tend to miss a lot of the material and don't do especially well—hence the attendance policy. And the stuff that's done in class (discussion, close reading, sentence construction, and so forth) is stuff that can't really be made up outside of class—as I tell students, if you could do it at home, I'd say, "Do it at home" and I'd do something else in class. Yeah, there's a correlation != causation problem with weak students who tend to miss class being the ones who most need it, but the overall idea of class doing things that can't really be done otherwise still holds. There are also a certain number of students who say or believe, "I'm already a good writer; I don't need to take a composition class." Out of the ~300 I've taught, that's probably been true of one to five, or so, but far more seem to have believed it. A school like the one listed sounds great. It also sounds like it'll work best for the highly motivated. One problem with the HN posts about how universities are wasteful, unnecessary, and so on, is that a pretty small percentage of people are willing to do university-caliber work without the structure of the university. HN posters tend to forget about the other 97% of the world. I tend to see them, and so do a lot of other teacher / prof types.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

The one they should really worry about is Khan Academy: 1. Free 2. Gamification of learning (aka certification) 3. Social web integrated into learning (a network to see your certifications) 4. Inverting the traditional model - do your homework in class watch vids/read at night at home. KA is on the way toward replacing traditional degrees the same way Stackoverflow and Github are replacing traditional resumes.

dagw 15y ago
Once KA starts offering courses that are at university level, perhaps. But as it stands the level of the topics covered on KA is far to superficial to threaten universities. That's not to say it won't happen, but so far I've seen no indication of it. PS. With all that being said, I'm huge fan of KA, and rooting for their continued success. I just think they're better suited to take on high schools rather than universities.
- perfmode 15y ago
  Fundamental? Yes. Superficial? No.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    I believe hé meant superficial in the way that the courses don't go into the deep end of the subject the way a university course might (which is absolutely ok, as it is not aimed at students at that level, but at the same time it means that it cannot replace a real university).
rimantas 15y ago
Really? I guess I am in minotrity, but after watching a few lessons on KA I I left with impression that quality of teaching is quite poor. Educational videos may be one part of education, but they cannot replace all. Teachers are there to stay for a long long time and it has nothing todo with technology.
- 15y ago

aaronbrethorst 15y ago

single page: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/the_college_forprofits_should031640.php?page=all&print=true http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...

vishaldpatel 15y ago

Seneca College in Toronto has a similar thing going for its Computer Programming diploma. Or at least, this was the case when I went there: 1) You can take an exam for a class at the beginning of the semester if you think you know the material. There is a cost of this exam, but if you pass, then you save money on taking the whole class... and time too. 2) You must complete every single assignment to pass a given class. Your assignments must work 100%. You'll be graded on style. 3) Every class was offered every semester - even during the summer semester. And there was a section for most classes at night. There's just one issue: I thought universities were supposed to teach you how to learn, while community colleges were meant for specific job-related skills. Shouldn't doctors, lawyers, nurses, computer programmers etc... all be getting their job-specific diplomas, just like the mechanics and the electricians? And shouldn't 'degrees' be more research oriented anyway? Why are degrees more valued when whats needed in most cases is someone with a specific skill? Do people with degrees really think that people with diplomas are incapable of learning? Do employers feel this way?

barry-cotter 15y ago
Re: your last paragraph Degrees are less about learning than making sure you will do a certain amount of work for at least two years and more usually four, even if the work is dumb. So it signals intelligence and conscientiousness. Having a degree tells people you're at least capable of being a member of the middle class. You're intelligent and biddable enough. Elite university graduates also got some implicit training in the social norms of the upper classes, and by virtue of the intense competition to get in you can be sure anyone who graduated from them is smart. More accurately, anyone they accepted, the dropout rate for top tier US universities is very low (except for Caltech). And yes, people with degrees do think people without are dumber, and employers likewise, because its true. And alternative certifications for different modes of training/types of knowledge fall prey to the same problems. Having separate, respected educational systems, rather than one for the real people and one for the losers requires relatively low social mobility, or at least hard social mobility. Seneca College sounds real cool.
- gte910h 15y ago

qrgnote 15y ago

IS WGU the only college of this kind?

GBond 15y ago
Some time ago I toyed with the idea of getting a grad degree for "resume dressing" purposes optimized for price/prestige/convenience. I was pleasantly surprised that there quite a few options after you get over the signal vs. noise problem: finding legit, accredited schools in the sea of diploma mills who spends a ton on marketing on spam (just google "online degree"). The best place I've found to do research on accredited programs (both undergrad & grad) school that cater to adult students is http://www.degreeinfo.com/forum.php http://www.degreeinfo.com/forum.php. It is the home of a community of people who are good at hacking the diploma game and share their info readily. Folks there tend to favor schools that are in the spirit of this school in the OP article (price/prestige/convenience) but there is quite a good range of schools discussed (for example Duke U.'s MBA program tends to be reviewed favorably as is Delaware for undergrad). There even intrepid individuals there who had foregone the traditional 4 year, "physical seat" undergrad for 2 years of working part-time and distance learning (can be with CLEP exams and the right program).
- qrgnote 15y ago
  Nice Link! I've had experience with Baker College http://www.baker.edu/ http://www.baker.edu/ in the past, Online Degree... but it was a time-based / attendance base system... WGU "Competence" based accredited degrees seems pretty bad-ass...

mechnik 15y ago

WGU consists of 4 colleges: Teachers', Business, IT, and Health Professions. All well and good but I wish quality online programs were also offered in Math, Natural Sciences, Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Writing, Humanities, etc... In my view a good College of Arts and Sciences is what makes University good. A great Engineering program would be awesome too.

gte910h 15y ago

WGU seems to be looked at askance from some googling by positions seeking MBAs

herdrick 15y ago

The key paragraph: "WGU’s answer to the status quo is to offer a degree that is based on competency rather than time. By gathering information from employers, industry experts, and academics, Western Governors formulates a detailed, institution- wide sense of what every graduate of a given degree program needs to know. Then they work backward from there, defining what every student who has taken a given course needs to know. As they go, they design assessments—tests—of all those competencies. “Essentially,” says Kevin Kinser, a professor of education at the State University of New York at Albany, “they’re creating a bar exam for each point along the way that leads to a degree.”"

amalag 15y ago

I took a bachelors from WGU because I dropped out of college many years ago and went out of the country. I came back and just wanted one to say I had a bachelors. I can say I practically learned nothing from WGU and the coursework was incredibly easy. This is for the IT degree. To be fair to them, most courses were IT certifications. So the real problem was the IT certifications were useless, I mean really, what use is Security+ and related certs. Anyway that is my opinion. I did some IT admin work first, then got more into programming with Ruby on Rails. Probably my path is a bit atypical.

TomOfTTB 15y ago
As someone who has interviewed candidates from physical universities with IT degrees I can say the same is probably true of them. I see candidates all the time who can recite the OSI Model by heart but can't figure out a Windows XP system isn't connecting to the network because it doesn't have an IP Address.

jeremyarussell 15y ago

I found this article really interesting, Read all the way through it on my phone and made sure to come online to comment. I have to find myself agreeing that the competency based off of actual employers is one of the best way to get stuff done. And now if KA can get actual teachers and setup actual accreditation systems then all these for-profit groups will be under even more pressure. As people that want these services to thrive I feel the best way for us to allow this to happen is to help them market their schools. Blog posts etc etc that link to the site will hopefully make a google search for "online college" send WGU and Khan to the top. I for one may be signing up. (I already attend Khan to learn about linear algebra.) Having a business degree from WGU would round out my current repertoire rather nicely I think.