9 ms·

A large part of the problem is all the shitty for profit schools. They get students to take out large government backed loans, then are defaulting, since they c

A large part of the problem is all the shitty for profit schools. They get students to take out large government backed loans, then are defaulting, since they can't actually get a job. I knew several people I grew up with who went to these schools. They took out huge loans, 10k plus, and they never landed any kind of job with their "certificates" / degrees. [1] Half of all defaults are from these kind of schools. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/career-education-corp-will-pay-9-million-to-students-after-allegedly-inflating-job-numbers-2013-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/career-education-corp-will-pa...

jobu 13y ago
Always ask if the school is Regionally Accredited in the degree you intend to take: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation#Regional_accreditation_vs._national_accreditation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation#Regional... If not, the credits are generally non-transferrable and many businesses will simply toss your resume.
- masmullin 13y ago
  How do you know that 'Regionally Accredited' is meaningful until you are educated? My high school guidance councillor certainly never talked about this. My college actually shouted "we're accredited" at the top of their lungs, but I didn't give a fart until I was half way through the degree, and one of my profs talked to me about why they worked so hard ensuring accreditation (for the same reasons you state) - at which point I said, "pheww it's a good thing this place is accredited" I had no difficulty getting a job after grad. But I certainly didn't know that accredited was important before I entered the course.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > My high school guidance councillor certainly never talked about this. They should have. :( It's sort of important.
  - johnward 13y ago
    This is a mistake I made. My dad didn't go to college and my mom got a 2 year degree from a community college. A shitty for profit school sold me on the idea that I could get an awesome job in 2 years and then continue on to a bachelors program. Except that the credits don't transfer and you can only get the BS from the same shitty school. I also didn't see anyway I could pay for schooling without working full time and I didn't see how I could make that work at a traditional school. Although I'm doing ok in my career I know many people who go to these types of schools do not. Now I don't know what to do. I would love to have gone or go to a 4 year state school. At this point in my life I make too much money and have too many responsibilities to be able to quit and go back to school. I also have 10 years in the field which I hope makes up for the education gap in some cases. Are there any actually decent (accredited) programs that have hours for working people? The only way I see myself getting a BS is if there is a full night program somewhere but at this point I'm not even sure that it's worth taking on more debt.
    - jhawk28 13y ago
      Look into DePaul. They have decent distance learning and are accredited. The distance learning is like a second classroom that is remote (instead of like a MOOC). They record the lecture of the day and post it in the evening. If you have any tests, you often need to find a proctor. They also have restrictions on who can be a proctor (you can't just find a teacher friend).
- nitrogen 13y ago
  The odd school here and there can get away without accreditation if their reputation allows it. For example, at least one of the founders of Pixar came from my former university, which has an unaccredited CS program (at least at the time I attended).
  - jccooper 13y ago
    Dunno how old you are, but I think most CS programs up until about 2003 werent accredited because no such program existed. Any BS from before that is just backed by the reputation of the school--which is basically the case save for the bottom of the barrel for every subject. (Because if you have to ask...)
  - zach 13y ago
    The focus in this discussion is on school accreditation. Program accreditation is a different beast of far more narrow interest. School accreditation is essential; program accreditation is a feature. School accreditation is done by a regional accreditation organization and validates every diploma the school grants. Program accreditation is only available for certain degrees to begin with, and is usually under the authority of a professional group in that area of study. Practically every state university is an accredited institution, even if they offer (i.e.) accounting or engineering programs that are not accredited by a relevant organization.
msandford 13y ago
I couldn't agree more! Another unintended consequence is that people who previously wouldn't have been able to get loans at all due to default risk can get money. But they don't have the credentials to get into a fancy school. This means there is a lot of excess demand and it makes it possible for these for-profit schools to even exist (they probably wouldn't otherwise). Since the job market doesn't necessarily need double the number of college grads it means that competition for the jobs that do need filling is fiercer. And that means that people who need to pay back loans for school don't necessarily have the ability to. A race to the bottom in terms of accepting a lower paying job ensues, and people are left with very little agency. Sometimes it seems like the better-intentioned a social justice law is the worse it'll end up being years down the road.
- muzz 13y ago
  McKinsey says there will be a huge shortage of college graduates: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/talent_tensions_ahead_a_ceo_briefing http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/talent_ten...
  - acchow 13y ago
    Despite widespread knowledge of grade inflation and diploma devaluation, somehow a college degree is still used in discussions of employability. If it's easy to graduate once you've been admitted, increasing the number of graduates isn't going to help alleviate the "shortage of college graduates" because the real shortage is in talent.
    - msandford 13y ago
      That's really insightful.
dnautics 13y ago
>[1] Half of all defaults are from these kind of schools. That means half of all defaults are from the "other" kind of school. And the loans from the "other" kind of school are much, much more than 10k +, and many of those students are "never landing any kind of job", too. Sounds like a LARGER part of the problem is "conventional" higher education.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  How many people go to real schools, and how many go to fake 'for profit' schools? And isn't the median student debt something like 25k? Not really "much much more" in my book. Anyone with a real degree should be able to handle that sort of debt. What we should be doing is allowing lenders to discriminate by major and school. Good school with a good degree? Lend. Good school with a shitty degree? Lend with extreme caution caution. Fake school with any sort of degree? Tell them to kindly fuck off.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    > What we should be doing is allowing lenders to discriminate by major and school. Good school with a good degree? Lend. Good school with a shitty degree? Lend with extreme caution caution. Fake school with any sort of degree? Tell them to kindly fuck off. No disagreement here. I don't want to give the perception that I think "for-profit" higher education is problem-free. I do think they have severe problems, but putting a disproportionate amount of attention on them is distracting to the problem that the "non-profits" are - which has a bigger societal impact, since they are serving more people. "For-profits" are just an easy target because of the broad social perception that profits breed evil, where many of those evildoings are just as bad in the "non-profit" higher educational sector.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      No, for-profits are a problem. They account for 10-13% of students, but 25% of student loans, and 50% of defaults. They have no academic standards, because they have no concern for academic reputation in the way traditional institutions do, and can seek to enroll the largest possible classes without worrying about keeping up GPA/SAT medians.
dmckeon 13y ago
From that link: "Students at for-profits account for nearly half of all student loan defaults but only about 12% of post- secondary students," In other words, not so much "half of all defaults" but "at 4 times the rate."
- dnautics 13y ago
  it's actually 9 times the rate, if you do the math correctly.
  - acchow 13y ago
    (1/12)/(1/88) = 7.33
    - dnautics 13y ago
      oops, I rounded 12 down to 10 when I did my math!
      - Toenex 13y ago
        Sorry which school did you go to? ;)
        dnautics 13y ago
        Uchicago math. Can't handle non integral mantissas or when they are greater than 6. At work, I do mostly biology, where everything is 1, 2, or 5 - close enough. One sig fig is par for the course, anything else would be an overoptimistic lie.
        Toenex 13y ago
        I do mostly biology, where everything is 1, 2, or 5 As an engineer working in medical imaging this I loved!
        13y ago
goostavos 13y ago
My girlfriend attends a for profit school (because her employer covers it 100%), it's absolutely alarming how stunningly expensive these for profit schools are. As a comparison, the state school that I attend, even with over-priced books, sets me back about $1200/semester, and that's for 3 classes. A single class for her is billed at that same amount. Before books. I don't know how anyone would look at the cost and their future earning potential and decide that paying for a for-profit is a good idea. I know people who have gone the that Full Sail program and ended up 100+k in debt, and with nothing useful to show for it. Education in this country is in a terrible, terrible state.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
  Full Sail Graduate here. You are correct. Avoid Full Sail. It's designed to pump out students like crazy. I'd say it's one of the most greedy schools. In the end I wish I could take it all back and never go there.
  - AJ007 13y ago
    Its worth noting Full Sail is one of the top display advertisers in the United States.
- jrokisky 13y ago
  The public university I attended was not much better. Tuition + Room and Board was 24k a year and rising. At the same time, an incredible amount of new university buildings are being built.
ctdonath 13y ago
As a sometime prof at a for-profit school, may I observe that 1/3rd of my students (on average) failed - not for any guilt by the school (me included), but because they just didn't do the work. Really, they didn't even try; I can't grade what's not submitted. Methinks there's a significant correlation between your complaint and the reality I observed, a correlation which nobody is taking into account.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  the charge is that the school management knows damn well that a full third won't do the work, and admit them anyway, getting their monies and putting them into debt. the issue is that public money is being used for this scheme, not that there's anything wrong with taking money from idiots in general.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    Statistically you're correct, but objectively you can't identify which students won't do the work - ergo, you can't discriminate who to enroll (heavy on the consequences of involving the word "discriminate"). The government would come down hard on any school which says "you pass all the enrollment criteria, but we have a nagging feeling you won't complete the degree so we're not letting you in." Hence the argument that public money[1] should not be involved. The school management can't say "no" to it (from any angle), and the would-be students think it's free; nobody, lender in particular, hammers home the point "if you don't do the work, you'll be in deep financial $#!^". It's the borrower "putting them into debt". Society pressures kids into getting a degree, the school makes it easy to start the process, government makes it easy to borrow the money, but ultimately it's up to the enrollee to sign for the loan and do the work to make it pay off. Every self-appointed pundit is pointing fingers at the school (for "fleecing" students) or the government (for "wasting" public funds), but nobody is pointing at the students for not making the effort. [1] - "public" insofar as it was legally confiscated from the public at implied gunpoint.
    - snicklepuff 13y ago
      > but objectively you can't identify which students won't do the work - ergo, you can't discriminate who to enroll I'm calling complete bullshit on this one: isn't that the very definition of admissions? Even if you claim it's not, I think that if you look at any student's previous grades / work experience / references, you can quite reliably determine who will do the work and who will not. These schools simply don't want to: they want to admit everybody so they can take their money in exchange for basically nothing. I would fully support legislation to bar for-profit institutions from receiving any federal tuition aid (whether loans or grants). > public money[1] should not be involved. The school management can't say "no" to it This is false: schools are not required to accept federal loans.[1] [1] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865576111/No-more-student-loan-debt-at-College-of-the-Ozarks.html?pg=alluired http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865576111/No-more-student... to accept federal loans
Shivetya 13y ago
Considering the budgets of most schools, which ones aren't for profit? Really? When even state schools spend money on facilities, staff, and materials, not directly toward educating the student, they are for profit.
- superuser2 13y ago
  Money going back into the institution and improving research, attracting better staff, buying supplies, building facilities, and improving the quality of life is not profit, it's reinvestment in the organization. Further, as easy as it is to be offended by brand-new facilities, you'll find that 1) many are paid for by oustide grants and the money never could have gone towards reducing tuition, and 2) those that are paid for with students' money amount to pocket change per student. A for-profit college educates students as cheaply as possible (in terms of cost to the institution, not price to the student) to maximize the amount of surplus the owners can pocket.
api 13y ago
Bubbles beget exactly this kind of opportunism. During the housing bubble there were builders who slapped up houses so poorly that they had to be demolished years later.

jobu 13y ago

Always ask if the school is Regionally Accredited in the degree you intend to take: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation#Regional_accreditation_vs._national_accreditation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation#Regional... If not, the credits are generally non-transferrable and many businesses will simply toss your resume.

masmullin 13y ago
How do you know that 'Regionally Accredited' is meaningful until you are educated? My high school guidance councillor certainly never talked about this. My college actually shouted "we're accredited" at the top of their lungs, but I didn't give a fart until I was half way through the degree, and one of my profs talked to me about why they worked so hard ensuring accreditation (for the same reasons you state) - at which point I said, "pheww it's a good thing this place is accredited" I had no difficulty getting a job after grad. But I certainly didn't know that accredited was important before I entered the course.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > My high school guidance councillor certainly never talked about this. They should have. :( It's sort of important.
- johnward 13y ago
  This is a mistake I made. My dad didn't go to college and my mom got a 2 year degree from a community college. A shitty for profit school sold me on the idea that I could get an awesome job in 2 years and then continue on to a bachelors program. Except that the credits don't transfer and you can only get the BS from the same shitty school. I also didn't see anyway I could pay for schooling without working full time and I didn't see how I could make that work at a traditional school. Although I'm doing ok in my career I know many people who go to these types of schools do not. Now I don't know what to do. I would love to have gone or go to a 4 year state school. At this point in my life I make too much money and have too many responsibilities to be able to quit and go back to school. I also have 10 years in the field which I hope makes up for the education gap in some cases. Are there any actually decent (accredited) programs that have hours for working people? The only way I see myself getting a BS is if there is a full night program somewhere but at this point I'm not even sure that it's worth taking on more debt.
  - jhawk28 13y ago
    Look into DePaul. They have decent distance learning and are accredited. The distance learning is like a second classroom that is remote (instead of like a MOOC). They record the lecture of the day and post it in the evening. If you have any tests, you often need to find a proctor. They also have restrictions on who can be a proctor (you can't just find a teacher friend).
nitrogen 13y ago
The odd school here and there can get away without accreditation if their reputation allows it. For example, at least one of the founders of Pixar came from my former university, which has an unaccredited CS program (at least at the time I attended).
- jccooper 13y ago
  Dunno how old you are, but I think most CS programs up until about 2003 werent accredited because no such program existed. Any BS from before that is just backed by the reputation of the school--which is basically the case save for the bottom of the barrel for every subject. (Because if you have to ask...)
- zach 13y ago
  The focus in this discussion is on school accreditation. Program accreditation is a different beast of far more narrow interest. School accreditation is essential; program accreditation is a feature. School accreditation is done by a regional accreditation organization and validates every diploma the school grants. Program accreditation is only available for certain degrees to begin with, and is usually under the authority of a professional group in that area of study. Practically every state university is an accredited institution, even if they offer (i.e.) accounting or engineering programs that are not accredited by a relevant organization.

msandford 13y ago

I couldn't agree more! Another unintended consequence is that people who previously wouldn't have been able to get loans at all due to default risk can get money. But they don't have the credentials to get into a fancy school. This means there is a lot of excess demand and it makes it possible for these for-profit schools to even exist (they probably wouldn't otherwise). Since the job market doesn't necessarily need double the number of college grads it means that competition for the jobs that do need filling is fiercer. And that means that people who need to pay back loans for school don't necessarily have the ability to. A race to the bottom in terms of accepting a lower paying job ensues, and people are left with very little agency. Sometimes it seems like the better-intentioned a social justice law is the worse it'll end up being years down the road.

muzz 13y ago
McKinsey says there will be a huge shortage of college graduates: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/talent_tensions_ahead_a_ceo_briefing http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/talent_ten...
- acchow 13y ago
  Despite widespread knowledge of grade inflation and diploma devaluation, somehow a college degree is still used in discussions of employability. If it's easy to graduate once you've been admitted, increasing the number of graduates isn't going to help alleviate the "shortage of college graduates" because the real shortage is in talent.
  - msandford 13y ago
    That's really insightful.

dnautics 13y ago

>[1] Half of all defaults are from these kind of schools. That means half of all defaults are from the "other" kind of school. And the loans from the "other" kind of school are much, much more than 10k +, and many of those students are "never landing any kind of job", too. Sounds like a LARGER part of the problem is "conventional" higher education.

jlgreco 13y ago
How many people go to real schools, and how many go to fake 'for profit' schools? And isn't the median student debt something like 25k? Not really "much much more" in my book. Anyone with a real degree should be able to handle that sort of debt. What we should be doing is allowing lenders to discriminate by major and school. Good school with a good degree? Lend. Good school with a shitty degree? Lend with extreme caution caution. Fake school with any sort of degree? Tell them to kindly fuck off.
- dnautics 13y ago
  > What we should be doing is allowing lenders to discriminate by major and school. Good school with a good degree? Lend. Good school with a shitty degree? Lend with extreme caution caution. Fake school with any sort of degree? Tell them to kindly fuck off. No disagreement here. I don't want to give the perception that I think "for-profit" higher education is problem-free. I do think they have severe problems, but putting a disproportionate amount of attention on them is distracting to the problem that the "non-profits" are - which has a bigger societal impact, since they are serving more people. "For-profits" are just an easy target because of the broad social perception that profits breed evil, where many of those evildoings are just as bad in the "non-profit" higher educational sector.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    No, for-profits are a problem. They account for 10-13% of students, but 25% of student loans, and 50% of defaults. They have no academic standards, because they have no concern for academic reputation in the way traditional institutions do, and can seek to enroll the largest possible classes without worrying about keeping up GPA/SAT medians.

dmckeon 13y ago

From that link: "Students at for-profits account for nearly half of all student loan defaults but only about 12% of post- secondary students," In other words, not so much "half of all defaults" but "at 4 times the rate."

dnautics 13y ago
it's actually 9 times the rate, if you do the math correctly.
- acchow 13y ago
  (1/12)/(1/88) = 7.33
  - dnautics 13y ago
    oops, I rounded 12 down to 10 when I did my math!
    - Toenex 13y ago
      Sorry which school did you go to? ;)
      - dnautics 13y ago
        Uchicago math. Can't handle non integral mantissas or when they are greater than 6. At work, I do mostly biology, where everything is 1, 2, or 5 - close enough. One sig fig is par for the course, anything else would be an overoptimistic lie.
        Toenex 13y ago
        I do mostly biology, where everything is 1, 2, or 5 As an engineer working in medical imaging this I loved!
        13y ago

goostavos 13y ago

My girlfriend attends a for profit school (because her employer covers it 100%), it's absolutely alarming how stunningly expensive these for profit schools are. As a comparison, the state school that I attend, even with over-priced books, sets me back about $1200/semester, and that's for 3 classes. A single class for her is billed at that same amount. Before books. I don't know how anyone would look at the cost and their future earning potential and decide that paying for a for-profit is a good idea. I know people who have gone the that Full Sail program and ended up 100+k in debt, and with nothing useful to show for it. Education in this country is in a terrible, terrible state.

ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
Full Sail Graduate here. You are correct. Avoid Full Sail. It's designed to pump out students like crazy. I'd say it's one of the most greedy schools. In the end I wish I could take it all back and never go there.
- AJ007 13y ago
  Its worth noting Full Sail is one of the top display advertisers in the United States.
jrokisky 13y ago
The public university I attended was not much better. Tuition + Room and Board was 24k a year and rising. At the same time, an incredible amount of new university buildings are being built.

ctdonath 13y ago

As a sometime prof at a for-profit school, may I observe that 1/3rd of my students (on average) failed - not for any guilt by the school (me included), but because they just didn't do the work. Really, they didn't even try; I can't grade what's not submitted. Methinks there's a significant correlation between your complaint and the reality I observed, a correlation which nobody is taking into account.

beachstartup 13y ago
the charge is that the school management knows damn well that a full third won't do the work, and admit them anyway, getting their monies and putting them into debt. the issue is that public money is being used for this scheme, not that there's anything wrong with taking money from idiots in general.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Statistically you're correct, but objectively you can't identify which students won't do the work - ergo, you can't discriminate who to enroll (heavy on the consequences of involving the word "discriminate"). The government would come down hard on any school which says "you pass all the enrollment criteria, but we have a nagging feeling you won't complete the degree so we're not letting you in." Hence the argument that public money[1] should not be involved. The school management can't say "no" to it (from any angle), and the would-be students think it's free; nobody, lender in particular, hammers home the point "if you don't do the work, you'll be in deep financial $#!^". It's the borrower "putting them into debt". Society pressures kids into getting a degree, the school makes it easy to start the process, government makes it easy to borrow the money, but ultimately it's up to the enrollee to sign for the loan and do the work to make it pay off. Every self-appointed pundit is pointing fingers at the school (for "fleecing" students) or the government (for "wasting" public funds), but nobody is pointing at the students for not making the effort. [1] - "public" insofar as it was legally confiscated from the public at implied gunpoint.
  - snicklepuff 13y ago
    > but objectively you can't identify which students won't do the work - ergo, you can't discriminate who to enroll I'm calling complete bullshit on this one: isn't that the very definition of admissions? Even if you claim it's not, I think that if you look at any student's previous grades / work experience / references, you can quite reliably determine who will do the work and who will not. These schools simply don't want to: they want to admit everybody so they can take their money in exchange for basically nothing. I would fully support legislation to bar for-profit institutions from receiving any federal tuition aid (whether loans or grants). > public money[1] should not be involved. The school management can't say "no" to it This is false: schools are not required to accept federal loans.[1] [1] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865576111/No-more-student-loan-debt-at-College-of-the-Ozarks.html?pg=alluired http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865576111/No-more-student... to accept federal loans

Shivetya 13y ago

Considering the budgets of most schools, which ones aren't for profit? Really? When even state schools spend money on facilities, staff, and materials, not directly toward educating the student, they are for profit.

superuser2 13y ago
Money going back into the institution and improving research, attracting better staff, buying supplies, building facilities, and improving the quality of life is not profit, it's reinvestment in the organization. Further, as easy as it is to be offended by brand-new facilities, you'll find that 1) many are paid for by oustide grants and the money never could have gone towards reducing tuition, and 2) those that are paid for with students' money amount to pocket change per student. A for-profit college educates students as cheaply as possible (in terms of cost to the institution, not price to the student) to maximize the amount of surplus the owners can pocket.

api 13y ago

Bubbles beget exactly this kind of opportunism. During the housing bubble there were builders who slapped up houses so poorly that they had to be demolished years later.