PBS Frontline to Air Report on the For-Profit Higher Education Scam

[ohnoes]

If you're serious about getting an MBA, see if you can gain admission to one of the top ten schools. If so, then consider going. It will be expensive and you will still be gambling, but at least you would have a good probability of success. Alternatively, you could keep your current job (less risk that you'll be unemployed after you graduate) and attend a local program at night, but that MBA will have far less value than one from a top school.

Very true. Don't do a full-time MBA unless its @ a top or name brand school. If you just want the acctg/fin/mktg education (which isn't really what the FT program is about), just do part-time. You save a ridiculous amount of opportunity cost & get to keep your job security.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

caveat emptor

There's these thingies called public libraries where they have these thingies, like books and magazines and the intraweb where you can, you know, look up stuff like how good a school is BEFORE you blow a buttload of money on tuition.

What kind of information do you think people are going to find? What good is it if much of it is misleading? Where are people supposed to find reliable and accurate statistics of exactly what percentage of all graduates in various years found solid middle class employment in their fields of study? It might be possible to find lots of salesmanship propaganda and newspaper articles written by naive journalists (who had to write something) about how a local college's new program is great and gives students the opportunity to learn about such-and-such, but that's nothing more than news media happy talk and says nothing about the actual employment statistics.

People always say "caveat emptor" and "You have a duty to do your research first." OK, you've said it. Now please tell us what exactly people are supposed to research? Is the information even available and if so would it be readily accessible? When 99% of the information available including the most easily available information is misleading positive propaganda, it's hard to "do the research".

To do the research you would have to somehow convince schools to disclose the identities of all students in a program for the past 5 years and then contact them one-by-one. Perhaps a Freedom of Information Act order could be used to get public schools to disclose that sort of information, but having to go that far seems like an unreasonable burden.

 

[Atreus21]

I have an (ex)son-in-law that was interested in ITT prior to being a SIL. He looked at them outside Ft Lauderdale and then his mother sent me a packet.

It was interesting that the price quoted matched up exactly to the amount of grants & loans that they felt you qualified for.

I then went to the local campus in Indianapolis and presented myself as a candidate. The costs were different for the same program; coincidentally covering what I would qualify for (age & VA were the big differences)

I, having a Masters in Engineering (not disclosed to them), started asking some tough questions which were responded to with boiler plate answers.

Then I called up some local shops regarding references.
Yes, they did hire grads from ITT but the 5 year retention rate was low.
It was also inferred that there was a tit-for-tat that went on, either pure economic or internships at the companies.

This was back 10+ years ago; but I would suspect that things have not changed much.

Does anyone know anything about U of Phoenix? I'm pretty sure that's for profit as well.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Does anyone know anything about U of Phoenix? I'm pretty sure that's for profit as well.

They have cleaned up their act considerably because they wanted to keep the accrediation.

ITT and others are not really accredited and they state (in very very fine print) that their credits are not transferable.

 

[Special K]

If you're serious about getting an MBA, see if you can gain admission to one of the top ten schools. If so, then consider going. It will be expensive and you will still be gambling, but at least you would have a good probability of success. Alternatively, you could keep your current job (less risk that you'll be unemployed after you graduate) and attend a local program at night, but that MBA will have far less value than one from a top school.

Are you sure about the bolded part? I was under the impression that the actual degree awarded by the evening program was equivalent to the one awarded by the full time program, even for top schools.

I have heard that you can miss out on networking opportunities by attending the evening program, however.

Another thing to consider is the opportunity cost. If you are already making $100k+ as a professional without an MBA, how long will it take you to make up the 2 years of lost income and the student loans incurred by attending a full-time program? It's just something to keep in mind.

 

[ShawnD1]

The university takes your money to teach you skills but, more importantly, to teach you how to learn.

Not just teach you how to learn, but show to the world that you are capable of learning. I won't say where I attended school, but most of my classes were easy and anyone who wasn't completely retarded could pass them. The catch was that each semester had 1 engineering class that was unbelievably hard. The marking was unforgiving, the exams were so long that there's basically no way to finish, and you would pass with such a narrow margin that you needed to complete every assignment and every quiz. After 2 years, literally 1/3 of the class has failed. While any trained monkey can do most electrical work, making the program harder to finish assures that only the best people are doing those monkey jobs. It also means we get paid more due to supply and demand 😉

Chemistry doesn't seem to filter people out like that, so chemists don't get paid shit. There are so many chemists on the market that companies can pay incredibly low wages and get away with it. Ultimately that was why I had to leave chemistry. This episode of Frontline highlights how this problem is really getting out of hand. If everyone has a degree, then a degree isn't worth anything. Just like how a high school diploma isn't worth anything.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

What company's purpose is to hold the interests of its clients and society over its own? Only a failed company. You want universities to serve you for the price you want.

Obviously you would expect for-profit institutions to be self-interested, but should we expect that from taxpayer-funded public institutions such as state universities? Shouldn't public institutions serve the interests of society at large and their students?

If you pay $250k for a degree in a worthless major, then what you end up with is a very expensive piece of paper.

Public institutions that facilitate this kind of economic waste should try prevent the economic waste and damage to society that occurs when students go to obtain these degrees that have little economic value. Also, organizations such as the American Bar Association that have been given the government-like ability to accredit schools for professional licensure should have a duty to serve the interests of students and the public (or lose the government-like function).

But I think your problem is that you think profits are intrinsically evil and that for-profit ventures will always throw their clients under the bus for a quick financial gain.

I don't think that profits are intrinsically evil, just that conflicts of interest exist and that the profit motive can encourage deceit, fraud, and behavior that does not serve the interests of society or customers. This is especially true in cases where there is an information asymmetry and where customers feel needy and desperate and may be naive, especially if they have been continuously indoctrinated to do something since Kindergarten and also if a third party student lender is willing to cover the upfront costs.

This is simply ignorant, as a university's reputation is based on the quality of its graduates and its research programs (tightly tied to the quality of graduates). If a university graduates a million people per year and none of them gained anything from being at that university, the university will quickly go out of business. Since I don't know of any universities going out of business, I can only assume that students are getting some value added by the service the university provides.

Intuitively, you would think (and hope) that that were true. However, like I've said, when everyone has been constantly indoctrinated into believing something since Kindergarten and when the employment statistics are outdated or misleading and when there isn't much real concrete information available, it's easy for people to be misled, especially when a significant percentage of graduates do obtain positive results.

I think that law school is a great example for this. Here we have a course of study that could add $100,000-180,000 to people's student loan debt and yet for decades only 1/2 of all graduates have ever benefited from their degrees and find work in the field. (Note that many of the ones who find work in the field earn merely lower middle class or middle class incomes often working 60 hours/week in an unpleasant Machiavellian field. The ones earning $150,000/year at large law firms are a small exception and those guys put in 70 hours/week under tremendous stress.) Today the number of JDs who are able to find employment as lawyers may be as low 1/20. (It's really bad out there, it's even been reported that Harvard graduates are having problems.) And yet, in spite of all of this, the lemmings keep coming. Why? I think it's a result of information asymmetry, indoctrination, the naive public's belief that all lawyers are rich, and arguably overinflated egos (with students thinking that they will graduate as one of the top 5 students in their class--and it's been reported that even top 5 students are having difficulty finding jobs today).

So, I wouldn't take the fact that students are flocking into the colleges and universities as evidence that they are providing value to their students and society for those reasons I mentioned--indoctrination, information asymmetry, and a sense of desperation.

There is one other factor to be discussed--that college education is the new high school. In other words, you need to get a bachelors degree so that you can at least hunt for a decent job. Students might be aware that college is not a guarantor of success, but if the choices is between working poverty wage jobs for life or having the opportunity to at least look for a better job, many will choose to go to college to get their club card. In other words, the sad state of our nation's economy is pushing people into the colleges out of a sense of fear and desperation. Many then pursue expensive graduate and professional study (what else should you do if you can't find a job with your bachelors degree?).

The end result of all of this is an Education Arms Race. Our society doesn't need nearly as much higher education as it has, but people feel compelled to obtain in order to keep up with the competition. I'm a participant in the Education Arms Race myself, so I certainly understand why people would want to do it, but overall it isn't benefiting our society. We're spending time and money to produce worthless excess sheepskins and not roads and wind turbines.

Higher education is not representative of a free market either. If it were a free market without any government subsidies for colleges and universities and if people could discharge all student loans in bankruptcy (just like any other debt) the entire education-student loan industry would collapse and we would soon find out what the real free market value of education is. (I bet it would be less expensive and that we would have less of it.)

Self-reported statistics may also be accurate.

That's possible, but much more likely when the real statistics are favorable and much less likely when they are unfavorable. I know that in the case of the expensive law schools that the statistics are inherently misleading if not intentionally fraudulent. (The ABA, which accredits the law schools, implicitly condones all of this.)

What alternative method do you recommend?

I'm not a professional statistician nor market researcher, but I'd like to see a third party conduct studies to determine what percentages of all graduates are earning solid middle class incomes (defined as $40,000/year with benefits and up) at various points in time after graduation. They should also report what percentage are working in the field they trained for and what their incomes are. They also need to report what percentage of students could not be reached or would not respond (whom people can infer to be malcontents).

What do you think would be a good set of statistics to collect?

And your characterization of how universities go about collecting these surveys is at least as false as you think the survey results are: surveying methods are governed by third-party accreditation boards, not the universities themselves. Universities wouldn't even bother doing these expensive surveys if they weren't required to maintain accreditation.

I don't know the details, but just because some industry-based third party might require the surveys doesn't mean that they will be conducted accurately. It doesn't work that way for the law schools which suggests that it's probably not much different for the business schools and other degree programs. I have three college degrees and I only received a survey from one of them. No one ever called me on the phone to inquire about my income and whether I was working in the fields of my degree.

I'll also note that saying that something may be unrelated to something else is meaningless because you have given no reason for anyone to expect that it is not equally likely that the converse is true: the income statistics from survey respondents might have a relationship to what graduates are actually earning. See how easy that was?

Here's how it works. A professional school sends out employment surveys to its graduates. 30% of those graduates return the survey. Of those 30% who wanted to return the survey, 95% were employed and many of them earned over $60,000. So a school could then report that 95% of all graduates were employed and that the median income of its graduates is $60,000 with a 25%-75% salary range of say $50,000-$80,000. That looks really great, right? What they failed to report is that only 30% of the graduates responded to the survey.

Then prosecute the fraud. Demonizing the entire education sector because of some perceived fraud simply makes this appear to be a witch hunt. I'm sick of idiots demanding change when the laws to achieve that change are already on the books and are simply not being enforced.

Being misleading and fraudulent are two different things. If the statistics say, "Survey respondents reported" then there isn't any fraud. It's misleading and we might properly regard it as de facto (in actuality) fraud, but it's not de jure (according to the law) fraud. I suspect that we will begin to see some fraud cases soon. The Frontline and New York Times reports mentioned that there are already a couple lawsuits.

In today's litigious society filled with angry malcontents, I suspect that most de jure fraud is being litigated. The problem is that there is de facto fraud in the form of conditional statements, puffery, and misleading information that is not actionable de jure fraud.

Ironically, those shouting for this sort of change the loudest are usually in the executive branch and are campaigning for change rather than enforcing the laws.

Are there politicians who are shouting about any of this? I'm unaware that it's much of an issue at all. In the Frontline interview it seemed like Arne Duncan wasn't too concerned. He struck me as a conventional, compromised politician who needs to make it look like he's concerned while not actually doing anything because of a concern about campaign contributions.

As technology becomes more complex, the level of knowledge required to design, maintain, or develop that technology rises. One can gain this knowledge through experience or through education. Education offers the benefit of giving about the same degree of knowledge in much less time than the experience approach, and coupling the two is even better. Only about 30% of US adults have a bachelors degrees, and every study ever performed has indicated that these adults will make substantially more during their lifetimes than the rest of us. If you can find a single published peer-reviewed study contradicting that statement, then you will have found a basis for your argument. Until then, keep your palliatives to yourself.

In the past people would start work out of high school and learn on the job. I don't think the nature of most jobs has really changed all that much, just that college education is much more easily accessible and that employers can now require bachelors degrees.

I too would like to find some studies in peer-reviewed journals. Not being an academic who studies this I don't know of any, but I know of at least one paper (written by a law professor with an economics background) who claims that 90% of all law school graduates will not obtain value from their degrees.

There are a couple problems with making inferences about the value of a college education based on the studies the media always cites. (1.) The media hasn't reported what percentage of the college graduates are earning what types of income. It's thus possible that those earning really high salaries average out the low incomes of those who are earning poverty-level wages. (2.) In order to judge the value of a college education today we need to look at statistics for graduates of the past decade or two. Degrees had much more employment value back in the Sixties and Seventies when fewer people had the degrees so it's illogical to make generalizations about the economic value of a college degree today based on the outcomes of people who gradated decades ago. (3.) College graduates are a self-selecting group--the people who go to college very well might have had higher average incomes anyway had they not gone to college than the other high school graduates who didn't go to college. In other words, the intellectual abilities and character traits that led the college graduates to go to college might very well have resulted in their having higher incomes had they not gone to college than the high school graduates who didn't go to college.

I, too, would like some modern, updated, detailed statistics about all of this. (Perhaps they are, in fact, out there but the media doesn't like to report on them.)

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Did you watch the program? Many of the students were promised job placement upon graduation. They interviewed nurses who can't find jobs because their school provided no hospital experience.

I think this also speaks to the value of the "accreditation" board. Why was that nursing school accredited in the first place? It also suggests that accreditation doesn't mean anything other than having satisfied what is necessary to obtain legal licensure.

Yes, they have a choice about whether or not to purchase the education, but you're deliberately ignoring the information asymmitry here. These students do not have good information or are being mislead.

I was really shocked to see the part where they had telemarketers (!!!) calling people trying to sell them on going to college. They were using telemarketers to obtain student loan funding. Then (it sounded like) admissions and financial aid counselors were receiving commission-like compensation based on how many students they could cajole into attending.

I can't get a $250k car loan or house loan unless there is substantial evidence that I will be able to pay it back. Why should an education loan be any different?

Because they are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy? That doesn't mean that people will be able to pay them back (perhaps resulting in a future bursting of the student loan bubble), but it really increases the probability that people will pay them back. Some people are actually fleeing the United States and moving to other countries to avoid paying them. ("I've always wanted to go to Tanzania.")

 

[IndyColtsFan]

If you're serious about getting an MBA, see if you can gain admission to one of the top ten schools. If so, then consider going. It will be expensive and you will still be gambling, but at least you would have a good probability of success. Alternatively, you could keep your current job (less risk that you'll be unemployed after you graduate) and attend a local program at night, but that MBA will have far less value than one from a top school.

Therein lies the problem. There is absolutely no way on earth I can quit my current job and go to a top ten program even if accepted. I have a mortgage, a wife, and all my friends and family are here.

The only reason I would ever get an MBA is not because I find it interesting or challenging (I doubt it compares to the MSEE I nearly completed), but because I would want it as a "check box" on my list of qualfications. That makes it harder to justify.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

If a guarantee was made and not fulfilled, then tuition should be returned. If it was not a guarantee but simply a marketing pitch (my guess as to what actually happened), then the students were suckered in just like they were buying a used car.

The problem is that the federal government is being made to be complicit in the suckering because the federal government is providing the financing. The Frontline report made it sound like these institutions would die immediately if the federal student loan funding were cut off. They also value accreditation.

I clearly stated that, if potential students are being given fraudulent information before purchasing an education, the fraud should be prosecuted. Otherwise, the burden is on the buyer to ensure that they are willing to accept the risks associated with their investment just like in any other industry.

The big problem that really drives all of this is that the loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. If we had a true free market, true capitalism for college education that included the ability to discharge loans in bankruptcy, many of these problems would resolve themselves.

IMHO, many of these student loans are sub-prime student loans.

Usually this is done by requiring a co-signer, at least for private loans.

I forgot about that--cosigning. What would happen is that people would get their parents to cosign and then they would still be enslaved to the student loans unless they could convince their parents to join them in bankruptcy (which, in today's economy, I can see happening). It would end up really hurting students from solid middle class and upper middle class families where the families would have assets (ones that can't be protected in bankruptcy) that they could lose.

How are you going to fix it? I offered two simple solutions:

1. Quit having government decide that "needy" people will receive a free education. Government writes a blank check for these people, resulting in huge tuition inflation for everyone else. If government isn't doling out money for college, then private lenders will decide who will be able to pay back the loans, the price of college will plummet, and most of the current problems will be solved.

The federal student-loan funded education is not "free"--those loans have to be repaid and cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. If it were free and the government started paying everyone's tuition, then in the current climate it would become a nightmare and education costs would explode.

2. Aggressively prosecute fraud. This should take care of the rest of the problems as I already stated.

This is a good idea, but the problem is that much of the actual fraud is not de jure fraud and thus non-actionable.

In addition to allowing all loans to be discharged in bankruptcy at a certain amount of time after graduation, my solution to the problem is for us to reign in and regulate the numbers at all institutions that receive any sort of federal or state funding or tax breaks (probably almost all of them). The government should then make sure that these institutions of higher debt are serving society by not significantly overproducing more college graduates than what the nation needs. (Say goodbye to 70% of the nation's business schools and law schools. Say so long to foreign graduate students and the excess of American graduate students in the sciences.)

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Wow, I didn't realize those fake schools costed so much $$$. But then again, I assumed that it was self evident they weren't real schools & that no one would actually be dumb enough to enroll @ those places.

One of the schools featured on Frontline had an actual campus and even baseball and basketball teams. Also, some of them are large and professionally-run entities on a national scale with nice buildings such as University of Phoenix. I can definitely understand how, to someone who didn't grow up in a middle or upper class family and who might be the first person in their family to ever attend anything other than community college, these might appear to be legitimate universities.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Does anyone know anything about U of Phoenix? I'm pretty sure that's for profit as well.

The University of Phoenix was featured on the Frontline program. I didn't know much about it either, but learned a little bit. You should watch the Frontline report if you find this discussion to be interesting. I really hadn't paid much attention to the for-profit colleges (I'm more interested in the value of graduate and professional degree programs) until I watched the Frontline show.

Oh, btw, some of them are establishing graduate programs! One of the interviewees obtained a PhD. in psychology and is now suing (along with a couple other people) because the school up-sold her on getting a PhD and then she claims that they said it would be accredited when it wasn't and now her "PhD. in psychology" is just a worthless piece of paper.

(Moral of the story--if an institution currently does not have accreditation that would allow people to obtain professional licensure in the field, don't go no matter what they tell you.)

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Chemistry doesn't seem to filter people out like that, so chemists don't get paid shit. There are so many chemists on the market that companies can pay incredibly low wages and get away with it.

Wait! You're talking about a science degree here! A STEM field! It's therefore impossible that we could have too many chemists and that it could be a shitty field!

That's what most people believe. We also have an oversupply of people with Biology degrees. In fact, we have a large oversupply of people with Biology, Chemistry, and Physics Masters and PhD. degrees. This fact is 100% foreign and completely non-intuitive to laypeople who have been drinking the value of education Kool Aid.

Many of those angry science graduates went to law school in the hopes of becoming wealthy patent lawyers (science or engineering degree + law) and now we have a large oversupply of people qualified to work as patent lawyers and intellectual property litigators. (How the hell is that possible--to have a large oversupply of people with two advanced degrees?!? According to the media and pundits, it's not supposed to be possible.)

Ultimately that was why I had to leave chemistry. This episode of Frontline highlights how this problem is really getting out of hand. If everyone has a degree, then a degree isn't worth anything. Just like how a high school diploma isn't worth anything.

It's all part of the Education Arms Race. Since we shipped jobs to other countries, imported foreigners on work visas, and allowed in millions of immigrants, people can no longer find decent jobs with high school diplomas, so now everyone is going to college to increase the stock of their educational credential armaments. Now Bachelors degrees no longer have much value, so now everyone is going to graduate and professional school. And guess what? Now we have an oversupply of people with graduate and professional degrees.

Have people's economic status improved? No. Things are pretty much the same as they were before--our nation has a large shortage of solid middle class jobs. The difference is that now millions of people are enslaved to student loans. (OK, we also have more well-to-do college professors and administrators and student loan company CEOs; I guess we got something out of all this.)

People don't really want college diplomas; they really just want jobs.

Because our government and our society are non-functional and because our government has been manipulated by greedy special interest groups and the wealthy class, we haven't addressed the fundamental economic problem of not having enough solid middle class jobs for the populace. Instead we're sending people to college in the hopes that college education will cause those jobs to magically materialize into existence because studies show that college graduates earn more than high school graduates.

The ability to go to college is much more limited in some of the other countries in the world--nations that recognize the reality that it doesn't make sense to waste time and money on college education that does not have economic value.

 

[ShawnD1]

NSFW ITT Spoof.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xt-RpHu7x0

Haha. That's awesome. I was wondering what that guy cleaning toilets was doing for his new job until he answered the phone 😀

 

[imagoon]

All this talk makes me depressed. I attended DeVry after it was accredited (I knew not to go to an unaccredited school.) I transferred in my community college credits and knocked out a year and 1/2 of it. I did not do any of my undergrad online. I now just completed an MBA with Keller. I did look at going to a University school and I actually had no issue getting my DeVry undergrad degree accepted at NIU but I ran in to the issues with 'life.' I have a 9 to 5 and really couldn't justify taking 3 years off of my life to go to a University. Keller is also accredited so my office didn't have issues cutting checks for education assistance.

Anyway, I took 2 online classes for my MBA, and the rest in class. I found that the in class teaching was far better than the online. I personally thought the quality of the line courses were very poor compared to the in class instruction.

It is annoying because crap like that devalues whatever my degree represented in the first place. I also do believe they are more like check marks on the hiring form though. I learned some decent stuff from my MBA classes but nothing ground breaking that I couldn't have picked up else where.

DeVry had been in the process of jacking up the term rates when I was there. Keller stayed even only going up in the winter one year. The prices are suspiciously close to what the graduate loans would pay out though...

My undergrad degree did get me a job though. Since it was me versus another with out one, I assume they called me because of it.

 

[ohnoes]

Are you sure about the bolded part? I was under the impression that the actual degree awarded by the evening program was equivalent to the one awarded by the full time program, even for top schools.

I have heard that you can miss out on networking opportunities by attending the evening program, however.

Another thing to consider is the opportunity cost. If you are already making $100k+ as a professional without an MBA, how long will it take you to make up the 2 years of lost income and the student loans incurred by attending a full-time program? It's just something to keep in mind.

I don't know of any top MBA programs that offer part-time MBA programs. They do however offer EMBA's which is part time & aimed towards older mid-level managers or exec's w/o MBA's. At any rate, the MBA is 90% about networking & recruiting. Especially when you factor in the grade non-disclosure policy...

As was explained to me and now I explain to others, MBA's are a pretty personal decision. It's all about going for the "experience." The ROI on it is actually quite bad once you factor in opp. cost as you mentioned. In my estimation, it's going to take me 10-12 years to break-even after I graduate.

 

[ShawnD1]

At any rate, the MBA is 90% about networking & recruiting. Especially when you factor in the grade non-disclosure policy...

What grade non-disclosure? A lot of engineering companies flat out state that you should bring a copy of your official transcript to the interview. You don't need to bring it, but then again they don't need to hire you. Some of them even request that you bring copies of electrical designs you've done so they can get an understanding of what you've been doing up until now. They might not look too closely at it, but a quick glance will show if you actually know how to use AutoCAD or if you were just making shit up.

 

[Slew Foot]

I thought everyone knew places like UOP/ITT/Devry were jokes? Youd get laughed out on the street if you tried to apply to med school with one of those degrees.

 

[ohnoes]

What grade non-disclosure? A lot of engineering companies flat out state that you should bring a copy of your official transcript to the interview. You don't need to bring it, but then again they don't need to hire you. Some of them even request that you bring copies of electrical designs you've done so they can get an understanding of what you've been doing up until now. They might not look too closely at it, but a quick glance will show if you actually know how to use AutoCAD or if you were just making shit up.

There's student enforced grade non-disclosure policies @ stanford, hbs, wharton, etc. You don't disclose grades during recruiting or interviews. They eventually do find out after you've been hired, but that's after the fact.

 

[ohnoes]

I should say that its more like a referendum voted on by students and then followed on an honor system. Not in the sense that the school or you are prohibited from disclosing grades.

As far as I know however, pretty much all the students follow the non-disclosure policy during recruiting.

 

[ericlp]

its actually brilliant. Con the dumbest people in society to think they can have a future and milk the government teet for whatever the grants will allow. As American as apple pie!

Been going on for years and is nothing new.


The real sad part is that these people that pay 30-60K for a degree online just slide on through with an accredited degree and have no clue how to really do the job.

America at it's finest!

I thought about going to college 'on line' at one time. Glad I didn't or I'd be paying off a major debt right now. But I remember one of the questions I asked was 'what's the percentage of your students that graduate that take X program?' The reply was "I don't know" I told her it was required by law to have that information on hand. But she danced around the issue. I'm pretty sure they do what they can to disclose some information.

 

[Wreckem]

Nursing school requires a full 4 yr degree to come out with a RN

CC courses can get you through the NA and LPN area.

Taking nursing courses in the CC can acts as the preqs for the 4yr school

Incorrect. A two year CC program(ADN) allows one to be an RN, some allow you to specialize in certain feilds, 1 year is LVN/LPN, 3-6months is Nurse Tech/CNA.

Most RN's only have ADNs, as most hospital run nursing programs are ADN and there are far more CC nursing programs than 4 year nursing programs.

BSN allows for more specialization. BSN and up are required to be an administrator in nursing(ie: in charge of an entire floor of nurses).

 

[Wreckem]

As for education arm's race. Get a math or science degree pass your teaching certs and go make $50k a year. Or go into nursing, dental hygene, certain engineering fields, etc etc.

The problem is clueless people go into area where they have no path of getting a job in their field or make money if they are.

As for the legal market. The legal market is over saturated with dumbasses who go to law school to try and make money. Most law students cannot stand law but they think its a path to riches. Those that enjoy law and aren't in the legal profession to try and make money are the ones who stay in the legal profession. Those thst see a JD = $$$$ either dont make the grades to make $$$$ or they do and are out within five years. As for the commets about some law schools having 90% of their students unemployed at 9 months might be true for a handful of schools now, but certainly not the majority. Is there an oversupply of JDs? Yes, but most schools have more than 10% of their class employed.

 

[shurato]

I went on a recruiting trip once to ITT tech for a job fair when I was working as a manager at an IT consulting company. Resumes were definitely far below par on average. Not so great interviews...just generally clueless students which I felt sorry for who probably spent a great deal of money to take these courses.

I honestly felt bad for most of the people I met as they most of them were minorities and looked to be of a lesser upbringing. I'm sure ITT Tech has no problems taking anyones money and promising the world when they "Graduate" I kept thinking these guys would probably do so much better going to their local CC and taking some courses from some real teachers.

This day in age its also a lot about who you know rather than what you know when finding a job.

 

[CycloWizard]

Obviously you would expect for-profit institutions to be self-interested, but should we expect that from taxpayer-funded public institutions such as state universities? Shouldn't public institutions serve the interests of society at large and their students?

The problem you're having is that you think what's good for the school and its students are two different things. They're not. If the students are successful, the school will be successful. Degrees are one of the two products of a university (the other being research). If the quality of a university's products is poor, then fewer people will buy it. Thus, it is always in the best interest of both parties to promote the other as best they can.

Public institutions that facilitate this kind of economic waste should try prevent the economic waste and damage to society that occurs when students go to obtain these degrees that have little economic value. Also, organizations such as the American Bar Association that have been given the government-like ability to accredit schools for professional licensure should have a duty to serve the interests of students and the public (or lose the government-like function).

I'm not terribly familiar with the ABA or how it is governed. However, the equivalent organization for engineers (ABET) is simply an organization which says whether or not an engineering department is accredited based on its published standards. Schools spend a huge amount of time and money trying to meet these standards because accreditation is supposed to indicate that the graduates of an accredited program have a minimum level of competence in their field of study. However, this process has become so costly and cumbersome that many universities are considering dropping it and telling ABET to piss off. This is a dangerous road to go down, as there are certainly benefits to having an accreditation system. A superior alternative would be for ABET to update its requirements and/or a new accreditation company should be formed with better or more relevant standards. Does meeting ABA requirements mean anything in a legal sense (i.e. does it control the bar exam which allows one to practice in a given state)? ABET has no such legal authority, and the ABA shouldn't either.

Anyway, I'll try to get back to the rest of this tomorrow. Too much typing tonight.