The case for for-profits: They concentrate on students who are nontraditional (aka the new normal: working adults) and underserved by traditional colleges. They offer them help filling out the FAFSA forms, more convenience and better customer service. They aggressively pursue growth in enrollment -- growing at an estimated rate of 5% to 10% a year or five times to 10 times faster than the overall market. That type of growth is needed to fulfill student demand, not to mention our national goals of a more credentialed population. And to the extent that the sector is truly market-driven, they have the potential to be more innovative and efficient than public or nonprofit colleges have proven to be (although the majority of online students are found at public and nonprofit colleges, for-profits certainly have a disproportionate share of the online market at 42% vs 9% of all students). Some for-profits have good fit with some DIY U ideas: open enrollment, unbundling of services, judging their programs on quality of results rather than prestige, and tying degrees more closely to workforce needs. In my book I relate these ideas back to John Holt's Instead of Education, where he praises the Berlitz language school, among others, as a "schools for do-ers". "We view access as critical," Jonathan Kaplan of Walden University, which concentrates on graduate programs for teachers, nurses and therapists. "An institution doesn't need to be elite to be outstanding in terms of quality."
The case against for-profits: they are not so much "serving" the underserved as they are targeting or exploiting them. Although students take out loans similar in size to those at private colleges, the quality of education is really in many cases more like community colleges. Although enrollment rates are high and growing, graduation rates are very low. And students who attend these colleges are twice as likely to default on their loans. A recent paper by Mark Kantrowitz found that 60% of the discrepancy in default rates was due to the demographics of their students, which leaves 40% that the for-profits still have to answer for.
Some have argued that this situation is highly reminiscent of the mortgage crisis: these colleges are peddling yet another false promise of the American Dream (in this case, the college diploma part of the dream, rather than the homeownership part) to those who are truly not qualified to take advantage of it. That their graduates and especially their non-graduates will have a very hard time pulling in salaries commensurate with their debt. Yet unlike the hapless homeowners, they can't go into foreclosure or walk away from their debt under any circumstances, and so they'll be stuck all their lives.
This dynamic is truly troubling, and it certainly exists. I may have been guilty in the past of bending over backwards to be fair to the sector, perhaps out of my own contrarian streak.
I just want to add a couple of observations: One is that for-profits, even more than other colleges, essentially operate as federal contractors, because their revenue comes from tuition which comes mostly from federally subsidized student loans and Pell Grants. That means if we're concerned about quality in the sector, federal regulations are the way to go.
The second is that the same kind of policies that would improve the performance of for-profits would improve the performance of all colleges, but they freak traditional higher ed out. Things like administering tests to see what students are actually learning, or imposing real accountability for terrible graduation and default rates.
I think these reforms would be a good idea across the board, and if they happen, for-profits might surprise us. The historical tendency in higher education has been for successful institutions' goals and aspirations and standards all to drift upwards. Some may see it as naive if I celebrate the fact that a Grand Canyon University has community service extracurriculars and liberal arts classes, but I see it as part of a necessary trend if we're going to get to a higher education future that serves everybody.
Follow Anya Kamenetz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Anya1anya
You get out of these things what you get into them; I have been very fortunate to also find excellent professors working in a very well-designed program.
I can only speak for my employer, who has recently instituted higher admission standards, exit exams to assess whether their graduates meet learning outcomes, and more advanced student intervention measures in order to attempt to improve not only their enrollment rates, but also their graduation rates. This kind of active engagement with the issue should be taken up by more private, for-profit universities if they are going to be taken seriously.
Of course, down the road we're going to ask alumni to contribute, but they'll do it because they value the opportunity Sphere provided them to successfully pursue their dreams and want to ensure this opportunity is available to others. Will Sphere survive up to that point? We'll see, but we've made it one year so far!
Loan default rates reflect all schools accepted by the Department of Education (DOE) for student loans … and that acceptance requires accreditation that DOE approves, which may be regional, or not. Most public and for-profit colleges have regional accreditation, as do many of the for-profit colleges. However, most of the schools with non-regional accreditation are in the for-profit sector, so the sectors are not equal on accreditation. Accreditation can be a major factor in paying loans because regional accreditation is often required by employers. The 2010 paper by Kantrowitz, cited in the article, says 60% of the difference in default-rate between for-profit and nonprofit schools is due to demographics of students … 60% is the majority. Kantrowitz did not control for accreditation ( Kantrowitz's paper: http://www.finaid.org/educators/20100405demographicdifferences.pdf). It likely that the schools’ accreditation would account for some of the remaining difference.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
But in reality, the main "consumers" of education aren't students but employers. Arguably, one of the main reasons that compulsory public education was instituted in this country was to benefit employers, who needed more literate workers. Similarly, the GI Bill was, at a policy level, less a reward for military service than a way of increasing the number of college-educated workers for white-collar jobs. It is particularly ironic, then, that the most vociferous critics of public education are often conservatives who espouse a business-oriented perspective.
But to get to the point of this article, universities have always served a filtering or gatekeeping function for employers, which is why the prestige of a university has been, and will undoubtedly continue to be, important. Schools that have open enrollment policies could potentially be tenable, but only if they have rigorous, high standards for students in their classes (and it seems very obvious that many don't--since it isn't in their economic interests).
???
After criticizing at length "federally supported" private education, you pick a a fundamentalist Christian college ( GCU) as shining example of what's right with federally supported for-profit education?!
I am speechless.
After all, someone (not Lincoln) once said "It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." You're a case in point.
I see this first hand where I teach, it is like the army, we tell these kids they can be anything they want just to get their FAFSA money, it truly is sad.
http://stephenewen.blogspot.com/2010/04/educationconnectioncom-parasites.html
Excerpt:
"The explosion only happened after 1992 when then-committee chairman John Boehner (R-Ohio) of the The House of Representatives' Committee on Education and the Workforce killed the provision known as the "90-10" rule and by simplifying the definition of "institution of higher education" to place for-profit schools on par with nonprofit colleges regarding federal-aid eligibility.
The well-devised idea behind the 90-10 rule was that if a proprietary school's offerings were truly valuable--for example, if they filled some niche that traditional State and private non-profit educational institutions did not--then surely 10% of their students would be willing to pay completely out-of-pocket, i.e., those who fell above federal guidelines for receiving taxpayer subsidies to attend college. It was a low bar to entry that traditional educational institutions routinely met without even paying attention.
But the 90-10 rule was abolished, a testament to what happens when millions of dollars of industry-specific lobbying overcomes the overextended attention of everyday citizens who actually have the greater interest in the matter."
Anyway, don't lump all the schools together, name names. Who is doing things right and who isn't? Don't take the lazy way out and just say they are all bad.