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Can For-Profit Tech Colleges Be Trusted?
snydeq found a story questioning "the quality of education on offer at institutions such as University of Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Tech, and Kaplan in the wake of increasing scrutiny for alleged deceptive practices [PDF] that leave students in high debt for jobs that pay little. 'For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates,' Robert Scheier writes. 'Should IT pros looking to increase their skills, or people seeking to enter the IT profession, consider such for-profit schools? And should employers trust their graduates' skills?'"
i know someone who went from zero to a good java dev after going to a similar college with a tech program. otherwise we'll be like europe where if you don't do well on the high school tests they give you will never go to college and never have a chance to change your life in the future
... when the creators of Robot Chicken make fun of you in their latest series, Titan Maximum:
Willie: I can help! I have a diploma in mechanical engineering!
Palmer: *sarcastically* From DeVry.
No, and No.
All other colleges are non-profit? Harvard is non-profit? Really?
that leave students in high debt for jobs that pay little
The majority of liberal arts programs would fall into that category.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
But you also can't trust public colleges, and for the same reason.
Public colleges in general cost SIGNIFICANTLY more than these tech schools, and the job prospects for 4 year grads are dismal. Go to grad school (especially in something like English, Art, and the Humanities), and your only job prospects are probably working for the same school that gave you the degree.
Even formally "instant upper class" things like law school are not a good payout anymore.
These things are the biggest rip offs I know of. They claim they can fast track you to intelligence and place you in a good job. In reality, they take thousands upon thousands of dollars of your money, and when you're done everyone throws your resume straight into the bin if they see that name on it. They budget more for TV commercials with 'successful' graduates than for real education. (If you've ever noticed the dates they show on the commercials, they are pre-crash. I'm pretty sure the 'success stories' they tout have since been laid off.)
Excuse my ignorance, but with all the tuition hikes in recent years, it seems to me that all colleges are 'for-profit'.
One should never trust anyone doing anything for profit. He will do the minimum possible for the maximum gain, including deception to the extent he can deceive you without you finding out.
There are problems in how they recruited students, so the skills of the students who finish are in question? How does one lead to the other?
It all depends, I've taken classes in both environments and I think education quality depends more on the professor versus the institution.
In the "traditional college" environment I found that the full-time professors they employed were great at teaching theory, but lacked in terms of practical experience. In the for profit environment I found that a much higher percentage of the professors only taught part time because they actively worked in the field. This let them teach theory that was backed up with real world experience. However you also had people who were excellent at what they did, but could not teach themselves out of a paper bag.
Our hiring practices generally exclude anyone not coming from a "real" accredited college. I'd rather hire somebody from a community college than anyone that went and sold their soul to ITT Tech or Devry--it shows a profound lack of common sense and planning ability. It's right up there with hiring somebody that lists "Geek Squad" on their resume. Pass...
I'm doing hiring for my team. I don't care too much about the education: if the candidate can do a decent job on the coding quiz, they could be a Spanish major for all I care.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Why would you say something as stupid as that? Did you not pay for your schooling, or do you have no schooling?
End of story, let us ALL ignore your accomplishments. Sound good?
DeVry is STEEP for an ABET-T accredited program. One could go to a State school and obtain an ABET-E Engineering degree for a LOT less than the cost of DeVry.
What these colleges have over the State schools; however, is the complete lack of selectivity. They will let just about anyone in, and it'll be up to them to sink or swim. Most of them sink, and some of them swim, and I have no doubt that a very small percentage of bright people, who are otherwise inadmissible to a State School due to circumstances not related to their academic performance, do very well for themselves. That's a tiny tiny percentage though.
It's not all bad, but the lack of selectivity means most students will fail, and do so owing a lot of money. It's not entirely the school's fault. They should, however, raise the admission standards at least a little bit.
Long answer: In the United States at least, if you have no college degree but are interested in putting in the time, money, and effort needed to get one, you will get the biggest bang for your buck at your local community college, possibly followed by some time spent at a nearby branch of your state university system. It's not MIT, RIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc, but it's going to be a pretty solid college education at a very reasonable price, and cost considerably less than the clowns at ITT or DeVry or University of Phoenix will charge you.
The only real exception to this rule is if you qualify for significant financial aid that allows you to attend a fantastic technical school at the same or lower cost than your government-run schools.
I am officially gone from
College, Inc..
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout
otherwise we'll be like europe where if you don't do well on the high school tests they give you will never go to college and never have a chance to change your life in the future
There are plenty of legitimate colleges (both universities and community colleges) that offer education for adults beyond typical college age. We don't need for-profit diploma mills for that.
Probably ~not~ but I would argue that the university system isn't immune to monetary temptations either; I went to a state university system, came from a working class family that could not afford to help me out... though the compsci and physics programs were challenging and rewarding (and well respected), the financial aide department was apparently (for lack of any rational alternative probability) offended at a 'poor' boy coming to their school. They raked me over the coals, lied through their teeth, and set me up for a lot of unnecessary pain including myriad courses audited due to their shinanigans preventing me from being able to afford the textbooks! This may sound like whining, but compare this to my wealthy ex-girlfriend at the time who came from out of state (re: triple tuition costs) who, in spite of a much more shallow and far less lustrous academic background, got a free ride through school. To her credit, she maintained it well... I'm not blaming her. But the school played serious favorites with what their fiscal equations must have indicated that she was better odds in terms of alumni donations to the school. They rewarded her and punished me based on equations and assumptions, best as I can figure. Well, now she's working in a department store and I'm writing code that empowers a million plus people, and that school's behavior has taken on something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; they'll never get a donated cent out of me.
"Never trust salesmen" is good advice (especially in the used market like amazon or ebay).
I would just add:
- Penn State, Maryland State, Virginia Tech, etc are ALSO salesmen
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
The most refined form of socialism practiced in USA in the admission/financial aid policies of the Ivies. It is all, "If you have the money pay the full price even if you are the top student being admitted. If you don't have money you a get a full free ride, even if you are at the bottom of the admitted students".
The really rich dont care. The poor dont care they get benefited. It is the frugal middle who did all the right things, who took sensible size mortgage, squirreled away the money, took less expensive vacations and cheaper cars and did everything your grandma told you to do, are being punished for good behavior. With incentive system so warped, is there any surprise America is on the decline?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My father has attended both "public" colleges and for-profit colleges and says that both seem to offer very similar educations and difficulty of completion. He's gotten degrees from each (a bit of an over-achiever at times) and hasn't had any problems regarding the pedigree of his degrees when it comes to finding jobs or contracts.
Maybe for-profit colleges do lead to a higher loan default rate, but that could be because a lot of the people defaulting on the loans are people who just weren't ready or able to learn at the pace required for college study. More scholarships and grants that don't turn their noses up at the for-profits could help reduce those loan defaults, but it wouldn't help those who enroll who just aren't prepared to learn.
The quality of the many recent graduates I interview from traditional colleges and universities is atrocious. They have no analytical skills what so ever and expect to come in making big bucks and leading projects. The ones that I did hire sit around all day worrying about how they could have used super duper new programming paradigm X and take forever to complete what should be simple development tasks. They shut down if a design spec given by a customer is not perfect rather than working with the customer to clarify or work through the issue.
Argh! You kids get off my lawn!
load "linux",8,1
Can the big non Tech only ones be Trusted?
look at Northwestern University $55,000 year for sex ed?
why is SEX SD in COLLEGE?
The original report was overly harsh and quickly got picked apart for purposefully twisted wording. Regardless, the report is highly flawed because it attempts to attribute a problem to all for profits while the investigators targeted four specific for profits. In other words, they cherry picked.
Worse, after they used the original report to generate a lot of negative press once the updated report was put out very little was mentioned of the change. Basically it was a tool of some agenda driven politicians to put out a message they want. While some of the findings are true the interpretations of the interactions between undercover investigators and the schools left a lot to be desired.
It also was a convenient foil to distract the public from the fact that so called not for profit schools have very rates and when backed by scholarship money that sets limits on what it pays simply move costs over to a new category called "fees" which essentially let them charge whatever they want. This is a very big problem in Georgia where HOPE pays out a specific amount but colleges get around it by charging fees for anything they can think they can get away with.
Should you go to a for profit. You should go to the best choice you can afford if that is what you want and you determine in your best interest. Some careers practically require it while others merely require it for advancement beyond certain points. It all comes down to, did you get what you paid for and is the cost relative to what you expect to make? The rule of thumb I have always read is, do not invest more into school than what you can make in a year from the actual job.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
My brother got his Associate's from ITT and Bachelor's from DeVry. Yes, his student loans will take awhile to pay off but the job he landed pays well and he often travels, so the company covers all those expenses. Before he was married he was always on the road, practically getting 20-40 hours of paid OT each week while having all lodging/food expenses covered.
On the other hand, my cousin is an optometrist. Her school loans topped $100k, she has to work 2-3 part time jobs just to fill her time, and none of those have great pay or benefits. The schools she went to are very respected.
So can you trust the "for profit" schools. I'd say you can trust them as much as you trust any other school. It's up to the student to make the most of the opportunity.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
...one of these schools is fine. 15 years experience designing and managing networks but no degree or only an Associate's? Take a few online courses to get a Bacehlor's and fill in that check box employers look at. A degree from Phoenix AND experience sounds better than just experience to me.
I work for, and am a graduate of, a non-profit online school that is both regionally and nationally accredited, and you wouldn't believe how many students we get coming to us from these for-profit schools. It's amazing how many people have no idea what they are actually getting themselves into, and by the time the debt load is so crushing that there's no escape, they realize that they didn't do anything but pay a lot of money for something that is completely irrelevant. Education shouldn't be something that costs untold thousands of dollars a year, nor should it be just theory - there needs to be a balance of quality, cost, and relevance. Once someone finds that (we're trying, and we're a heck of a lot closer than most)... I'll leave guessing up to you at this point.
I will never recommend any for-profit paper mill to anyone, particularly ITT. I've got 40k worth of debt for the majority of classes entailing being a teacher reading a book to us. There were only two teachers that were worth a damn (Hi Mr. Miller and Mr. Richie) and I took three classes under them, total. Going there went something like this: First three quarters: This is pretty basic stuff, guess I get to the meat of things later. Second three quarters: Well, this seems to be as good as it gets, I've already spent almost 20K, may as well finish it out. Last two quarters: Regret. At least I'll have a diploma. Not to mention there was a guy in the classes that did nothing but surf the web for nothing but entertainment sites, did poorly on all the tests, didn't turn in homework, but still managed to get on the honor roll. I hate that place with all my heart and I chalk it up one of my life's biggest lessons/mistakes. I wish I would have paid 1/10 of what I did and gone to community college for the same education.
Full disclosure: I went to a for-profit tech school. (I flunked out of Ranken Tech's architectural technology program, but ended up with a job as a drafter that I held for 12 years, and have recently transitioned into another drafting job)
It's generally in these schools best interest to flunk out anybody that doesn't perform. Yea, they'll take anybody, but they only want the qualified people to finish and go into the workforce with their name attached. It makes it a whole lot harder for them to maintain their high job placement numbers if they graduate non-performers.
Having worked with several other people who have gone to tech schools and to traditional schools, I'd say it still just as much as ever depends more on the person than the university. If someone knows their shit and is good at what they do, they can be anywhere along the spectrum of college dropouts to full-on traditional college degree holders, and employers won't give a damn. If you do your job, and do it well, where you went to school means very little. All college did for me was get my foot in the door. The fact that I'm damn good at what I do and that employers talk to each other is what has made me a person in demand in my field.
I had a boss who got both a bachelors and masters degree from american intercontinental university. It seems like he maybe got both degrees (some sort of IT/Security nonsense) the same year too or only one year apart so that might be a red flag. His application of security techniques was terrible in the code he wrote. They may have tried but it didn't take in his case. But that being said, I guess it worked out well for him. He got a Manager/Lead job with little experience. He was also friends with the division VP and several other people the VP had hired too.
I guess it worked out for me too. I challenged some of his decisions and he resented that so I got all sorts of crap and a good job became downright painful. I went an got a better job and a better wage.
Slightly off topic, but...
This is what really scares me about the Republican push for charter schools in this country at the expense of public schools (I live in Raleigh where the Chamber of Commerce is heavily involved with the push for for-profit charter schools). Public schools can be pretty bad in places, but at least education is the primary focus of the school. For-profit colleges and charter schools are primary interested in profit, not education.
Sure, you can make the argument that charter schools won't be profitable if the kids don't get educated. However, there are LOTS of opportunities for charter schools to game the system (e.g. only accepting students likely to make their graduation rates and test scores look good compared to public schools) and put profit ahead of a well-rounded education for all kids.
I simply don't TRUST for-profit schools, and they would have to be heavily regulated before I do.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/02/27/1530247/IT-Graduates-Not-Well-Trained-Ready-To-Go?from=rss
Someone with a fair amount of credibility will have to start one, let's say Bill and Melinda Gates or GE (General Electric), then people will suspend judgement on that particular one. If that works, then it will blaze a trail for others willing to apply the same kind of hiring standards and controls. For now, the industry is considered a diploma mill.
I don't think we can really trust non-profit schools either if they have a desire to grow or become nationally recognized. They can still push through those that should never have graduated just to get more student notches on their belt when they apply for federal grants.
I used to work at an internationally renowned medical facility who regularly treats world leaders. They actively encouraged employees to enroll in online campuses such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan, to continue their educational development and help further their careers. I know several IT professionals there who started off answering phones at the help desk for $12/14 and hour and now through online education and hard work are now managers earning $90-100K+ after only 10 years. It comes down to the individual, how hard you work, how dedicated you are to your education, and what you take away from the material you are presented. That is what makes a true professional, not the pedigree of your degree.
There is no real difference between "for profit" and regular colleges. They both have a product to sell. They both have costs which they need to cover. They both want to build a reputation.
I suppose some here will automatically distrust any venture that wants to make a profit, just as I automatically distrust any venture which is ultimately beholden to the government, and thus politics. But that is all beside the point. If you graduate from DeVry you will know something about computers and you will be in debt. If you graduate from anything from SUNY or Cal State up to Duke, UVA or Rice (basically anything short of the ivys) you'll be 6 figures in debt and your communications degree won't open many doors. The issue is higher education -- its costs have far outpaced its rewards.
For the most part, they are diploma mills. There are occasionally a few people who know what they're doing that graduate from there, but the majority lack critical thinking skills, which are needed to figure out anything beyond the standard formulaic scripts that a help desk IT position needs to follow. It's probably why these people are willing to give up cash for these places in the first place.
I went to ITT Technical Institute to get my Associate of Applied Sciences and am going to DeVry University for a Bachelors in computer science. So take it from someone that went there - First, the cost is extremely expensive; even for an AAS which I could have received from Pima Community College. The difference is that my AAS is specialized. I didn't have to take a humanities course or a psychology course, this was a huge benefit to me. I had already had experience in the small-form factor computing industry not to mention experience with servers, routers and enterprise level network infrastructure. The degree allowed me to refine my skill set and my computer practices. Second, the people that feel their getting shafted are the same type of people that would feel they get shafted from their educators at a public institution. They chose to go into computer science because they figure, "...hey it's computers, i use them everyday and I figure they should be easy to learn about." That's a quote from one of my fellow ex-students. They don't realize that computers like any skill set requires some type of training whether it be private self taught training or through a get-to-know-your-computer-class training. They start taking the classes which are intermediate to advanced level class concepts and are completely lost. These are also the type of people that don't put much effort into their education so conversely, they don't get much out of their education. Third, there is a misconception that public universities such as U of A and ASU and Caltech are not for profit institutions. Their out there to get your dollar just the same way the for-profit institutions are. What it depends on is what your looking for in a program, institution, and education. Some people don't want to spend credit hours on a degree that has you take humanities and sociology courses. I needed an advanced program that would allow me to get into my field faster. Just so happens I started my own company. Finally, It falls on the individual to have due-diligence to look into what's offered at their ITT/DeVry/U of Phoenix to make sure it's a good fit for them. Don't go into something without doing to research first. That's just reckless decision making.
Of all the things I've lost; I miss my mind the most. - Mark Twain
... is that for-profit colleges have a particularly bad track record of ripping off their students. Some of the horror stories include continuing to auto-register students for classes after they've announced their intent to withdraw, and charging them for it - even though they've long since stopped attending the school. Then the student gets hit with a gigantic bill for an education they haven't even received.
Can non-profit schools rip off students? Sure. But it seems that many for-profit institutions are particularly egregious and horrible about this.
Many years ago Vocational Technical schools churned out welders, plumbers, electricians, and all sorts of other skilled trades by the boatload. Not everyone was cut out to be a white collar employee, and so if you didn't go to college you could choose these schools to learn a trade and get the skills necessary to get a good job.
These programs have fallen by the wayside along with America's manufacturing. We don't need as many of those workers, so we don't train them.
There is a new economy though, an information economy. Yesterdays Professional Engineers are today's MCSE's and CCIE's designing information systems. These high end jobs still require a college education, as much for the non-technical (e.g. communications) skills as for their technical parts.
For each one of the architects of the information age there are hundreds of technicians. Just like a P.E. may have designed building built by a crew of 1,000 skilled workers in the past, today an information architect designs a data center built by hundreds. These "for profit colleges" specialize in associates (2 year) degrees with the tech skills necessary to fill these jobs. They tech the technical bits, but go really light on the reading, writing, and math skills that would actually give people the fundamentals; just like VoTech schools of old. The welder of old didn't need to know at a 14" beam was required for the weight load and how to calculate it, just how to lay down a perfect bead. The information tech of today doesn't need to know why there's a three layer switching fabric, just how to run Cat5 cables and test them.
Where the "for profit colleges" mislead people is they want them to think they are getting the same education as a 4 year traditional college. They are not. Look at the curriculum online or talk to people who have attended one. These institutions teach you how to do, not how to think.
Somehow it became stigmatized to have not attended college. Never mind that I've seen plenty of 6 figure skilled tradesmen, and seen plenty of 4 year college graduates struggle to get a $40k job. If these schools marketed themselves as VoTech they would be more honest, but no one would go. They are forced into marketing themselves as something they are not, and then folks are surprised, and disappointed with the output.
I wasn't saddled with heavy debt, but the fact that the institution I attended required you to pay for the entire degree in the first 10 months was there as an incentive to actually do the work required. They also had an additional fee for every month past their expectation that you didn't finish. The goal was to get you to complete. Unfortunately, since the degree is non-accredited, I cannot use it as proof to any local Universities if I want to be an Adjunct Faculty.
Having the additional degree did help me get my present position.
jerry
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
Some people can make the BEST of what they learned by doing. Many cannot. This is not
the point I was trying to make. I always appreciate people who need no formal training, they
tend to do, rather than expect a piece of paper to bolster their abilities, they are the exception, rather than the rule.
I graduated from my local ITT Tech with a Bachelor's Degree in Information Systems Security as the valedictorian of my class. It took me a year to find a job and not only do I feel like I am COMPLETELY unprepared for a simple IT job but I was also informed that I was hired mainly because the senior IT guy here said he thought we'd get along well (and we do, which is nice), so that basically means I got lucky and my credentials had nothing to do with it. I've got a sizable debt still, but I haven't been out of my old retail job for a full year yet. 30K a year is double what I made in retail, but not quite what I was expecting (I am entry-level, though). All-in-all, I liked that the teachers worked in the field and really did know their specific subjects inside and out (for the most part), but I didn't like anything else about the school.
No.
Four year colleges by law have to accept all your credits obtained at accredited state community colleges. This really is a money-saver.
I know a lot of educators, and some of them said they are routinely shocked by college administration because they've heard some form of the phrase, "We don't train them for work; we just want to educate them," too many times.
Here is the point: You go to college, you get educated.
You are not useful.
You are educated.
I know a lot about meditation, and about Go, and about philosophy. That... would be useful if all of society knew about that kind of thing, because society is a mess. As a job skill, though, it's worthless. That I can talk about all kinds of shit is not money-making.
A degree in IT doesn't make you an awesome programmer or sysadmin or security professional. That only comes with experience-- and getting the experience first makes cherry picking your education a hell of a lot more effective than ever getting a degree. Getting a degree is a waste of time; the only ones worthwhile are the ones that earn their knowledge.
It is said that knowledge given freely is worthless. When you pay someone for knowledge, that knowledge is given freely. I pay for Go books, I read them, I buy more, read them, I get no better; if I want to improve in Go, I have to play a lot of games and learn by losing a lot to stronger players. That I paid good money for books doesn't change the fact that the knowledge was dumped in my head with no effort on my part. Knowledge must be earned; the books give me guidance along the way, but I won't get any good until I encounter my own struggles and come to understand said guidance.
In college, you pay money to have someone read to you from a book, tell you to read from a book, and give you a paper test asking you if you recognize this shit you read from a book. Math is an exception, since math is math; any application of math is not an exception, you must solve real problems to get good at solving real problems. Anything with a real school (medical school, law school, etc) tends to be an exception (especially with internships being required for law school, and especially since law is academic anyway-- a court case is just Ph.D. research and a dissertation to an audience that WILL challenge you on it). The key here is the real world is often based on solving problems you haven't seen before, not solving problems of structure repeated throughout the book.
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While I'm sure the folks at these colleges are learning *something*, I never found that they were really learning much that was useful to me as an employer. Their "computer science" courses are generally about the sorts of things one can learn on the web. I need people who will use the web to learn stuff on the job. I need the school to teach them the stuff they're not likely to learn by just googling it. They're also often taught by other equally uneducated people in the industry. I never hired someone from one of these schools because none of them ever could hold a candle to the folks coming out of "real" universities. Mind you, even "real" universities produce some piss poor graduates. I don't know what it is, but perhaps the research aspect that lacks from these for-profits really makes a difference in undergraduate education.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Harvard has billions and billions of dollars in their endowment fund. It may not be paid out to shareholders, but it's a money-making operation regardless. Their whole system is designed around getting kids to get high paying jobs so they will give money back to the university. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't make Harvard any better than Devry or other honestly for-profit schools.
Plus, wherever you look in the recent financial crisis, whoever you try to blame, you find one thing in common. The vast majority of people involved went to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, or Wharton. They did NOT go to Devry. So maybe we're attacking the wrong schools for deceptive practices here. Somehow Harvard taught a bunch of people to screw over the rest of the country.
Ok, so this is a few years ago and anecdotal but there you go.
I got out of the Army in 82, spent a year doing odd jobs before landing a part time programming position in BASIC. In 1985 I went to Computer Learning Center to get better. Better training than the hobby and part time stuff I'd been doing and a chance at a better paying, full time job. The FORTRAN instructor was very good in teaching programming. The COBOL instructor was a screw-up who threw up on the grade book after a night of partying (the staff had to look at the grades from the reverse side) and lost several projects when they blew away in the parking lot (the affected folks had to redo their projects). In general I thought it was a pretty good set of training and even taught the COBOL Report Writer in class for extra credit.
Anyway, when I started looking for a full time position, I couldn't get past HR. This went on for several weeks until one HR woman said I should remove Computer Learning Center from my resume as they generally punted the resume once they see that.
I took it off and the next position I applied to offered me a programming position on an IBM System/23 and on the IBM PC AT programming Funeral Home and Point of Sales programs.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
period
Sure, elite colleges are quite expensive, and the cost-benefit relationship in a lot of cases is way out of whack. But at least with an elite college you can 1) be reasonably sure you're at least going to get a top-quality education out of the deal, and 2) not worry too much that the university is actively trying to steal from you. The quality of education you get out of, say, ITT Tech or Kaplan is sometimes dubious, and such institutions have been known to use shady tactics like continuing to auto-register you for courses (and charging you for them) after you've withdrawn from the school. In some cases this went on for mulitple semesters before they finally "expelled" the student for non-attendence and then hit them with a giant tuition bill for instruction that they never even received.
So, yes, in a lot of cases elite colleges are not the best value. But they're probably not actively ripping you off.
"...institutions."
They say it is a very sad state of affairs because the practice of taking advantage of poor and undereducated people is all too common. This particular person teaches English and states that they are blown away by the lack of fundamental grammar and even spelling skills. That being said, if you don't have a command over language, how will you ever understand that these schools are in fact, *for* profit (for someone at least) and they do not have people's best interests in mind?
The best suggestion I give when I come across someone who goes to one of these is "STAY AWAY AND GO TO THE LOCAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE WHERE YOU CAN TRANSFER CREDITS IF NEEDED!!!" I don't say it in all caps but make it very obvious that it is not only the cheaper way to go, you will also become more educated, and of course, the fact you can transfer creds, which you cannot from many of these schools stated in the article.
Well, you can trust them to try to get as much money for as little product as possible. (Though I do have to disagree that this is universally applicable. There are still some remnants of "honest business" out there that have not been eaten by the beast yet.)
So how long until Congress cuts away the GAO? It seems to be getting in the way of fleecing the undesirables back into indentured servitude here...
Someone had to do it.
I went to Herzing. It was on par with UW:Madison tuition. After ~$25,000 in debt I had an associate degree and two bachelor degrees, although I maxed out my transfers/test outs.
At the time, their associates CS program was, IMO, one of the BEST systems to produce entry level programmers/consultants I've seen. I've gone to a number of other universities and public schools (while in the military, including military CS training), and I would have had no qualms hiring any of the recent grads from their assoc CS program for entry level positions.
Their Bachelor programs seemed a bit more hit or miss. They had some really amazing profs and teachers, and a couple of really bad seeds. They were usually pretty good about getting bad teachers out in short order (usually 2-symesters and they would be gone). Really though, the Bachelor programs were 100% dependent on how much you were willing to put in. If you did the bare minimums, you could have still passed, but it would have been a waste. If you were really dedicated to the topic though, there was a lot they offered.
That said, towards the end of my time there, they started to go in the wrong direction as far as profitability over education, IMO. They introduced some new degree programs (including a couple of video-game design programs) that were really designed, IMO, to get kids to part with their money, and not with future career in mind.
They also merged books into the tuition cost, so students couldn't re-use books to save money.
And the thing that really chapped my hyde was when Renee Herzing (the President) became a board member on a PAC that opposed a recent Dept of Education rule change on capping schools' tuition rates for low-employment and low-pay fields (ie: no running up $25,000 debt for a IT support desk assoc degree) and she used her position to make the faculty send students completely one sided arguments about how this rule was the worst thing ever and it would destroy their education. When in reality, Herzing wouldn't have been significantly impacted, and even then, it would have capped their tuition rates only on specific programs. Their IT and Nursing programs would have been completely uneffected.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
bureaucracy is the primary focus of public schools.
In a word....BULLCRAP!
Nobody goes into teaching because they enjoy bureaucracy. Stupid comments like that are nothing more than Republican talking points meant to demonize public schools so that for-profit schools look good in comparison.
Nice try Glenn Beck.
I went to a tech school (Heald Institute) for a computer/electronics degree because it was fast - 18 months. It was filled to the rafters with people getting "retrained" because of some sort of job injury (most of them were insurance scams).
There were very few in the program that even had the vaguest concept of what electricity was when they entered, and when they left nothing had changed.
They "graduated" with an "AA Degree" that was accredidentially worthless, and expected to land high paying jobs. Most that could find jobs became copier repair techs, and had $20K+ in student loans.
It was a scam from start to finish, except for a few of us who had some inkling of what we were studying actually doing something with our "diploma" afterwards.
Schools become a bureaucracy because you make them that way. Focus on results for my kid, need to test the teacher, etc. Key is to work with the Teachers and the School Boards to maximize what they have. Learn to volunteer and allow the good Teacher time to prepare the lesson plans not just for the students but each individual student.
Issue is that profit schools are for giving an R.O.I. to the shareholders. Once payed what do I have to do then? Would it be better that those Charter Schools be on a contract. Let us say, I only pay for the up front materials and profit only occurs if my kid gets a Ph.D.
Charter Schools only mean you will be living in the Third World, oh forgot you are.
I made the mistake of transfering from a cheap county college to a private for profit college (Drexel) in hopes of completing a BS in IT. Most expensive mistake I ever made. The sales/marketing/admissions people lied up a storm to me. Claimed they do all sorts of job placement, most students leave the school with job offers, great education and hands on experience, etc. Talking to those people they claimed it would take 2.5 yrs to complete a BS with the credits they let me transfer. I budgeted for 3 yrs and figured around $80k should be enough with buffer room.
Well tuition nearly doubled in the time I was there, they cancelled classes that were part of a sequence (prerequisites and such) several times which put me at part time enrollment yet still billed me for full time tuition costs. The "cooperative internship experience" they claimed was optional (pay tuition and take classes while on internship or don't pay and just go to work/internship) during my talks with the admissions people (I was not interested, already had a job as a sysadmin) turned out to be mandatory, to the tune of $18k for 6 months (two quarters of classes... that's 8-12 classes I paid for but was not allowed to take). During that time I had no contact with the school and simply went to work every day as I always have.
So here I am at year 4, $122k in debt and I can't afford the $41k they want to take the final 7 classes to get my degree since I blew through my savings trying to pay down my loans. Drexel University has been the most expensive and crippling mistake of my life. I would have been better off going to a cheap state college for around $15k/yr which I could have easily paid cash without taking any loans. My advice to others is don't worry about the name on your degree, just get a degree relevant to your field wherever is cheapest. Experience and knowledge has got me all my jobs. A degree is just a peice of paper to get past HR and open up higher pay (varies from company to company depending on how much the value a degree). If you are already working in your field you will likely not learn much at school anyhow.
I went to DeVry in the 80's as well as a friend of mine. I will say when I went there it wasn't asy at all and my total investment was $30k, that included books, food rent etc... We worked our tails off 4-5 days a week just in class, forget all the extra time that was required to study, write code etc... I look at my Daughter going to college now at a Public University and she hasn't gone to school 5 days a week for 4 years. Matter fact her Jr. year she went fulltime and was there 2 days a week.
I paid off my student loans in less than the 10 years allotted and have had a high paying job for most of my 23 years in the workforce. Oh yeah that friend of mine form HS that went to DeVry as well, he graduated and went to work for Fermi Labs.
I would hire a grad from a profit over a public student any day for I.T. For-profit schools skip the junk and get people up-to-speed quickly so they can hit the ground running with the latest tech when they graduate. I don't think I can say the same for non-profit.
Development might be a different story though.
After skimming through the report. I was a bit disappointed to see they didn't do any undercover testing at any non-profit schools. Maybe I missed it, but it's not clear if it's in there.
It's possible this is just a problem w/ the post educational system in which easily obtainable loans have skyrocketed tuition costs. I don't have much doubt that for-profit colleges are the worst of the bunch, but I don't think it's fair to point the spotlight on them w/ out scrutinizing public, or private non-profit schools.
I can't speak to ITT or UofP, however, I went to DeVry some 20 years ago, got an accredited Bachelor's Degree and spent about the same amount as a "traditional" university. I work in the field same field I trained for and have had a great career. I've since attended both community colleges and graduate school at a state university and can say that the education DeVry provided me was easily as rigorous as grad school. I found the classes I took at the community college level were a joke in comparison.
I'm doing hiring for my team. I don't care too much about the education: if the candidate can do a decent job on the coding quiz
When you have a thousand resumes for two positions, how do you choose which ones even get to take the coding quiz?
...and just showing up isn't good enough.
Most discussions about failure in education fails to note the student's own failure to DO THE WORK.
About 1/3rd of my students fail, not because I'm tough or the material is hard or whatever the usual excuses are - they fail because they just don't do the work! Online quizzes not even opened/started, online discussions not participated in, homework assignments not submitted (not even a "I'm confused" text file as I recommend)...I am very sensitive and responsive to even slight attempts at effort, but if they don't do anywhere close to enough work - and I mean if I gave a 100% on every assignment they did do it still wouldn't hit 60% for the course - then there is nothing anyone else can do for them.
If you are willing to do the work, you can get a fine education at any school at any price.
If you are not willing to do the work, you will fail and lose a lot of money in the process.
And yes, for-profit tech colleges can be trusted. If their product (education) sucked as bad as is implied by the question, they would soon fail because (hey, get this) they didn't do the work.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I taught at ITT Tech in a city in Ohio for two quarters 2007-2008. The book for my class was using Fedora Core 4 just as 8, and later 9, where coming out. I offered repeatedly to update the textbook which students used, but was repeatedly denied. When my students groaned because I had them read a lot of articles outside the book, I said "This book, while only two years old, is ancient in terms of technology. You read the articles so you're learning the current practices and methods instead of ones which are two years old, or older." Of the ~9 students I had, I know that three of them went on to get good jobs in their field. Another is freelancing and making enough to live. I don't know about the rest - never heard anything from them. I can only hope that they learned something useful from me, and my class was an exception to the low standard some tech schools espouse.
"those who receive a "free" education seldom appreciate it as much as the one who had to earn (and pay for) that education"
- prove your statement please: facts, references, etc.
IT needs apprenticeships not College or a mix of both
.
Maybe a 1-2 year class room / apprenticeship to start and then maybe so on going after that.
A: "My son got into DeVry." B: "What did he do? Open the door?"
I graduated from a good private university, went off to get a tech job in the finance sector and make very good money. Having been down that road now, I realize what all colleges do -- "for profit" or not. They are businesses out to make money.
First, they steer you towards bad loans. For example in New Jersey, the financial aid office steers you towards "NJClass" loans that have a 7% interest rate. You can do better if you go down to your local bank, or even shop around online. But the college gets a cut from this, so they offer you the NJClass loan. The prices you pay, especially for private schools, don't come NEAR what you will be worth in any amount of time. If you assume no scholarships (and I had a half scholarship -- more on that later), a good school can run you anywhere from $15k to $40k a year -- the former for a public state school, and the latter for a private school. Things are variable of course, whether you commute or dorm, but the minimum you can look at nowadays is about $15k, even commuting.
I commuted to a private university with a half scholarship, and 5 years and a major change later, I graduated 65k in debt from school. I however, am one of the luckier ones as I have a real skill and work in an industry that while full of bad ethics, pays really well. I still pay about $450 a month on my loans, and that's after consolidating and everything else. If you figure that a college graduate that comes out of school will make less than a six figure salary, that $450 is going to be debilitating to pay back. And odds are, it will be even higher just because financial firms have gotten more twisted and turned over the years. Remember how the sub prime mortgages got bundled up and sold off as good loans to other people? It happens with school loans TOO. The bank has no reason to keep the loans, and in the 10 years I've been paying back my loans, I have had six different lenders.
The only thing we can do as parents (if you are one, as I am), is to steer your kids to making good choices and spend less money on their education. The return simply doesn't work out well in their favor, especially with the debt load they will likely have to carry. Community college for two years, then a decent school for another two, and graduate with as little debt as possible. I am one of the lucky ones as I said; I have a six figure salary, I have a really good resume, I am good at what I do and I enjoy it to boot. Not everybody is that lucky, and the really unfortunate part is that it will affect their lives in a profound way, while Wall Street (and the industry I work for) will profit handsomely as they help shrink the middle class even more than they already are.
If you want to take a real stand, write your senator and get the allowance for federal student loans raised to a higher level. It's easier to repay a 1.5 or 2% loan than a 7% with variable interest and lots of legalese you can't follow.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I have been offered three positions with different tech institutes/training centers to be an instructor and in the end turned all of them down. I can only speak from the prospective employee side but the experience was very similar at all three and it was slimy/dirty feeling from every angle. Some of the outrageous things that were said or demanded of the instructors as well as how the "students" were regarded and spoken about put me off completely. Years later I now hire tech candidates and see many resumes and get calls from these places, the signal to noise ratio is so high it is often not worth my effort to go through 10-20 candidates to find 1 good one (which is roughly what I have found to be the case). Go to a decent community college for an associates, if you want to further it then transfer to a solid state school. You will be far better off.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Beyond that, I look at who is accrediting them and ask "do I trust the accreditation agency?"
...and it is what it is. I spent 10 years in the military and knocked out my first two years of school at 6 different universities between deployments. I got out and got a decent job, and established myself. At some point, I decided I should finish my degree. After talking to a number of local universities and the local B&M University of Phoenix, I chose Phoenix. And I chose them for a single reason. They accepted more credits than anyone else and offered the shortest path to completion.
Had I not been established in my field, I probably would have been pretty dissatisfied with the curriculum. However, since I was familiar with most of it, it was easy to stay ahead. And had my GI Bill not paid for it, I may be a little bitter about the experience, but since it cost me next to nothing, I can't knock it.
Like most universities, there were some great instructors and many of the genuinely cared. There There were some bad ones. It's the luck of the draw. That said, I felt like a number when dealing with anyone in administration or counseling.
Now that my undergrad is out of the way, I am pursuing my masters at a more reputable University.
People don't understand what 'non-profit' means. All it means, is that it meets certain requirements as declared by the IRS that affects how it pays taxes.
There are employees who make MILLIONS OF DOLLARS while working for a non-profit organization. There are non-profit organizations that use hard-sale tactics. There are certainly public universities that do this. That employee people whose sole job is to market the school and/or the degree they are selling to CHILDREN.
My public university actually decided to bull-doze parking lots because someone did some math and declared that, 'If we had less parking, more students would park illegally, and we'd net $x million of dollars over y years.' So they tore it out. I'm also 100% convinced the average starting salaries for my major were grossly inflated. I even worked at our 'telefund' while I was a student. That was the Universities calling center that would call up former students and try to get them to give us money. We were even instructed on how to 'Get them talking about the old 'ol days' so they'd be less likely to say No. And, if you have a transcript mailed to any address (that isn't another university) - even if it's not yours - they will send junk mail to that address trying to get donations and sell homecoming tickets and alumni vacation packages. You can't stop the mailings. Even when you say, 'Look, I don't live there, the people that do were just friends who let me crash there for a few weeks while I was trying to get a job. They don't want the junk mail. Stop sending it. Please. Here is my new address, send it here'.
It's all about $$$. For-profit colleges and universities just haven't jumped through enough hoops (ahem, $$$) to get recognized as a 'real' school yet. The accreditation bodies are even worse than the universities. And thanks to Federal Student Loans, anyone can get as much money as they want. 'You want to major in Art History? And you want 70k in loans each year? Sure!'.
bureaucracy is the side effect of you wanting the schools to do all the parenting for the parents. In europe we have public schools but without the bureaucracy, because when your child doesn't care enough to do well in school the teachers don't have to answer to childish parents who think their little john jr. is the reincarnation of jesus monkeyballs christ. It's difficult to "get all As" in most european public schools (k-12 and college), it's not just "oh if you try and are responsible you'll do great". No, some subjects just are easier for some and straight up difficult for others and grades reflect that. American public schools are a joke, and american private schools are a religious-affiliated joke.
I went to CLC (computer learning center) for networking years ago, and was told all sorts of thing about how they will help me get a job ect ... then two weeks or so from graduation they lost there accreditation.
So now I graduated from a non accreditation school, can;t use the credits as college cred and the only job they could help me get was a crappy help desk job.
Save your money go to college.
employers will/should be looking at sample code and real world testing any way.
I am an ITT grad with an AA in multi media. The education from ITT was no better than I the community college I attended a few years earlier. ITT will flat out lie to get students. I was told my student loans were at 6.8% I later found out that some were as high as 15.24%. The paper work you sign for the student loan has the amount of the loan but no interest rate. I even found a promissory note that apparently I signed but was left blank except for my address and social. ITT's motto is "We'll get you funded." I was also told that all the programs I needed for my classes would be provided. After starting I was told to d/l cracked versions of the the Adobe suites and 3DS Max. Bit Torrent was highly recomended and so was asking for coppies from students that had already taken that class. 2 years latter I had over $25,000 in student loans and about $10,000 in cracked programs.
...Pretty much every school is 'for-profit'. Some are just better at hiding it than others...
Don't kid yourself. All schools are for profit. These just happen to distribute the profit to shareholders instead of the politicians and administrators in charge.
Getting any education out of a school is a job for the student, and it can be done almost anywhere. Unless the student doesn't understand how to learn, in which case there is trouble no matter where you go. It may be the professors' jobs to teach, but none of them can make a student learn anything.
For a specific entry level careers in specific areas of technology, the for profits may actually have a small advantage, they can change their courses very quickly. They can drop a Visual Basic course and add a C# course with little or no faculty input. Of course that can be a disadvantage if they drop or add the wrong courses, or if they don't hire a faculty member who understands the subject.
Apart from cost, name recognition and the hard sell, there is an additional small disadvantage to the for profit schools. Their programs tend to be highly focused on specific subject matter with little breadth. It's a small disadvantage, especially in the engineering fields, because most non-profit universities have narrowed the focus of their programs as well.
My recommendation is to find a school that offers the program you want, will accept you, and that you can afford. California kids might have to relocate to the Midwest to find that. And once you get there, work your ass off. Show up on day one of each class being half a semester ahead of everyone else. Once you're sure you're ahead of the curve and a lost weekend won't kill you, then have some fun. Then prepare to spend a long time paying off your student loans.
Support SETI@home
The recent regulatory attack on for-profit colleges has been linked to apparent insider trading against the colleges by hedge funds.
http://www.citizensforethics.org/press/entry/crew-provides-sec-new-info-short-sellers-shaping-education-regulation
Proposed regulations were leaked early to hedge funds who profited from the drop in stock price of the for-profit colleges affected.
depends on the person and not the school! Intelligent individuals will be intelligent regardless of where they get their piece of paper from and less intelligent individuals will be so regardless of where they get their piece of paper. I did not do so well in high school, not as a result of low intelligence, but as a result of being from a low income family living in a rich suburb. My parents were given a house in said town by my Great Grand Father as a wedding gift and that was the only reason they could afford to live there. Consequently I endured the worst teasing and ridiculing that any child can as my family didn’t “belong” living there. As a direct result of this plight I decided most days to either not attend school or skip out early to avoid being ridiculed. I barely graduated high school, but I knew that education was important. I took a year off of school after that and then I attended one of those for profit schools that everyone is speaking of (I won't mention which one because I am not pushing a school just the idea of for profit schools). I graduated maxi cum laude and would have been valedictorian if it weren't for my hatred of the COBOL programming language. Either way one's intelligence should never be judged by how they do in high-school because some children are never given a chance due to circumstances beyond their control!.
"excellent track record of ripping off their students" ?
Disclaimer/Cred: I've been an instructor at a for-profit "tech" school, and at a NFP community college from 2008 to present.
While teaching at a nationwide chain of tech schools, I personally found the certificate programs to be of dubious value based on their high-cost, almost $14,000, and the mandated grading structure in which students that completed software guided "labs" and had daily attendance were mathematically incapable of receiving a failing grade. I also felt like admissions/recruitment staff overstated the value of the program, but that most students had more sober expectations than our marketing hype suggested.
(Note: I've found the actual degree track AS/AA or BA/BS or Masters programs to be of significantly higher quality. Granted, having gone to a large Midwestern university, I find the for-profit "college" experience to lack some of the extra-curricular qualities that I think heavily contribute to quality college education. Particularly at the AS/AA level, I find the career-ed (tech) coursework to be similar to accelerated CC offerings.)
While I felt the program was not in the interest of the student (and eventually resigned), I will admit that it did serve a population that would have been likely to fail in the community college environment. Additionally, it did give them minimal exposure to the industry that they would have otherwise had a difficult time getting. The most valuable service was career placement, in which most of them got jobs at very rudimentary scripted help desks, which could get them enough "experience" to get past the HR goons and maybe get some attention with vendor certs or good interviewing toward more hands-on tech gigs.
Granted, as I've sat on hiring boards, I would find the certificate alone to be of minimal value, and would identify more strongly with an untrained applicant who showed similar skills through self-education (e.g. repairing family computers, experimented with Linux, authored simple web pages) on the basis that self-education can be extremely valuable with a good on-the-job training program.
I try to make it a point to discourage college certifications (and to set realistic vendor certification expectations) and push the AS as being far more valuable to employers that also opens the door to 4 year schools should they decide to go. Most of the counselors at the for-profit or non-profit community colleges generally tend to encourage students to simply do whatever they've already chosen to do, which is usually certification as a low-hanging fruit, as most simply want to avoid the general education courses.
Unfortunately, the for-profit schools are doing a far better job of providing instruction of any quality that is often more ideal for working individuals. Working two jobs (FT programmer, PT instructor) and living fairly far from any university, has made me use University of Phoenix for my MBA program. As a student, compared to other peers taking programs in low-middle quality state-schools, I find UOP's offering to be comparable on content. That said, I do think that the accelerated nature does cause some topics to be handled superficially, and without proper self-motivation, promptly forgotten.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
No!....No!...No!
We've hired too many idiots from these sorts of colleges, and we immediately throw out any resumes that list these schools. Just can't take the risk of trusting them anymore.
Many moons ago, a company I was with had a ban on applicants from Devry. At that point the candidates they were producing were so completely lacking of any usable skills, that they cost a great deal more to train just to get them to a client.
As long as an institution has received proper accreditation, which isn't hard to verify, that serves as reasonable assurance that their educational offerings are sound. So if it is possible to achieve a well-rounded education through an institution, whether it be for-profit, non-profit, public, private, online, offline, prestigious, ill-reputed, etc...doesn't that place the outcome of the student's education squarely on his or her shoulders?
I did my research before enrolling and found that the institution I went with, which is for-profit, had tuition rates comparable with the national median. There were also statistics that proved alarming - the graduation rate, the ability of graduates to pay back their loans, the student to teacher ratio. I decided that with the right level of dedication those things could be overcome. I'm not worried about my willingness to complete the work or my preparation for a college-level curriculum, as I'm doing just fine. I am worried about the amount of debt I'm taking on, but it's not excessively more than I would face anywhere else, including state schools. I simply cannot attend a brick-and-mortar school that requires you to be physically present each week...it's not an option, at all...so this is really the only opportunity I have to obtain a four-year degree. If I take my education seriously, and bring more to the table than a piece of paper that says I'm a graduate (i.e. experience, certifications, attitude), I am confident that I will be able to find gainful employment that will allow me to pay my loans back at a reasonable rate and still be able to support my family.
It seems like 90% of the problems people bring up when talking about for-profit schools have to do with the students and not the institutions so much. Yes, they regularly recruit people who probably shouldn't have made it past high school. Yes, the vast majority of these people probably wash out, with a few thousand more in debt for the whole debacle. As long as I'm not targeted by some HR or hiring manager's prejudice against the institution my degree came from, as long as I'm given a fair shot, I am willing to be accountable and honest about my knowledge and capabilities.
It's just rough out there, and my goal is to have everything a potential employer could possibly want out of a candidate - a degree, relevant certifications, and relevant experience. Is this worth tens of thousands of dollars in debt? God, I hope so. I've always believed, even before I ever considered enrolling in a for-profit institution, that education is what you make of it - not where you went, not what instructor you had, not what you majored in. If this debt drives me to destitution, I will likely have only myself to blame, not some predatory for-profit school that bamboozled me into enrollment.
There was an interesting episode of Frontline on PBS recently that dealt with this topic. I think it first aired last year, but still current I think. You can see the whole thing on-line for free if you are really interested... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/
I agree that a college education can serve as a "foot in the door", so H.R. can check-mark that little box that says you have it. But IMHO, it's foolish to buy into today's overpriced college education simply for that reason. Doing so perpetuates the status quo, which is essentially a big sham.
Let's face it... the ONLY reasons someone like your friend is successful at his or her job, once hired, are their level of intelligence, willingness to work hard and see things through to completion, and adapt to their surroundings. As you said, your friend is good at what he does NOT because of anything he learned at DeVry, but because of his intelligence. So why do we perpetuate the idea that it's a good idea to start out multiple tens of thousands of dollars (often hundreds of thousands!) in the hole, because we owe it in student loan debt, all so someone with little common sense about hiring appropriate people for a job can tick a check-box saying "college degree"?
I think there are very legitimate reasons to attend college, but they depend on what a person is trying to achieve. You probably have enough specific information you need to learn to become a doctor that medical school makes sense. If you want to do advanced research science, an advanced degree in your field, again, probably makes sense. If nothing else, in these fields, you'll need access to a lot of expensive equipment that you simply won't have access to learn how to work with, hands-on, any other way.
On the other hand? If you want to be a software developer, what can a college REALLY offer you that you can't do on your own? Surely, they can't give you an imagination if you don't already have one -- and that's half the battle to create original software that people enjoy using! And for FAR less money than you shell out in tuition, you can build yourself a very nice home computer environment to code your software on, and pay for a high-speed Internet connection and even a web site to sell your software from or host web applications from.
And even for a field like law, I was recently reading an article talking about what a bad "value" a law degree is for most people. Unlike most degrees, a law degree doesn't really involve any "lab classes" or need for any special equipment. It's pretty much a matter of having someone to act as instructor, and a lot of books to read. You could essentially open up a law school in your own basement if you just hired one qualified person to teach it, and gave students a list of appropriate textbooks to purchase and bring with them. So WHY is it such an expensive degree to obtain?
I would not go to a for profit college for anything, let alone technology. We all know the disaster that is the University of Phoenix. It has essentially become a degree mill or a degree for sale.
This is obviously someone from one of those shitty school trying to get some opinions for their marketing department.
"For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates"
What do you think every single school is?
Academia isn't some magical, pure, honest, well-intentioned society of ivory tower egg heads. Academia is all too often a heavily politicized, dysfunctional, counter-productive institution centered around cronyism, plagiarism (on the part of those teaching and directing), indoctrination, money-grubbing, and all-around bullshit. Any education of students or advancement of a field that takes place in ancillary.
The legal status of these institutions may be "not for profit", but if you take 2 seconds and look at the salaries, benefits, and other perks (forcing kids to buy your friend's book, him doing the same with your book) of the professors and administrators, you'll see it's all a joke.
And generally, the more "respected" (i.e., elitist, selective, expensive) a school is the more this holds true.
The actually quality of education of these tech/profession schools is comparable to traditional universities. The only difference is the type of applicants they attract, and thus how dedicated they, individually, are to taking advantage of that education. ...". Actual research is minimal, and follows no scientific rigor. But when you're teaching a result-driven subject (like any sort of engineering-related or programming-related field), you can't go this way. If you're not spending most of your time with hands-on shit, you're not going to produce competitive graduates in those fields. Every time you have a computer science/engineering major take a mandatory art/etc. class, you harm them. They could have used that time to graduate earlier and be less in debt. They could have used that time to take another class in their field. There's supposedly been an outcry of "Engineering students can't write!", or "We need more well-rounded graduates!". I say "supposedly" because I've only ever heard academia refer to it, never an employer, and the typical college graduate is no more literate than your typical high school graduate - the problem is endemic to our entire society now. And yes, we can in part blame the internet, text messaging, and the retard culture that worships and celebrates imbecility, from Paris to Palin to The Situation (be it the Room on CNN or the guido on The Jersey Shore).
Traditional universities are stagnant. They fear the job-focused tech schools. They fear the online schools. Decades of increasing course load and requirements for shit unrelated to the degrees students are seeking has resulted in many capable people quitting or skipping college, and the wrong sorts of people sticking with it. The intelligence of college graduates continues to drop. The price of a diploma continues to increase. The usefulness of the diploma rapidly approaches nothing more than a checkbox on a resume.
Traditional universities haven't changed much in centuries. Their teaching style and air of self-importance and "tradition" is thousands of years old. When you're teaching art or literature, you can still rely on the pointless Greek-style, name-dropping form of education. Ideas are instilled and indoctrinated, not created. Arguing a point is done in the form of "Famous Dead Guy said
Either way, the ever-increasing art/writing/history/ethnicity/etc. requirements have done nothing to produce graduates who can write competently, in English or any language, or express themselves, or appreciate art, etc. And the idea of a "well rounded" graduate has just produced job applicants who lack focus (both in education and in drive) in their selected fields. Ultimately, most end up taking a job unrelated to their degree.
When traditional universities see other institutions basically opting out of the rankings and accreditation game, they get antsy. They seek to defame those institutions while secretly being enviou
I'm currently a student at ITT Tech, about to graduate in three months. So far my loan has reached $90,000 for a a BS in networking. Currently I work at apple making $10.50. You do the math.
I learned the hard way that Certification Mills are not worth a damn. I made the choice to go to CEI years ago. They got me Pell, and Stafford Sub/Unsub loans, and I had to round out with a nice 19% interest Sallie Mae loan. In all about $15K just to get an A+, MCP, Network+ and some other cabling cert that I'd never heard of and have never heard about since. About 3 weeks into the first class, I decided I'd made a mistake, and decided to drop out so as not to incur major debt. they tried to talk me into staying, but relented. They returned the Pell Grant, and all of the Stafford loans, leaving me with about $3K in 19% interest Sallie Mae as a thanks.
Had I had my druthers, I would've just spent the money on a few books and study guides to brush up on what I didn't know, and taken the A+ and MCP tests on my own for a grand total of maybe $1K and avoided the debt altogether. Hindsight and all..
What career would a Spanish major be earning more money in than IT? I don't really think it's a high demand field.
Whatever you say, Che.
I'm assuming you don't have a job, which is basically selling your skill set to an employer.
U. of Phoenix lied outright on a phone call. I was applying for their MBA program and asked very specifically "Is UoP AACSB accredited?" They said yes, and I said thanks, call me back in a couple days. In the meantime I checked with AACSB and they said UoP is most certainly NOT accredited. The UoP recruiter girl called me back as scheduled and I told her what AACSB had said. She then went on to explain how the accrediting board must have made a mistake, and that UoP is legit. So I ended up at UMass which probably ended up being less expensive, anyway. Effin den of thieves and liars. No better than vinyl siding salesmen in my opinion.
I went through ITT Tech, They will pretty much pass anyone. I had guys in my track that had no business taking the class but they would keep passing them with a C. The material was great. Much better than a bunch of boot camp cert classes, thats for sure. These schools are a great alternative for people with a full time job. My gripe is because they are a for profit, they will pass anyone and make the degree less credible. The degree is great to get your foot in the door but I worry if they interview some of these "C" students and think thats typical from an ITT grad, it makes my education look less credible. A smart hiring manager has to keep this in mind during the interview process. Thats my only advice. I graduated with a BS in Telecomunications Engineering 10 years ago and work as a Senior Engineer and so I am not sure if its the same today.
Practically all the for-profits are tech schools - if you're getting a "bullshit Bachelor of Arts degree", you're not getting at, say, DeVry. What you're really saying here is that you don't think BAs are worth the money. And you may well be right about that. But you ought to compare apples to apples: is a degree from a for profit tech school a better value than, say, a degree from Texas A&M? Given the fact that many of these for-profits have been accused of actively ripping off their students (not just providing a legitimate education of dubious value, but actually stealing their money), I think that's a hard case to make.
Only if you redefine the word "profit" to mean something that it, well, doesn't. For-profit organizations have investors/owners, who have put money into the organization and expect to be taking out something of value at some point, either in the form of dividends or increased capital value. Non-profits are organized as quasi-government agencies or as foundations of some sort. There are no investors or owners - just contributors, and there's no profit to be taken out. That doesn't mean that non-profits don't try to increase their revenue - of course they do. Either for the noble goal of increasing the quality and quantity of service they provide, or the less noble one of growing someone's empire, but either way, yes - they want to take in more money. That doesn't doesn't make them equivalent to a for-profit organization.
The US may have once had tax rates north of 70%, but there were a vast number of deductions and shelters. When they lowered the rates, they tossed a lot of those deductions. You'd have to ask an old tax professional with a few decades experience whether things are actually better or worse now. I couldn't tell you as I entered the workforce in 1988.
If you combine state and federal rates, the U.S. has higher corporate tax rates than some EU members.
However we have generally lower income tax rates. It's a mixed bag, in other words, and yet another topic that fails to follow the Oversimplified World Rule Set of the Slashdot Brain Trust.
I'd be happy just to see the system simplified. The AMT, for example, is a fucking abomination.
I dunno. Has "The Fox And The Grapes" ever been peer reviewed?
Always assume people are out to screw you out of your money, so do your research before you give money to anybody for anything.
Schools and teachers are not the same thing. They are two different entities.
I hear time and time again from friends who get into teaching, that they just hate all the politics and bureaucratic nonsense in their school. Young fresh teachers want to teach. They want to work with kids. They spent time and hard earned money on getting a diploma because they were enthusiastically for the idea of being the teacher.
But then you learn what it is like to deal with the administration staff. That rather than enabling educators to do their jobs, they act as a barrier that teachers struggle against. Teacher with experience eventually learn how to work in and around the system. And how to swallow your pride and tell an administrator that their way is right when you know that it's a terrible idea, because sometimes you gotta choose your battles and avoid making the wrong kind of enemies.
It's a massive system, as insidious and painful as other massive government organizations (air force politics being perhaps the most extreme example, making state level DMV organizations appear tame and efficient by comparison)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The amount of my loan at DeVry doesn't seem like much now as it was in late-70's dollars, but it took me until 1991 to pay it off at punishing interest. And then a collection agency called me a year later and said I still owed money (a few hundred). So I paid it. And then a different collection agency called me a year and a half after that and said I still owed money (a smaller amount, but still in the hundreds). After fighting with them for some time, I ate the cost and paid it. I lived in some anxiety for the next decade expecting yet another call.
My BSET from DeVry qualified me for a engineering assistant position at about 50% above what was minimum wage at the time. The ads show you working in the space industry or military electronics and you can get those jobs (I did) but what they don't tell you is that stringing wires is still stringing wires, whether it's a PBX or a command module.
My financial situation didn't turn around until I taught myself programming and system integration, which positioned me to ride the internet / dot com wave. DeVry had little to do with that -- their few programming classes were still on punch cards when I was there.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
For Profit schools have been in existence for decades. They are not a new class of instution, they are just a different method of delivering instruction.
I have worked for both a public non profit school and a private for profit school in a teaching role. In my experience, the teaching requirements, professional development and oversight are much more stringent in the for-profit school than the non-profit school.
The for-profit school, provides a quality instruction for those students who are not a good match for a traditional non-profit school. Instructors typically have both experience in their field and a strong teaching background. The for-profit school, delivers a product based on what employers want in their new hires. No fluff, no 'useless' knowledge. A student starting in a for-profit school will know exactly what classes are needed to graduate, and will know exactly how long until graduation.
The non-profit school, will deliver a quality instruction for those with the will power to learn. Instructors tend to highly educated, while poor teachers. The product delivered by the non-profit school, often has not changed for years. I remember my Economics professor teaching from hand-written notes that had yellowed with age. to get my 4 year math degree I took karate, racquetball, and weightlifting as electives. The term I was to graduate with my math degree, my school changed the graduation requirements. Despite a 3.59 GPA I was unable to graduate on time, and had to take 2 additional terms of classes to get a Bachelors Degree.
Well I don't agree with that as an explanation for the bureaucracy in the US public school system. Major corporations have layers of idiots that interfere with the primary function of business. Just as other government services have the same sorts of idiots getting in the way of their primary function. I think of public school as just another state run local service. Some states operate it better than others. But the instances where it is ran poorly have such a profound impact on society that we all want to stand up and exercise our American right to bitch and moan about it.
Should a school's primary function be the education of children? Ideally yes.
But what if you allow politicians to oversee the operations of said service, should we be surprised that it becomes a politically charged environment?
There are non-religious private schools in America, some of them quite good (Le Lycée for example). But most of us cannot afford such extravagance. And ultimately for the poor majority, I would prefer they go to public school than no school at all.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I don't think it's a "for profit" issue, or even a "trust" issue. Whether a college has a reputation for giving value for the cost of tuition, or not, should be verifiable fairly easily. If they have a record for punishing tuition to prepare people for low paying jobs, (which was my own experience) then the point has been proven, and whether they're "for profit" or government supported doesn't have a lot to do with it. (Except, in the case of the former, if people stop signing up they go out of business.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates."
I'm failing to see the distinction between for-profit schools and not-for-profit schools here.
you can't trust public organizations much, but you can trust private ones even less
Words to men, as air to birds.
I taught a course in a program at ITT for one semester and I was disgusted. I wasn't allowed to set my own curriculum, I wasn't allowed to set my own standards for pass or fail. If a student did the assignments in the book that I was obligated to assign them then I had to pass them. I couldn't fail them if their work was sub standard. I could only fail them if they did the work. It was appalling.
To make things worse:
The curriculum was out of date and they wouldn't let me update it so I was forced to teach my students expired skills.
Students walked into a class that required programming skills (but wasn't supposed to teach them) and didn't even have a basic understanding of a conditional IF statement. I found myself teaching them programming concepts just to get them through the class.
There were really only two students in the class of 30 that had the chops to pass the course, but in the end I was forced to pass all of them.
The school made no attempt to teach them the ethics of the field. They were constantly handing in work that used material they'd stolen from online sources and had no idea what was wrong with that. If they tried to get away with that in the industry their companies would wind up sued into oblivion.
It was depressing.
My alma mater doesn't pay money to have the naming rights to the stadium of a professional sports franchise. If you wonder where several million dollars worth of Pell Grants have gone, look no further.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Can you trust someone who has something to sell? NEVER.
Good Point! This is a philosophical issue of ethics in any exchange: can you trust in the "value" of what you buy with money? Transactions don't always equate to fairness where value is exchanged for profits.
Frontline has a nice program about for profit schools. They seem to fall mostly into two categories: failing private colleges (usually religious non-education places) that are trying the online gig in order to stay afloat, and schools started for the sole purpose of exploiting the student loan system for fun and exorbitant profit. There are almost certainly some good for profit schools out there, but they're overshadowed by the seemingly endless parade of slimy bastards who are just in it to make a quick buck. Some schools have absolutely dismal repayment rates, with many of the biggest managing less than 35%.
You might get lucky and come out ok in spite of them, but you still cant trust them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think going to an abet accredited school, whether for profit or not, is your best choice. While it is true that after a couple of years experience it will depend on the person, some of the big companies will not even talk to you if you don't have a degree and even fewer if you don't have a degree from an abet accredited school. Check abet.org to see if your school is on their list.
I concur. I turned in assignments to UoP from ~ 15 different cities, because my projects could not stop just because I wanted an MS. There was no way to do that at a trad campus. I would not have lasted one semester at the usual pace. To those that talk about 30k in debt, you need to talk about 75-80k in lost income, at least for us mid-career types. In those terms the for-profits are an excellent deal. Of course, nothing prevents Average State University from implementing on-line courses as well.
I think you could make a case for the evil inherent in the true socialism that most State Us practice as well. If there is a lesson to learn here it is that government should excuse themselves from the education process because government is inherently poorly suited to meeting individual needs. This means massive inefficiency and bloat, and the non-profits are just as good at suckling the federal sow as the for-profit universities.
Key word, being, "Buildings".
The buildings are *very* high profit, and at least in my hometown, it appears that the university president was on the board of directors of the construction firm that got all the contracts, regardless of price and regardless of cost overruns.
Oh, he did have to report the [huge] side income, which is how we know.
Corruption lives large in our state. But I don't think that our state is unusual.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I see a lot of people posting about how ten years later they realize that college wasn't worth it, in so many words. I think these posters really don't realize the odds against them without it. While you might have a lot of debt, you also had a real job and are able to pay it off, and another real job, and the experience then to get another job, plus the ability to change careers if you really wanted. So many entry lvl positions just want a 4 year degree, in the field or not. I don't see many posts about "I went bankrupt from my student loans and now share a apartment with 3 strangers" I think it's mostly the perceived stress from the loans that bring this talk about. All the posters are still doing ok
-2 for a lack of thought on the topic at hand, Take another two and half off for offending people without a reason. Not everyone buys the American Dream baloney, particularly since the wipe out of '10 made renting for the last decade a wiser decision than the 3bd/2ba suburban track.
Since we have so many complaints about the for profits. I went to a major american university.(Supposedly a top 50 in the world but I'm not buying that.) I guess I could point out I started out in orientation taking a calc and physics placement test. I did excellent on the physics test(which was basically repeatedly asking me if I got Newton's first law, yeah because I've watched Mr. Wizard) and lousy on the calc test. So of course they put me in the freshman physics for physcist majors even though calc was a pre-req. That didn't turn out well. (Since it was basically an applied math course.) I probably should point out that the only thing the university actually managed to accomplish with me was to drive crazy and literally make me mental ill with their antics. I managed to graduate in spite of them but they had done such a huge amount of psychological damage that I was basically unemployable for years.(Honestly I was a mess after they were done with me a spit me out.) Lets just say a BA from them wasn't worth very much and what was more noticible was the years of unemployment in the years immediately following graduation. Oh and just to twist the figurative knife they shoved in my ribs they sometimes send mailings asking for donations or very rarely call. I'm thinking the next time they call I'll say the following "To quote the former vice-president go fuck yourself."
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Those schools mostly suck if you expect to learn from them, and are not motivated to teaching yourself along the way. I don't know much about the IT programs, but take the various arts, fashion, media, and "game design" schools that are run as private businesses; They accept whoever pays for the tuition, rather than vetting applicants for some base levels of aptitude in the given subject. The result is 95% of their grads have no business looking for work in the field they think they just graduated into. Trios, Academy of ______, etc... Stay away. You'll have wasted your time and money and be no closer to a career.
Here's the take from a DeVry graduate, (B.S. Computer Information Systems, Summa Cum Laude, Outstanding Student in Major): A nearly complete waste of time and money.
Mr. DeVry had a good idea. Start a college to teach electronics along with the liberal arts courses necessary to earn an accredited bachelor's degree, with this twist: Instead of "professors" the electronics courses would be taught by industry professionals earning extra money by teaching at night. He supposed that the advantage of using industry pros would be that they would provide students more of a real world point of view, like getting on the job training while at school. It worked well for the electronics students, so the organization grew. That's when the problems started.
My IT "industry pros" were a complete bunch of losers who couldn't get hired as engineers at real software companies if their lives depended on it. One of the few instructors who was not actually a loser taught "systems analysis". He was one of the stars of the DeVry Fremont faculty because he had a successful career at Sun. Only he has never analyzed a system in his life. He is a bus. major whose role at Sun was to do "team leading" or whatever the latest buzzword is for the guy who knows jack about tech, but is charismatic enough to keep a room full of engineers more or less on project when they have a meeting or whatever they're calling meetings this year. His lectures were interesting because we learned how to use buzzwords to sound smart, and how office politics can play out, but we learned NOTHING about systems analysis.
So, I learned nothing useful at DeVry except stuff I taught myself while working on projects I devised, and that if you need to know something, you can usually find it in Google if your google-fu is strong, and you don't give up. That's about it. I am now the head IT guy at a bio-tech start-up with multi-billion dollar potential, and thanks to that may well get very rich doing IT, but I owe my father for this situation, because he sent me to a fancy boarding school for high school where I met the founder of my company. I owe DeVry a kick in the nuts, and a lot of money to the feds.
BTW, while I was there, I observed the electronics guys and gals getting what they claimed was a pretty good tech education. I recommend DeVry to someone interested in electronics, but the rest of their programs are a joke.
Social Credit would solve everything...
All that comes to mind when I read this is: "Thank God I'm British!"
Education should be a right for all, not just the ones who are lucky enough to come from a wealthy background.
A colleague of mine, a phys ed major when he was in school, decided to get his Masters of Education from U of P. He handed me an essay that he'd gotten a 98% on. I read it. The essay was garbage -- illogical, unfounded assumption, few references. The kind of thing that would pull a C or a D in a freshman English class.
Bad education options are not limited to for profit colleges.
I was looking for an online horticulture course. Came across University of Waterloo's program. A course cost $350, and consisted of 20 lessons with quizzes. There were 3 sample lessons online. I went through the lessons. Each lesson consisted of about 10 minutes of reading, and 10 multiple guess questions. I was able to do all 3 lessons in less than an hour.
I think it was something like 5 required and 5 optional courses made up a diploma.
I expect more bang for your buck. An online tech course should be on par with running a highschool. In our country a highschool costs about $6,000/year/student, not including the building facility, for the government to run. A high school student typically takes 6 courses in a year, each with 125 hours of required instruction time. So high school education runs about $8/hour for instructional time.
If we naively equate instructional time for student time, then the Waterloo horticulture course should have cost $30-$40.
There may be good distance learning courses out there. I haven't found them yet. Do your due diligence.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
"those who receive a "free" education seldom appreciate it as much as the one who had to earn (and pay for) that education"
is a very different statement from
"I had to work for my degree. I appreciate it more than the people I have met who didn't have to work for it."
It is the former statement I objected to as it suggested you were offering a proven statement based on research across a large pool of people using a respected research methodology. My bias: I am a post doctoral researcher in education and technology at a UK university. So I am critical about such statements, I spend lots of time reading academic papers about issues like the impact of education on people's lives and their perceptions of it. Probably I should chill out as slashdot is just us all hanging out talking nonsense at the water cooler, not an academic forum... :-)
Your later statement is more of a personal opinion based on a limited informal survey (you chatting to your pals) so of course I can't comment on that. Plus you're clear there that you're offering a subjective opinion rather than a researched fact.
anyhow, probably should take it too seriously eh?