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Federal Student Aid Requirements At For-Profit Colleges Overhauled
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Department of Education has released a proposal for new regulations that would hold colleges that receive federal student aid accountable for the employment success of their graduates. The overhaul is prompted by the fact that students from for-profit colleges account for nearly 50% of all loan defaults yet only account for about 13% of the total higher education population. '[O]f the for-profit gainful employment programs the Department could analyze and which could be affected by [the proposed regulations], the majority--72%--produced graduates who on average earned less than high school dropouts.'"
The majority of people attending these institutions are one stop away from being high school dropouts. I couldn't begin to count the number of companies who refuse to employee individuals from these "tech colleges". I interviewed one "tech college" professor who had no practical knowledge in the industry, no degree outside of a what was taught at the "tech college", and admitted he had limited knowledge on core infrastructure questions outside of the material provided by the "tech college". However he was a professor for the core infrastructure classes at the same "tech college" he graduated from. I promptly put that institution on my not even worth hiring helpdesk support list. If you want someone to really look at your resume go to a community college and be willing to put in the time to learn. Stay away from tech colleges as they are stain on a resume you could never get off.
~^\-/^|-|^\-/^~ May the force be with me!
While this sounds like posturing that would never actually get passed, I really I hope I am wrong. I went to the University of Phoenix because I was working full time and night program CS degrees at real schools simply did not exist 5 years ago. I knew then that I would only pay for the degree if I was planning on getting a Masters degree at a real school right after. I even called two local schools to ensure they would admit graduate students with UoP undergrad degrees. (BTW, I am in my last semester of my Masters program now)
My UoP degree definitely helped with my career, but only because I was an experienced software developer long before I enrolled. It only helped because of ridiculous HR requirements for applicants with degrees only. The education was atrocious. My second semester database class consisted of just these four assignments: 1) Create a Database, 2) Create a Table, 3) Create Foreign Key Relationships, 4) Load Data into the Tables, 5) Create a Report. They even gave us the commands so all we needed to do was paste them into the console. This may be the most egregious example of the poor curriculum I can think of, but the rest of it was almost as bad.
My fellow students who didn't already know the material were struggling to understand it with no help in sight. I would help them on the forums and over emails, but I knew they would never get the necessary instruction to ever get hired in this field, let alone keep any job they weaseled their way into. It was really sad that they were spending potentially over $50k for a worthless degree. I never said anything to them because I did not want to risk being kicked out after spending so much money.
I hope the government really does start to do something. This problem was primarily caused by real universities that do not offer sufficient night programs for adult students, but it has progressed to the point where government intervention is necessary. These online schools really could provide decent educations if they were forced to. If their programs were decent they would fill a very large void in our country's education system, but in their current form they are nothing more than a parasite.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There is no justifiable federal role in education. Education has traditionally been and should be locally managed.
We don't need more regulation surrounding student loans, we need less. In fact there shouldn't be any federal student loans at all.
TFA and TFS don't make it quite clear - would the SCHOOL lose eligibility, or a specific degree plan? If a student gets a degree in art history or women's studies that probably won't do much for their employment prospects, regardless of whether the school is good or not.
But they actually know and understand the curriculum. Besides which, professors at real universities aren't hired to teach, they're hired because of the research they've done. So yes, they have experience in research.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A better system is needed for people who are working but want to learn new / more skills and want them to add up to something why not have some kind of badges systems?
also some skills are a poor fit in to the over all university system also the university system is loaded with all kinds of fluffy / filler classes as well. forced PE classes at a price that is more then a 2 YEAR HIGH COST fitness club membership??
Not only that, but student loans are one of the few types of debt that are not normally discharged in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing. It's pretty much with you for life. You'd be better off putting your tuition on a credit card than taking out a student loan for it. Starting off that far in the whole with student loans is one of the worst mistakes you can make, unless you really understand what you are taking on.
What this tells me, is that there is clearly a demand that is not being met by 'traditional' colleges/universities. These schools offer people a chance at a diploma that they can put on their resume. If you don't have that piece of paper on your resume, you are not even going to get an interview regardless of how knowledgeable you are in the field (unless you have a contact inside the company already).
These schools give people, who maybe got off to a bad start, a chance to go to classes in the evenings, it is a path for those students who were not necessarily 'good' at school and would score poorly on an ACT or SAT test. When more and more of the jobs those people used to get go overseas or to mexico, they have to have some way into the 'new' economy. Either that or they find a way to game the system with welfare/disability (or get stuck forever in working poverty). They have to live, they have to feed their families. These schools offer them a way to do that. (or more likely, the false hope that they can do that)
I think the traditional colleges need to take notice and start offering programs that mimic what these for-profit schools offer. Flexible schedules for adult students, shorter paths to a certificate or diploma, etc. Side note: aren't all colleges 'for profit'? I see the million dollar salaires of university presidents, massive coffers, and multi-billion dollar sport franchises and have to think that they are all 'for-profit'; the profit just goes in different directions.
How about forcing them to refund tuition to people they lied to in order to get them to sign up?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
1) A system of education designed to produce a graduate with a broad yet substantive grasp of human knowledge in art, literature, humanities and basic sciences?
2) A system of education designed to promote a commanding, in-depth knowledge of a specific discipline like engineering, law, medicine or physical science?
3) A vocational system designed to produce employment-ready workers with a sound working knowledge of a specific area of business or government?
4) A finishing system where young people learn the social skills and cultural knowledge necessary to aspire to the elite class of society? While it sounds free from anything like education, these things may require things we do consider education, like learning foreign languages to demonstrate worldliness, and where political history is personally embodied in the elites themselves (aristocracy and nobility), and where proper social manners may be barely distinguishable from what passes for politics and diplomacy.
I think it's mostly grown to be 3 and 4. You go to college to study an occupational field so you can get a job. It's different than 2 because you're not studying as nearly in depth. Accounting isn't mathematics. Before the 1960s you belonged to a fraternal organization to learn to participate in formal society as an adult. After the 1960s its where you go to experiment, find yourself and in practical terms learn to live on your own (pay rent, feed yourself, etc). In more expensive schools there is still a strong emphasis on the social component both from tradition and from aspirational goals of joining some of your fellow students' elite socioeconomic class.
I think for most of the past few hundred years its mainly been 1 & 4, with a strong emphasis on four. When we began indulging girls in education, college was a fine place to find a suitor of suitable class and ambition. But for all, a solid grounding in the liberal arts was socially useful, eliminated provincialism and promoted useful skills in basic mathematics and literacy.
The in-depth education of 2 probably started out ecclesiastically as the means to produce priests and preserve religious knowledge and church canon. Not until the enlightenment and the industrial revolution were most of these subjects studied with any rigor. Until mathematics was applied, engineering was just skilled trades like carpentry, stonemasons and blacksmiths.
Where you have professors who have been in school for years and have next to no real experience.
Experience of which industry? I'm a physics prof. Our grads work in fields as diverse as finance, medicine, IT, natural resources, academic and industrial research etc. in a diverse range of positions. University is supposed to give you deep understanding of a subject and a broad range of skills that are useful for a wide variety of positions both in academia and industry it is not a training scheme for job X. Being involved in research means that I can take the latest research results and bring them into lectures so the students learn about them and perhaps find ways to apply that knowledge wherever they end up. This is not only good for the student but good for society as a whole and someone from industry is unlikely to be able to do that.
Continue to hold the student accountable. They're the ones that were too stupid to go to a college and get a degree for a job good enough to pay it off. And too stupid to figure out debt v/s income ratios. And maybe their parents if they were involved in the stupid decision to send their kids to college without a means to pay for it.
Your repetition of the phrase "too stupid" seems to imply some sort of innate cognitive dysfunction.
But I think what you really mean is that they don't have the necessary experience and skills to evaluate basic financial math decisions, right? I mean, except for the small percentage of people with actual cognitive impairments, most people should be able to figure this out, right?
So, then you have to ask yourself: how is it that we require students generally to take 11-12 years of mathematics in this country, but they somehow graduate without basic financial math skills to survive in the world?
I taught high school math and science for a few years, so I know the curriculum and debates first-hand. I can tell you about the 140 or so students I was teaching my first year -- mostly high-school juniors and seniors in algebra II (likely the last math class they would ever take in their lives for most). And one day I tried giving them a simple application problem involving compound interest: only 2 out of the 140 students actually knew what compound interest was.
According to the state-mandated curriculum, I had no time to teach them the basics of math that would help them to survive in the real world, but at that point I decided I needed to carve out a few weeks and do at least a little of that... even if it meant some of the scores on our official testing would be a little lower. I can tell you that most teachers probably don't even have time or initiative to do that.
So... with situations like this, you have to ask yourself: how can we expect these "too stupid" students to evaluate basic financial situations when they don't even know fundamental ideas like compound interest, let alone how it might apply to loans or investments or whatever?
Of course, I agree with you that some of the blame should be placed on the students and their parents. But I do think we need to recognize that we require kids to spend over a decade in public schools, and many of them are leaving without fundamental numerical skills to make decisions in the real world.
So are they really "too stupid" or were they just never taught basic numeracy?
First you must ask yourself the question: What is the purpose of the public education system?
If it's purpose is education, then yeah, it's not doing so well. But if you look at the history it was created in the first place in large part to store children someplace out of the way while the adults were busy working, at about the time that child-labor started being outlawed. And it does pretty well at that, as well as indoctrinating students to obey authority even when the authority is ignorant and arbitrary, which I think we can all agree is convenient for those calling the shots in the wider world.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Exactly. There is generally no reason to go to these for profit schools other than they are super easy and you generally dont have to do much, after all their pay is directly related to you passing so why would you fail?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Taking California for an example, the system has been wide open to foreign students capable of paying the extravagant fees but kids from the state have more limited options to enter the programs; necessitating cradle to college programs as their sole means of entry outside of community college programs. As a tax-paying parent, my observation displays a money-hungry group concentrated on taking my tax money and categorically denying access to the majority of California kids in favor of larger fee entrants.
In my university classes, I knew more than one student that weaseled their way through classes without really understanding the material, so I know that those people are out there. A college/university education isn't a panacea; the student has to do work on their own to end up with any level of competency at graduation time.
In my case, I saw two benefits to a college education. First, it showed me what was important to study in my time. Second, it provided me the pass to get past the HR gatekeeper-goons at most employers. A degree is no replacement for having the drive to learn.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Go work at "non-profit" schools - that's where the real money is...
Ask yourself, why is it that students upon graduation from a traditional school can defer payments for three years, and the "analysis" the DOE has done is based on the default rate 3 years after graduation?
Can "non-profit" graduates defer their loan payments for three years? I seem to recall not, but I'm not sure...
Ken
Wait... what? Only a small portion of federal taxes go towards education. The vast majority of public schools are funded by the taxpayers in the school district, city, county, or state they are located in. Are you talking about state colleges/universities? This isn't about private vs public. Its about for profit vs non-profit. Non profit apparently does better in most cases.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Where I live the community colleges are inexpensive, but do not have flexible class times for working people, and most of the tracks that have good job prospects have 2-5 year waiting lists. So many students choose to rack up the debt at TVI, PMI, UoP, where they can start immediately and continue a full-time job.
The problems at our CC are mostly because they can't attract enough instructors. The community college pays them half of what of what they would make working in the field or teaching at a for-profit college, and are horribly mismanaged. In the electronics department, I frequently heard the instructors compain about pressures to dumb things down to pass more students. The place where I work has started to favor techs from TVI & DeVry because the quality of students from the CC has decreased. When my wife was doing her nursing degree, the department head would be constantly changing things (like room locations, curiculum dates, rules about how to evaluate students, etc) literally the night before class, so the instructors could never be prepared for class. Many people are willing to take a pay cut to do something that they enjoy more, or work under a horrible boss if the pay is good, but very few are willing to do both.
That is because -- get this -- computer science is not about coding.
It's about math and engineering. Any coding is incidental at best and it's not their job to teach you "programming".
Judging programs on their employability is myopic. If you are smart and logical, then picking up a programming language is trivial.
Most top schools have little to no programming education -- you learn discrete math, graph theory, complexity theory, algorithms, data structures, graphics (which is physics and math), AI (lots of stats and probability), linguistics (if you do NLP) etc.
Even when you learn Operating Systems or Compiler Design, you're learning them from a design point of view. The details of implementation are something you pick up on your own.
You want to teach skills that are transferable and will survive the next programming language or platform fad. Any good CS program teaches that. Learning to code in Java or *nix sysadmin skills are things you should pick up on your own.
The vast majority of public schools are run by school boards in which parents can have greater or lesser input.
Some districts have smart aggressive school boards that set standards and make sure their kids get a good education; in other school districts it's all about whose brother-in-law gets the lunchroom contract.
It's small-town democracy. If you don't have good schools for your kids, blame your self and your neighbors. It's your responsibility.
I don't use my degree, properly. I was trained to design computer chips. Instead I administer networks.. There are parts of my education I rarely use, yes, but I would *never* say I "rarely use what I learned" because there isn't a waking hour that goes by where I don't use something I learned in college.
People who filter on college degrees just want the benefit of a pre-screen for candidates who also have a college education to draw on. It would be nice if every business could afford the time to individually assess every resume that comes through the door, but the realities of business are not like that. They all rely of pre-screening in one form or another, and much of that pre-screening has to be free or hiring would be an unaffordable process.
Someone had to do it.