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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.'"
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
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.
How about forcing them to refund tuition to people they lied to in order to get them to sign up?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Education is primarily a social welfare program. Social welfare programs generally don't work if they are localized to jurisdictions that have free trade and immigration. States are required by the constitution to have both - the only reason that state-level primary education works is that the federal government sets uniform standards and will deny substantial funds to any state that violates them.
If you make education purely a state-level system then there will be a race to the bottom. Employers will flee states that have generous education programs in favor of minimalist states that have lower taxes.
Socialism of any kind can really only work at the national level. Employers can't easily flee countries, because they would then become subject to tariffs when selling back to that country. Granted, the US of late has backed free trade, which is why all the manufacturing jobs are going to countries where you can fire workers who get injured on the job and dump your pollution wherever you like.
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?
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.
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.