Predatory Educating

People have now-a-days, said he, got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know of nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shown. You may tech chemistry by lectures. – You might teach making of shoes by lectures!

“First, why does the market do such a poor job of policing these predatory education companies?”

This is a question that has occurred to me several times. I think your points are good (particularly the credit card analogy), and, given that, perhaps their drop out/ graduate employment rates would be better compared to community colleges. There may also be a significant cultural component. It could be that the idea of the idea of the liberal arts education (in the classic sense, not the B.A. sense) is so ingrained as the gold standard of true academic achievement that these for-profits, which, frankly, are geared towards ostensibly practical jobs skills and lack so much the air of tradition and dignity. If the “second rate” education of obscure state schools/community colleges is unattractive to the ambitious, how much more so these schools entirely outside the world of academia?

“Yes, our kids do graduate, but could they have learned just as much on their own on the Web?”

1. Signaling, as Prof. Caplan might point out, of a students conscientiousness. A person may be quite well self-learned, but that doesn’t tell a future employer much about one’s ability to get a task done on time and as expected.

2. For those lacking superior self-motivation, the class schedule should (hopefully) keep a person somewhat on track. Ditto for the reinforcement of lecture, reading, and tests/homework.

3. Networking and access to resources. Professors (for those entering academia), alumni (private and government sector) and practical work opportunities (think lab assistants and interns). For many job seekers, these will make all the difference…

From presentation by Steve Eisman
SUBPRIME GOES TO COLLEGE

From 1987 through 2000, the amount of total Title IV dollars received by students of for-profit schools fluctuated between $2 and $4 billion per annum. But then when the Bush administration took over the reigns of government, the DOE gutted many of the rules that governed the conduct of this industry. Once the floodgates were opened, the industry embarked on 10 years of unrestricted massive growth.
Federal dollars flowing to the industry exploded to over $21 billion, a 450% increase.

The bottom line is that as long as the government continues to flood the for profit education industry with loan dollars AND the risk for these loans is borne solely by the students and the government, THEN the industry has every incentive to grow at all costs, compensate employees based on enrollment, influence key regulatory bodies and manipulate reported statistics – ALL TO MAINTAIN ACCESS TO THE GOVERNMENT’S MONEY.
In a sense, these companies are marketing machines masquerading as universities. And when the Bush administration eliminated almost all the restrictions on how the industry is allowed to market, the machine went into overdrive.

“could they have learned just as much on their own on the Web?”

No, for two reasons.

1. Judgement and Grading matter: think Weight Watchers.

2. Our understandings are so different that each of us could read the same web article and come away with different aspects we did not understand. Good profs fill in those gaps.

why do you make the assumption that they are, in fact, “predatory education companies”? if they are, like TDL suggested, maybe its not just for-profits.

and as far as how much the government stands to lose, i’d like to see how much public money is spent/lost on for-profits compared to non-profits once you consider the taxes paid by for-profits and the heavy subsidies given to non-profits. for-profits *do* provide an education that is less expensive for society as a whole even if it’s not markedly less expensive for the actual student. you can argue that the education is not as good (and i’ll agree to a point), but there’s no way the outcomes eisman and others talk about are caused by the quality of the education alone.

i would expect the main reasons the non-profits look so much better is 1) they get first pick, so to speak, of the good students (similar to what floccina said) and 2) the students themselves pay a much smaller proportion of the cost of delivering the education because of subsidies and large endowments. on the first point, even executives at for-profits (and i’ve heard one say this) prefer their kids go to the harvards and stanfords of the world because they recognize that the value of an “education” is so much more than the classes you sit through. the “good” schools act as a filter, letting the best students in and leaving the rest to fend for themselves. the apples, and mckinseys, and goldman sachs, and johnson & johnsons, and wal-marts know this and the students know this. you could secretly take all of the best kids out of the best schools and plug them in at u of phoenix or kaplan with the exact same curriculum as the best schools and see outcomes better than what you see now out of the schools and worse than you see out of the students. how much of the school’s improvement is from better students v better curriculum? what caused the students decline?

[in the interest of disclosure, i work for an investment firm and have read a fair bit about the industry. i personally don’t have any positions with the for-profits, but my firm does in a couple. however, a large part of how i feel about education comes from sitting in mba classes at a “top five” school and wondering what i’m learning that my friends in lower schools aren’t. i realized it probably wasn’t much if anything.]

Fail to see why the emphasis on placement as a measure of success. Universities shouldn’t be in the placement business and this ever growing away from their primary function (education) is bothersome.

“Universities shouldn’t be in the placement business and this ever growing away from their primary function (education) is bothersome.”

The discussion is about for-profit guys like ITT, not Harvard. No one involved — teachers, students, creditors, politicians, anyone — wants ITT to be in the business of “education,” but rather placement. You go there because you want a better job.

Maybe what’s going on is a shift in the way education is done, as our society adapts to the availability of the Internet.

After all, it’s not obvious why it needs to cost $50K/yr for a student to take half a dozen classes, provided that he has the discipline and drive to invest the effort. Lectures, reading material, and homework (including feedback) are easily delivered online. There are potential efficiency gains here, including breaking the restrictions on time and location for the student (no travel, can “attend” lectures when it’s convenient), distribution of a lecture to more students than could conveniently fit in a classroom, and profs and T.A.s can be from anywhere in the world.

But the transition from an old way of doing things to some new way can be rough, especially when the old way is deeply ingrained in society. It’ll take us a while to get it all sorted out, and meanwhile the advocates of the old way will be pointing to every failure and false start as proof that the new way is just a passing fad if not a fraud.

And maybe they’re right. As floccina says, time will tell what value a for-profit education really has.

Meanwhile, it’d be interesting to hear from someone who’s taken classes at one of these for-profits. Are they any good?

I was just thinking that many people are in denial about IQ and genetic abilities these days. Schooling is being grossly oversold as a cure to many ills and as a way to make much more money, so is it surprising that people might over buy schooling?

Seriously? Is for-profit higher ed the real problem? Take a look at non-profit higher education. So-called “non-profit” higher ed has gotten fat and happy with government subsidies and exploitation of uninformed clients. The standard non-profit BA degree in social sciences or biology is empty of skill. In my large state university, students are required to take “interdisciplinary” courses where the curriculum is formulaic: “race-gender-class”, business-bad, and government-good.

Typical non-profit undergraduates spend 5 or 6 years switching to less demanding majors and acquiring mountains of debt. They’ll grow old paying the minimum on student loan and credit card debt .

At graduation, there are no ready-made jobs for BA sociologists and biologists. Many of the current class have just now resigned themselves to returning back home since they “can’t find a job” in their chosen fields. But certainly, this unexpected turn of events can’t be the fault of the non-profits? No, the non-profits certainly have the best of intentions–look at how well they pay all their faculty and staff, regardless of productivity.

In contrast, one takes Kaplan courses and gets practical business and technical skills. One expects to graduate with modest skills and get an entry level position–no education for a global citizen and short-course stints in France or Thailand. With patience and determination, one’s career grows into modest prosperity or better.

The state of US, non-profit higher education is appalling. Small segments in engineering, some sciences, medicine, and George Mason economics [:)] remain productive. But the latter are heavily taxed to carry the remaining burden. Most academics have floated away into a intoxicating ether–some to socialist ideologies and others to abstract models of presumably real phenomena. Their net contribution to growth and knowledge is negative.