For-profit school admits fraud

Discussion in 'Accreditation Discussions (RA, DETC, state approva' started by Bruce, Jun 6, 2016.

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  1. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

  2. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    There has been, for many years, this tier of really crappy career schools. They existed for decades completely unchecked. So they grew and became large without becoming any less crappy.

    Now as people begin to cry about how "for-profit = evil" we will see many of these places die off. When they do the world of higher ed will be slightly leaner. The competition will be out of the way for the remaining, and sturdier, for-profit universities.

    I also predict that, in the coming years, more people will start asking the question "Hey, why aren't we mad about non-profit universities that also don't deliver?" A former employee I know now works at the Verizon store down the road. He complained pretty incessantly about his six figure student loan debt (for his B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Sociology). Why isn't anyone doing a feature story on him? Why doesn't he get to protest Sallie Mae and demand loan discharge?

    He will. The attacks on the for-profits will invariably rally the lazy people who happened to graduate from non-profit schools and then we'll see people making a mockery of the lower tier private schools with employment outlooks that make trade school look far more attractive.
     
  3. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    "The Braintree school was located in the Granite Plaza shopping center on Granite Street, at the current location of the Montilio’s bakery and pizzeria."

    It's also a cobblestone's throw from the infamous Quincy Quarries, isn't it Bruce? I first learned how to rock climb at those quarries. On a hot day we would rappel off the cliffs right into the water. I'm pretty sure it's all closed off now. (sorry for getting all off-topic here)
     
  4. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Is there some basis for this? The public record seems to indicate quite the opposite. It will be interesting to see when she is elected governor.
     
  5. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    I like the way we do it here in Canada. Private career school? No degrees -period. Limits the damage to a max of maybe $15 K a student, if things go sour. We have our home-brew schools plus some American chains, like Herzing (awards degrees in U.S. but not here). Want a vocational program and a degree here? First earn a diploma from a public college (tuition ~4K a year, 2 or 3 years) and ladder it into a degree-completion program. Lots available.

    Private career schools here live largely on government money - e.g. retraining unemployed people for new careers at $15K a pop. I guess it's more expedient for the gov't to pay people benefits for 10 months vs. 2 years+ at a public college. We've become degree-crazed here, but not quite to the U.S. extent, as I see it. For the moment, you can still fix a tap without a degree. Ontario's new "College of Trades" might put a stop to that, though.

    J.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 7, 2016
  6. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Who then is the target demographic for your homegrown for-profit universities? I'm thinking of the New Brunswick schools.
     
  7. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Healey for Governor?

    Don't "hold it" your breath;

    Healey’s ‘hold it’ has critics hopping mad
     
  8. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Not too far, maybe a couple of miles.

    I jumped those quarries as a kid, which I never admitted to my father until years later, because his brother drowned in a Quincy quarry off of Quarry Street. All the ones off Riccuiti Drive (Swingle's, Granite Rail) are all filled-in, although they still attract rock climbers in the nice weather.

    Before and after;

    [​IMG]

    The highest point to the right was called "The Triple Lindy", and if you jumped from that with at least 2 witnesses, you made your bones as a Quincy kid. Of course, I was stupid enough to do it when I was about 13, and I think it took a year for my testicles to drop back down from my throat, the impact was so hard.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 7, 2016
  9. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    When I was around 14 I went swimming in a reservoir in Pennsylvania (illegally). Had just moved to town, the other kids told me it was cool and all good. Was in the water for 15 minutes before I got busted by a Fish and Wildlife Officer (not to be confused with a game warden or an officer of the Department of Conservation of Natural Resources).

    I'm not sure what made my father angrier; the fact that his idiot son got busted swimming where he wasn't supposed to or learning that there was no "professional courtesy" in PA like there was in NYC (the Fish and Wildlife guy gave dad quite a lecture about how he, a police officer, ought to supervise his kid better because, you know, im sure that guy's son only ever did his homework while the guy was at work).

    That was the punishment to end all punishments. Basically grounded for the entire summer only to be released to my part-time job picking beans in the scorching sun.

    I wonder if MOOCs had been a thing of I'd have stayed out of trouble...
     
  10. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Hahaha!!! It was a learning experience, as well as a good story.

    I'm sure it happened, but I never saw any kids arrested for swimming in the Quincy quarries. The 2 big ones that everyone jumped & swam, one was owned by the city, the other by the Metropolitan District Commission (state agency), which had their own police department until they merged with the state police. Whether it was the Quincy cops or the MDC cops, they viewed it as a nuisance more than anything, and would only show up if there were complaints from citizens (rare, because there were no cell phones back then). They'd show up and blast the siren, which sent us running.

    Looking back on it, I (along with a lot of other kids) was extremely lucky to have survived and was also uninjured, other than some bruises. There were something like 20 people killed in the quarries in a span of 20-something years. One kid who jumped into Swingle's Quarry drowned, and in spite of a massive search, his body was never found. It's now under tons and tons of dirt from the Big Dig, which was used to fill-in that quarry and others.
     
  11. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I also heard that there are a lot of stolen cars that wound up at the bottom of those quarries I don't know how deep that water was, well over 100 feet?
     
  12. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I'm unsure if our detainment would actually qualify as an "arrest." That also angered dear old dad quite a bit. The officer (who my father affectionately nicknamed "Detective Fish" thereafter) loaded us up, brought us to his little shanty and called our parents. We received quite a lecture about how we could have died but it was largely centered around how, if we swam down about 50 feet, we could have potentially been near an intake which would have spit our corpses somewhere on the other side of the county.

    Beyond that it was a hot summer and the guy had been chasing kids off non-stop.

    As for a learning experience I can say that what I learned was not that swimming in reservoirs or disregarding signage was evil. I learned quite a bit about the duality that is necessary in being an adult. My father didn't care that I was swimming in the reservoir. He DID care that I got picked up by an LEO. He also thought the guy who picked us up was, in his words, "the worst kind of real cop wannabe the world sees fit to excrete (he didn't say "excrete")." Punishment came. But it was a punishment without anger. And, in subsequent years, I swam in other equally prohibited reservoirs. Once, he came along and illegally fished. My friends saw it as a sort of hypocrisy. But I choose to think of it as more of a statement about crime and punishment in general; there are plenty of things that are illegal but not at all immoral (nuisance, as you say) but if you get caught doing them you have to face the consequences.

    Perhaps I'm just rationalizing. But I think it caused me to start seeing the world less in black and white. The bean picking thing though...

    That was just my father being a d-bag.

    The reservoir was fairly low risk. But when I moved upstate and started spending a lot of summer time around Ithaca, NY I really began to appreciate some of the dangerous activities out there. Gorge jumping is fun as hell but it is dangerous. I tried it once. It is the kind of thing that I can picture a 15 year old self doing without blinking an eye but the sort of thing that a then 30 year old self recognized as being a very bad idea well beyond the possibility of getting fined.

    Speaking of life lessons I don't know what lesson I would impart to my kids. I would never encourage doing something that dangerous. But I will likely be as powerless to stop them as my parents were in stopping me. Ultimately, I hope they have fun and learn and live to tell the tale. But I guess that applies to life beyond swimming in forbidden places as a kid.
     
  13. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    When they drained Swingle's Quarry to look for the kid's body that they never found, I and a friend of mine snuck into the area by climbing a fence. We went over to the edge on our bellies to look over. You could see the stolen/dumped cars at the bottom, stacked by decade.

    This was 1983-84, so the 80's cars were on top in relatively good shape, then the condition of the cars went downhill, the further down the stack. The lowest we could see, I estimated to be the 1950's, based on body shape, as there wasn't much else left.

    I estimate the depth to the bottom to be well over 100 feet, closer to 300 feet. The Granite Rail Quarry (where the rock climbers go) was about 100 feet deep.
     
  14. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Somehow, this sounds like the start of a Stephen King story....
     
  15. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    I was hoping you'd say they finally found Jimmy Hoffa.

    J.
     
  16. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    Well, it's really quite close to Whitey Bulger's old territory so . . .
     
  17. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    ...so it's too obvious. Gotcha.
     
  18. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Whitey's dump site for his victims was within the borders of Quincy, but you can practically throw a baseball into Boston. The quarries are at the opposite end of the city, not far from the Braintree border.

    I think Whitey didn't use the quarries for a couple of reasons; there were people coming & going at all hours of the day & night; kids drinking late at night, hikers during the day, and dog walkers in the morning and evening. Also, there was always the chance that whatever precautions were taken to weight the body down might come loose, and then you have a floater that's easily noticed. The only reason they found his dump site was because Kevin Weeks sang like a canary to avoid a much harsher sentence.
     

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