I'm $30K in debt with a worthless degree

I used to teach for Corinthian, but my conscience got the better of me, and I quit. The faculty training, academic materials, and course requirements compared favorably to RA schools I taught/teach for, but their aggressive/predatory marketing manifested itself in many students who had no business being in college. I was making serious money, but I couldn't be a part of what was going on.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/ended-30k-debt-worthless-degree-142000117.html

 

I trust your judgement Bruce- I believe that the "faculty training, academic materials, and course requirements compared favorably to RA schools" if you say so- as such, while I have no experience with this school, she can't possibly claim that she didn't learn "anything" and can't get "any" job- I just don't believe that. People use continuing education credentials (non credit, certainly non accredited) to earn job training skills that land jobs- I believe she's using her unemployment to make her case, which I understand the motive, but she's doing herself no favors. She has skills, she is employable- she needs to market herself better.
She still has a degree, and by all accounts, it's more legitimate than some of the diploma mill holders you and I can find on LinkedIn.

I am glad they closed, I do believe they were predatory, and maybe she'll get her loans forgiven. Either way, it's time to end the pitty party and go about the business of starting Chapter 2 for this lady.

 

Everest is well-known as a predatory school, so the name, alone, can hurt her job prospects.

On the other hand, a lot of criminal justice students have unrealistic expectations. Most of the time, they'll end up getting a job that requires no degree. I've noticed that people with human services degrees often don't know how to search for jobs. On another forum, there was a woman with a criminology degree who couldn't find a job. I pointed her to a government agency and told her about a couple of positions. Less than two months later, she was starting training in one of those positions.

 

Probably better for landing a promotion than for finding a job. It seems that every school and its mater is now offering CJ degrees.

 

Most people also do not understand what CJ degree is about.

 

"Human Resources" (HR) is another degree that sounds good, but there may not be a lot of opportunities for those who are not already employed in HR. Many HR managers started from the ground floor in a business with limited education. It's also a very small, narrow and esoteric field. Many people do HR duties, along with all their other duties i.e. HR is just a small part of their job.

The important thing is to get a degree, whether it's in HR or CJ or business. Most people don't work in the field of their degree (although many do). People with degrees in HR, CJ and business can be extremely productive in whatever profession they end up in. The degree should help them to think critically and to find solutions to problems (hopefully).

 

There are, in many ways, two different worlds of HR. On one extreme, we have the HR Director who may not have any formal HR training. Heck, maybe even no degree. He or she might have started out doing something else and then, as the business needs evolved, they found themselves doing more HR stuff than anything else and so the company owner threw them a courtesy title of HR Manager or, if they were very special, Director of HR.

On the opposite extreme you have large companies like Manpower (my former employer). It's a large, multinational corporation that is staffed almost exclusively by people who can be described as HR Professionals. Most of them are recruiters, mind you. But it's the sort of place where even higher level executives, at the end of the day, consider themselves HR professionals who spend most of their day on managerial issues.

Solidly in the middle are people who have jobs like mine. I work for a large company. And we have a large, and fully professional, HR staff. You don't end up in my department because you thought you'd dabble in HR. Nor are we doing this because we fell into it. I'm a Senior Human Resources Business Partner. HR is my day. And I'm not "senior" because my boss wanted to pat me on the head. I'm senior because I supervise two other Business Partners, a recruiter, a staffing assistant and an admin. There is another Senior HRBP with a similar set up (she doesn't have her own recruiter. We both share the services of that one, though I do his performance appraisal).

Also in my office you'll find that we have a 12 person benefits shop. We also have a training team, all HR professionals. And the whole mess of us report up to an Executive Vice President of HR.

The HR world is indeed quite small. Esoteric? Not really. You can't just talk your way into this work especially when it comes to benefits administration. There is nothing esoteric about compensation analysis. And there is certainly nothing esoteric about managing health benefits and retirement plans.

Many people do accounting duties along with their other duties. I, myself, manage a budget and complete journal entries for my little slice of the pie. I turn them over to Corporate Finance every month. I guess that makes me a bona fide accountant, right?

I jest. People who dabble in HR are not HR professionals. If you are a manager who hires and fires, that's great! But this does not an HR professional make. It sounds like you've only ever encountered very small HR shops. That's OK. But there is a whole HR world out there.

The issue with HR degrees isn't that there isn't work for a recent graduate. It's that getting into HR, like most professions, requires you to start out somewhere. I was able to parlay my Navy work into a decent civilian job when I got out. I was able to do that because I had certifications and a degree. But I've encountered folks from the military who can't make that leap. Want to know why? Because it happens pretty frequently that whenever we post a mid-level HR position I will get an application from a veteran or a military retiree.

The spiel goes like this:

Many years in the military, I was a senior NCO, I have no work experience since leaving the military. I have a Bachelors and sometimes a masters in HR, usually from a place like Capella, AMU, UMUC, Phoenix or DeVry. I did not do anything even remotely related to personnel administration in the military but I figure I'm qualified because I led troops/sailors/marines/airman.

Then when they fail to get the job they conclude that companies are anti-military, military experience doesn't translate to civilian life or, as you said, HR is basically not an industry unto itself.

This is true. But it's also important to know what industry you intend to get into and look at the qualifications before you proceed. A degree in HR is valuable. Certifications are also valuable. But, more importantly, you have to know what you want to do in HR to get your start. Benefits? Recruiting? Generalist? HR Analysis? There are different skills and qualifications required to pursue each path.

 

"I'm $30K in debt with a worthless degree"

Wasn't that a Bob Dylan song from the sixties?

 

Add a divorce and/or dead dog, and it could be a country song of any era.

 

You load fifteen credits, what do you get?
Another term older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the school bookstore

 

At schools with predatory recruiting practices, they give already misinformed students even more misinformation. I had students who thought they could become licensed social workers, students who thought they could skip the police academy, and a disabled veteran in his 60s who thought he could become a criminal investigator. The misconception at all types of schools is that CJ is more applied than it actually is. So, you'll get students who will complain about learning theories of criminology and sociological problems. If all you want to learn about is handcuffing people, writing tickets, and defensive tactics, then you are better off self-sponsoring through a police academy. If you want to learn about criminalistics, then major in forensic science.

 

While I'm sure there are admissions people, and schools that employ them, that actively spread these misconceptions I also must wonder how much of it is just people not even receiving misinformation but just concocting their own reality.

During my freshman year at Scranton we had a class called "Freshman Seminar." It was a 1 credit course led by an academic advisor where they taught you how to read a syllabus and start thinking about your career. Our final project, such that it was, was to do a presentation to the class on our career of choice complete with what education was required to achieve that goal, salary expectations, licensure requirements, the types of places that would employ such a person etc.

It was a fun exercise and I think a lot of people learned a lot in the process. One classmate, for example, who started out pre-med with a major in biology ended up switching his major to nursing with the goal of becoming a nurse anesthetist. He wanted to eventually become an anesthesiologist but when he began researching the career path, and the required amount of schooling (and debt) associated he learned about the RN-Anesthetist option which he previously hadn't even heard of. Good stuff.

Meanwhile, we had one guy who was majoring in Psychology intending to eventually go to medical school to become a psychiatrist. He was convinced that by majoring in psychology he would be able to skip a residency after med school and just be a psychiatrist the day after he graduated with his MD. The advisor said something to the effect of "Oh, I'm not so sure it works that way just make sure you do your homework on that."

Another had it in his head that by majoring in "Law and Society," an undergraduate track that was essentially a Liberal Arts concentration, he would be eligible to take the bar. He constantly referred to his B.A. program as his "law degree."

The last one, the one that pissed me off the most, was the young lady who decided she was going to be a psychologist. Her reasoning? The money. She wanted to make lots of money. When she did the research she was confronted with a very uncomfortable truth about the sort of money a clinical psychologist commands. Her response? No problem, she'll just make the upper 10% of the salary range because that sounded better. At one point, when examining the median salary, she blurted out "My mother makes more than that and she's just a nurse!"

My point being that this was a fine little private, non-profit Jesuit school. No one misled these people. Most of them just made stuff up and accepted it as fact without seeking outside information. So it makes me wonder how much of these issues with places like the Art Institutes is misinformation versus students with their head in the clouds who, like the psychology major above, was simply not corrected by an admissions person who, let's face it, knows jack about career planning for specific majors.

 

I observed the same through our community college. Early on, when I had the ability to advise, I didn't know what I didn't know- but later, when I was only an adjunct, I found this forum (and InstantCert) and began working on my bachelor's. As I became educated, I realized that the degree program I helped start wasn't a transfer degree. Not only did I not know that, but the students didn't either. It wasn't uncommon for students to tell me that their long term plans included more education (home ec teacher, restaurant management, hotel/hospitality, etc.) with the expectation that they'd get something from this (AAS) degree. The degree was (is) a THREE year apprenticeship that results in an AAS consisting of 74 credits. A grand total of SIX credits are gen ed (transfer).

So, I can tell you that in this case, no one misguided students- and in my specific case, I was completely ignorant -as the program's student advisor. The bottom line is that you HAVE to advocate for yourself, you HAVE to ask questions, you HAVE to talk to more than one school, and you HAVE to talk to people doing the job you hope to earn. It took me years to learn the nuances of how our student's credits would/wouldn't transfer. And, since I'm no longer running a program, I'm just talking to myself.

 

As I said, they took already misinformed students and gave them more misinformation. Many CJ students already have a misconception of what CJ degree programs entail (I did find this to be less of a problem at the state university). The predatory career school I taught at (which is now shut down) had admissions reps who would say anything to meet their numbers. When dozens of students entering at different times all repeat similar stories about what admissions reps told them, then the allegations are likely true. The finance and accounting offices were crooked, which led to the school being disqualified for financial aid. So, it's not hard to believe that admissions was also crooked.

 

We always listen to you, Jennifer! :wink:

I've lost count of how many students I've had (profit, non-profit, private, public) who think that a CJ degree is their instant ticket to a detective's job, or even more unrealistically, criminal profiling and/or CSI-type stuff.

I can literally see the disappointment spread across their faces when I explain that you first have to be hired as a police officer and spend several years shagging calls in a black & white before you can even think about getting a specialized position.

 

I guess I'm just somewhat skeptical of the whole "Grr....for-profit schools mislead people to make their numbers" argument when the same thing seems to happen elsewhere.

Someone is telling the incoming CJ Freshman class at many small non-profit schools that this degree is a one-way ticket to the FBI. I hear people saying it all the time. I hear the parents of students repeating it. Go to no-name university, get degree in CJ, yadda yadda yadda, welcome to the FBI.

As I've never applied to the FBI I'm not going to claim to be a recruitment expert there. But their public facing recruitment material tells me that, were my kids interested in that career path, they'd likely have more success getting in with a degree in accounting than CJ.

Many of these small non-profit colleges are in the same boat as for-profit schools. They don't have massive endowments to rely on for investment income. They rely very heavily on tuition dollars. They are trying to make numbers also.

But, hey, there are definitely some bad players out there. I know American InterContinental was downright aggressive with me when I called them a few years before they were put on probation. Incessant calling, condescension and basically trying to convince me I was a POS if I didn't sign their papers immediately.

 

The FBI has different hiring tracks, depending on the needs of the agency. All of them require a 4-year Bachelor's degree at minimum, the General Track allows for any major at all, including CJ, there is also a Language Track, an Accounting Track, and a Law Track, all self-explanatory.

Usually, you only see the General Track open up when there is a shortage of agents and a need to hire more quickly, such as after 9/11. Interestingly, any degree accredited by an agency approved by the US DoE is acceptable, so a DETC degree would work.