NCLC trashes for profit education (centers on UOP)

I figured I would post this as it was brought to our attention as a company today, and I figure it wouls spark some good debate/discussion.

As you all know, I work for UOP, and have been a critic of them in the past, but this is ridiculous and unresearched. Especially the part that states the 7% completion rate, they only looked at ICS (introductory course sequence) students, which are mostly college-age students w/ no credits, most of them cannot hack (or do not want to) the group work, and are not ready for accelerated classes.

http://www.consumerlaw.org/news/ProprietarySchoolsPress.pdf

Here is an article from the Chronicle

Chronicle of Higher Education
June 30, 2005

For-Profit Colleges Puff Up Their Job-Placement Rates, Consumer Group Says, but Companies Dispute Its Findings
By ERIC WILLS
Many for-profit colleges do not make their students' job-placement or program-completion rates readily available, or give out numbers for those rates that are inflated, according to a report released on Wednesday by the National Consumer Law Center.
Nancy Broff, general counsel for the Career College Association, which represents many companies in the for-profit higher-education sector, disputed those findings. She said the numbers reported by for-profit colleges are not necessarily any different from those reported by public institutions.
"Every criticism they make applies equally to all sectors" of higher education, she said. "It is misleading to put out a report like this that focuses solely on the for-profit sector."
The report, "Making the Numbers Count: Why Proprietary-School Performance Data Doesn't Add Up and What Can Be Done About It," is based in part on an investigation in which an employee of the nonprofit law center posed as a prospective student and visited five for-profit colleges. At each institution, the employee asked for program-completion and job-placement rates during an interview with an admissions counselor.
The report says that the counselors "by and large" evaded questions about completion rates, and that job-placement rates were "equally difficult to obtain."
The employee visited a Boston-area campus of five institutions: the University of Phoenix, which is owned by the Apollo Group; ITT Technical Institute, run by ITT Educational Services Inc.; Katharine Gibbs College, run by the Career Education Corporation; the New England Institute of Art, owned by the Education Management Corporation; and the Bryman Institute, operated by Corinthian Colleges Inc. The companies that run the five institutions make up about 74 percent of the industry, the report says.
Ms. Broff said that because there is no federally required methodology for reporting job-placement rates, it can be difficult to come up with a way to compute such numbers. Other factors complicate the reporting of job-placement numbers, she said. She noted, for example, that many students are employed when they enroll at for-profit colleges. The admissions counselors provided as much information as they could, given the data they had, she said.
The law center's report says that the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics does not require any type of institution to report job-placement rates. Moreover, of the licensing agencies in 10 states that the center reviewed for the report, only 8 required colleges to report annual job-placement data, and none published that information anywhere.
Accreditation agencies that the law center reviewed, chosen because they accredit the five companies that were the focus of the report, also did not publish such data and relied on the institutions to do so.
"Enforcement by states, the federal government, and accreditation agencies is dismal," the report says of the completion and placement rates.
The report's authors also found that, based on 2002 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Apollo Group had a graduation rate from four-year programs of only 7 percent at the 14 institutions that submitted data. That rate, the report says, is based on the number of students who enrolled in 1997, minus the number who left for "acceptable reasons" like military or Peace Corps service, divided by the number who completed within five years.
The other four companies that the center studied had completion rates for their four-year programs ranging from 31 percent to 59 percent, according to the report.
Ms. Broff said that many Apollo campuses are less than six years old and therefore do not yet report placement data. Depending on how the law center computed the numbers, she said, the campuses' graduation rates may appear much worse than they are. Moreover, she said, the rates of all of the institutions that are part of the five companies are not much different from some colleges in Massachusetts, for example. "We don't stack up badly," she said.

 

I have always said that the line between profit and non-profit education is pretty thin. Schools like Harvard have GIGANTIC endowments and I would say they are a very rich institution. I think they are non-profit only because the law allows them to designate as such. Some non-profits do better than others, though. When my wife's Grandfather passed away, he left a farm to Brigham Young University. They eventally sold it for quite a handsome sum. They are non-profit, though.

I have a lawyer friend. He has done very well taking companies and institutions from the profit based model to the non-profit based model. Same company...just different laws and reporting requirements around it. Once they go non-profit the owners make out bigger than before. It's one of the reasons they go non-profit. It's why my friend is doing a wonderful business.

 

The vast majority of UoP students are already employed full-time.

 

and I figure it wouls spark some good debate/discussion.

"would"

 

Lies, Lies, & Statistics

My impression of the for-profits (and not-for-profits such as Touro) students are that the majority are nontraditional types who are wage earners first and students second. Because of this, they are going to take longer to complete 120+ credits for a bachelors degree then somebody that goes the traditional route. Due to the nontraditional status of the students, it is impossible to compare completion percentages between these schools and those that cater to the traditional, 18-22 year old, full time student.

Statistics are easily twisted and misrepresented.

 

UoP doesn't operate a placement or career function.

I find it odd that the author focused on this element, since traditional universities are not held to any particular standard in this area.

Can you imagine if a university was criticized for not placing all of its literature graduates in lit-related jobs? Ka-boom!

 

If you saw PBS' 'Declining by Degrees' the other night, you'll find great evidence for this. Unless the school is one of a handful of massively endowed institutions, they are all now being driven by what is essentially a profit mode (based upon tuition revenues, along with in a very limited number of cases sports revenues).

A big part of this, according to the show, is a significant change in the social contract regarding higher education, from the idea that an educated population is a general social good (and therefore public funds are justified in supporting it) to a strictly private good (since higher ed results in increased income). With this change, state gov's have cut subsidies and the fed gov has drastically scaled back grants in favor of loans. The net result for schools is constant pressure to grow programs and reduce attrition of students.

Regards,
GME

 

Lies, Lies, & Statistics

Say it isn't so!

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Mark Twain

 

This is a bit of snobbery. The for-profits are obviously tapping a need, and people are willing to pay for it. Especially in the DL realm.

FWIW, one of the schools I went to was the University of Miami at ~19k/year, and it would be hard to distinguish that school from a profit-making enterprise. Although their bi-weekly alumni fundraising letters would make it sound like the place is falling apart for lack of funds.

 

http://www.decliningbydegrees.org/

http://www.decliningbydegrees.org/

In case anyone is interested in the topic anymore here.

Bing

 

I would go so far as to say it was impossible to tell U of M from a profit making school, because it is:
http://www.flbog.org/univ_info/icuflist.asp

 

Who actually usually PAYS for a UoP degree? The student or his employer? The reason I ask is, UoP is SOOOO expensive that it really doesn't make sense (to me, anyway) to consider going there is there is any state school alternative. A UoP M.B.A. degree isn't sufficiently prestigeous to justify the price. UoP isn't Stanford or Wharton nor would UoP ever claim to be in that league.