PBS Frontline Story on For Profits-Showed on 3/1/11

Hi All,

Caught most of a Frontline review of For-Profits last night. UofP was obviously the main example but Grand Canyon, Everest and others were discussed.
Any reactions? Thought it was fairly well handled.

 

Wow... another one. I remember when College, Inc came out last year and caused quite a stir. I enjoyed it... are we able to watch the 3/1/11 issue online?

 

It does not appear to be posted online yet.

 

According to tvguide.com, it was a repeat of College, Inc.

 

According to the PBS website for my area it was, indeed, a repeat of College, Inc. I'll say what I said when it first came out. If College, Inc. was a research project, I would have given it about a C-. It provided the illusion of balance, but it only focused upon a very narrow sector of for-profit education. It would have been akin to profiling a few local state universities and extrapolating that to 3,000+ very diverse non profit colleges and universities.

 

Since when does the news have anything to do with balance? :worried:

 

I had never seen this was looking quite forward to it. Now that I have seen it I am disappointed. This was hardly investigative journalism. It was okay at best but you could tell they where simply trying to sway the public one way and paint the for profits as evil capitalist enterprises. I would of liked to have seen some success stories as well as I know there is some. It also would of been interesting if they looked more into community colleges to see how they fared against the for profits as they often serve a similar marker. I am thoroughly against for profit for myself as the tuition is quite frankly a rip off but if it works for someone then good for them.

 

PBS leans left for sure.

 

I know I'm going to upset several people here, but it has to said, trying to spin a for-profit is like putting sugar on sh@t. If a colleges acceptance rate is 90%, but their graduation rate is 6%, that should tell you something. Granted Frontline is very left; however, they shed light on a real issue no mater what side of the fence your on.

My question is this: Why isn't College, Inc a sticky??? For all the crap that is, I'm surprised that College, Inc is not . . .

Mods, what do you think??

 

So, it is fair to lump all for-profits in one bucket? What is the local state school's accpetance / graduation rate?

 

AP: This research has been done. It can be found here

In my city, there is a large state university, two private non-profit universities, and one family-owned private sector (for-profit) university that is not a publicly traded corporation like Phoenix or Kaplan. Regarding the tuition "rip-off" The comparison of undergraduate tution between our local for-profit and non-profits goes like this.

• State university is $15 per unit less than the for-profit
• Private non-profit #1 is $209 MORE per unit than the for-profit
• Private non-profit #2 is $415 MORE per unit than the for-profit

The list of the 100 most expensive universities in the country includes at least one public university but includes no for-profit universities.

 

AP: Two problems here: 1) There are over 3,000 colleges in that sector and a 6% graduation rate is certainly not typical. 2) The IPEDS data for 4- and 6-year graduation rates only count students with no prior college experience who start with a given school and attend nowhere else. For most for-profits, the large majority of their students have some previous higher ed experience, so these graduation rates only capture a fraction of the students in a school--hardly a decent data set.

I am not a Mod, but my feeling is that we have too many stickies already. If we keep it up, we'll have to go to page two to see any current threads.

 

I do second this statement. It seems to me that the search function exists for a good reason and a single sticky in all caps that advises how to use the search function to find specific topics OR a single sticky with persistent links to all the valued stickies would be very easy to accomplish.

Create one thread that says "Check here for your question first" put hard links to all the stickies in the first post, lock it and then release all the sticky threads to the wind and you'll have a more functional front page.

 

It may not be completely fair, but if the shoe fits . . . I'm sure there are a many out there that are reputable, but the for-profit industry as a whole have more issues than Time Magazine.

There was a saying that goes like this, "There are two ways to earn a degree, you can earn one or buy one."

Public or Private colleges/ universities are the only way to go IMO; but again, that is just my opinion. At least on the community college level, a student can try different subjects, pass some -- fail some, and find out what their good at and what they enjoy doing without having to take out student loans and rack up huge amounts of debt. Granted community college's graduation rates are inherently lower, but you cannot there graduation rates with for-profit's who rape their students for tuition. Comparing the two is ridiculous.

Anthony's link is very interesting, thank you for contributing, that was a good read.

 

You're spot-on with that observation.

 

I'm probably in the minority, but I like seeing for-profit schools in the mix of educational options (K-12 as well as postsecondary). Let's not kid ourselves, being nonprofit sounds warm and fuzzy, but to assume that the business models are all that different isn't a good understanding of the industry. The difference is what you call the dollar and what column you put it in.
Some of the revenue GIANTS in this country with million dollar CEOs are nonprofits. The decision (at start-up) about whether to be nonprofit or not can simply be about resources, management team, access to money, etc. At the end of the day- everyone has a product to sell and everyone wants the same customer.