Graduates of For-Profit Schools Earn Less...

than they did before they went to the school?

As expected the study focused on associate and certificate level study.

 

If you want to study a certain type of business, then it is reasonable to study the sector as a whole and generalize. The point of studies like this is not to look at every individual college and inform people of which ones are good and which ones are bad. They are making a comparison of two types of colleges that do tend to have inherent differences in how they operate. If there is huge variation between a large number of colleges, then the results of the statistical analysis wouldn't allow for a generalization because there would be no correlation. All of this is assuming that the researchers did do proper, statistical analysis. All I want to know is if they controlled for any demographic differences.

Never mind. The abstract says that they did compare comparable students. The abstract also says that they were able to rule out the possibility that a few low-performing institutions affected the average.

 

Certificate and associate programs at for-profit schools have shown themselves to be a crappy proposition, in general. One can quibble over the quality of the education versus the lower tier private non-profit schools. I can't find the article now but that professor in Albany who researches the for/non profit and accreditation issues once said that when you hit the bachelors and masters programs you start seeing that the employment numbers start looking more like no -profit and public universities.

Certificates and associate degree programs tend to attract low income earners. If you are making minimum wage and want a small leg up a one to 18 month program is mighty tempting. The problem is that if you have no skills and your work history is less than stellar then a certificate or associate's degree is likely not going to supercharge your life. If you go to a CC it might, at the very least, be cheap. I recall seeing that Everest's pharmacy technician program cost a total of $16k before financial aid. For a job that doesn't require a certificate to get hired and pays around $12/hr (in this area) that's a lot of money to spend. I've encountered more than a handful of people who enroll in these programs hoping to make more money only to find that, even if they can get hired in those fields, the local starting pay is not very much higher than what they were earning before.

A bachelor's, on the other hand, opens up a whole new class of jobs for many students.myou might be able to get a job in sales without a degree but the higher paying sales jobs typically require one. And many of the people seeking masters degrees through DL already have good jobs they are just looking to "check the box" for career advancement.

So while part of me sees this as a hit piece the other part of me acknowledges that certificates and associates degrees from for-profits tend to be as bad as they say. That's why we are seeing CEC divesting many of the "career school" type holdings. They are unlikely to pass muster under the new rules. But an unskilled worker with an overpriced Medical Assistant certificate is in a very different place than a seasoned registered nurse who earns an MSN from UPhoenix.