Why Students Choose For-Profits

the answer might surprise you

Study examines why students choose for-profit education | Education Dive

 

None of these answers surprise me because of this:

In other words, a lot of students at for-profit schools don't really have anyone to talk to them about college and often don't know where to begin when researching colleges. So, why they choose to attend the colleges they attend is based on perception. Let's take convenience, for example. I've heard from a lot of people that they chose a for-profit college for convenience, and that's one of the reasons found in the study. Even in this day and age with thousands of online degree programs at non-profit colleges, I still hear people say that they had to attend a for-profit because they needed an online program. They were simply unaware that there are dozens of colleges within their own state that offer online programs. So, traditional colleges should work on their outreach strategy, but it's mostly a matter of informing people that flexible options are available. Otherwise, you're going to continue to have a large number of low-income students who will get all their information from non-traditional colleges advertising on TV, banner ads, and job fairs.

 

Yeah, I guess that's why advertising works.

 

In my experience, a lot of students chose for profit because time too. Walden for example, offers 5 credit courses that run every 6 weeks. A typical student, can complete about 40 credits per year on part time basis and a complete degree depending on how many credits they can transfer in about 2 to 3 years part time while they work full time in a company.
Most traditional schools require 4 years full time attendance, this is something that adults cannot afford.
Walden and Devry typical student is in his or her late 30s or mid 40s, when you are that age even two years make a lot of difference so you are willing to pay double if you can finish in half the time.
I used to teach mainly IT, in the IT field the reputation of the school is almost irrelevant as long as the school is RA. Walden, Devry or other for profit normally works well for IT professionals that rely more on work experience in their resumes.
In few words, you pay for a faster degree that does not necessarily means lower quality.

 

This is another example of people's perceptions being wrong.

Walden is on the quarter hour system, so 40 credits in one year is not impressive at all. Their bachelor's degree programs are around 180 quarter hours. The equivalent of 40 quarter hours is 26.67 semester hours. It's pretty normal for students to complete 30 semester hours at a traditional school just by attending the fall and spring semesters.

Accelerated courses are really just condensed courses. Normally, when students take accelerated courses, they take less courses at a time. If you can complete a full-time course load per year by only putting in part-time hours, then the coursework must be extremely easy. A lot of traditional schools offer 8-week courses now, but it really makes no difference whether you take two courses per eight weeks or four courses per 16 weeks. Usually, you can take a max of 18 credits per semester at traditional schools before having to ask for permission to take more. In the summer, you can take 6-9 credits.

If you look at Devry's graduation rates, well under 50% of their students graduate in 150% of normal time (6 years for a bachelor's program) at most of their campuses. At a lot of their campuses, around a third or less finish in 150% of normal time. So, the majority of their students are not accelerating their degrees. I don't know what the numbers are for their online programs, but I doubt they're much better.
http://www.devry.edu/d/graduation-rates.pdf

Walden University has a 33% retention rate, so only a third of their students stay pass the freshman year. Two-thirds of their students do not graduate in 150% of expected time.
http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/walden-university/academic-life/graduation-and-retention/

 

Talk to who? A guidance counselor? Your typical high school guidance counselor either operates off of college rankings (provided by for-profit companies) or, much sketchier, because they are wined and dined by admissions representatives, typically from local colleges desperate to boost their admissions.

I used to recruit at Marywood University. I was often baffled by how this tiny little Catholic college in Scranton could attract such a sizable international population. Then, of course, I learned that they employed people full time to fly overseas, set up shop at schools and tell the young adults of South Korea how Marywood University is the next best thing to Harvard.

Part of it is that people don't know that non-profit schools do online learning. Then again, as we discussed previously, many people think SNHU is for-profit. It all comes down to a lack of information on the part of the student. Many people don't know the actual difference between for and non-profit, many people don't understand accreditation either. I'd even venture to guess that your typical guidance counselor doesn't know jack about accreditation.

I guess I just feel that most students, traditional or otherwise, are making decisions based on perception rather than objective research. Fact is that a bachelor's in business admin from Marywood isn't going to carry more weight than one from TESC outside of the area (especially South Korea).

Also while it is a reasonable point that for-profits get their students through advertising the fact is that non-profits and public universities have been advertising since they opened. Maybe they didn't set up at job fairs. They set up in high school gyms for "college fairs" to tell young minds how their unheard of college will accelerate their lives. They disn't advertise on TV. Then again, lawyers and doctors didn't used to do that either. And now all of those things that You just identified as being the domain of for-profit schools are being adopted by non-profit and public schools as well. Fill out an info form for Northern Arizona, if you get bored, and see if it's coming from the Ivy League playbook or straight out of UPhoenix's operations manual.

 

fftopic: My high school guidance counselor didn't know anything about anything. I think she must have been giving kickbacks to the boss in order to keep her job.

 

My high school guidance counselor was trying to get me enrolled into Juilliard as a Pianist, nevermind that I couldn't play the piano and was already on a Computer Science track and taking a college Tech Diploma program. The counselor just wasn't listening or paying attention.

Years later, I came to know what a HS Guidance Counselor made in my area, and well, I came away understanding why the quality of guidance I was receiving was so poor. At that pay grade there is no way you'll attract strong talent :-(

 

Mine caused a minor scandal when it was discovered that he was accepting finders' fees for driving students to a local beauty school and the National Guard. He wasn't fired and other local guidance counselor's publicly rallied to his defense saying that accepting cash was "bad form" but that guidance counselors accepting dinners, lunches and non-cash gifts from admissions counselors was "standard practice" and helped them stay current with admissions standards.

Of course, he didn't send everyone to business school and the NG. Just the poor students that the local universities didn't care about.

My mother tells me that her guidance counselor gave her a list of seven jobs and proclaimed those to be the only career paths in the world which just so happened to align with the meager offerings of the local community college.

As a traditional student I couldn't even rely on parental advice because both of my parents were non-traditional students. So I relied, often to my detriment, on the advice of incredibly biased admissions/guidance counselors not realizing that their primary job was to make a sale.

 

When I was at the University of Phoenix, our expenditures for academics was capped at 8% of gross revenues. The largest staff on our campus--and typical across the country--was the admissions staff. They took care of the students from soup to nuts, and stayed with them through their first 5 classes--the break-even point for enrollments.

For-profit schools focus on providing an all-in-one service for potential students who don't know what they're doing, don't know how to do it, and don't know all of the places they can go. All they have to do is decide. Everest College had an entire campaign about this. Their messages was to get off the couch and make the call; they'd do everything else. Of course, this information imbalance--odd in the internet age but typical of that economic class--set up the conditions for the abuse we've seen.

So why don't not-for-profits--particularly public schools--do this? Because it's expensive and there's no profit motive to compel them to do it. Instead, they shift a lot of the costs involved back to the applicant by creating a do-it-yourself entry process. Not entirely, of course, but the difference is stark.

Think of a car dealership. You don't have to understand cars. You don't have to understand the competition. You don't even have to understand financing a car. All you have to do is show up, say "yes," and be credit-worthy enough--which ain't hard if you're willing to accept a high interest rate. Of course, this information imbalance was used for a long time--before CarMax and the internet came along--to screw customers. Who has a worse reputation than car dealers? (Particularly used car dealers!)

If consumers had a more level playing field when it came to higher education, perhaps they wouldn't be so ripe for abuse. But even if the information is there, they need to know that it is to be used. It took a long time for consumers to catch up (mostly) to car dealers. They're still not there when it comes to going back to school.

 

For the most part. However, the DBA and the EdD at Walden are on the semester hour system.

 

Same here. My high school guidance counselor did nothing. In fact, I am not sure what job he actually did. He did help coach the football team, and if you were not on the football team you were SOL! I remember going in to his office to talk about colleges ( I was #3 in my class and my teachers encouraged me to go to college. My parents didn't know the first thing about school. My mother never made it past 6th grade. My father never went straight to the navy after high school. My father was also a paranoid weirdo who didn't want to fill out my fafsa form because he thought it was a big government conspiracy. So I went to my guidance counselor in hopes he could perhaps tell my father filling out the fafsa was necessary. All he did was shove an advertisement about a local college fair and told me to bring my father. (My father didn't end up going.) I ended up going into the Army instead...where I first heard about Excelsior.

I am enrolled with SNHU for my masters. I know around these parts and the other board people don't think too highly of SNHU. But SNHU's (non-profit but definately using for profit tactics) marketing worked on me. Or maybe it's the school colors being enticing and calming..

 

I don't recall my high school guidance counselors ever counseling anyone for anything. They were there, but I never really knew what they did.

 

Since I said these students are coming from families where no one went to college, I thought it was obvious that they had no family members to talk to. Hardly anyone is going to know about accreditation, but students from economically disadvantaged families often need help with the most basic things. I came from a home where no one knew anything about FAFSA, SAT/ACT, placement exams, or filling out college applications. As someone who works in a correctional facility, I've heard from many clients that they had no idea what FAFSA was until now.

The counselors at my high school had so much on their plate that they weren't going to seek out each student to give them a bunch of information, but they were there if you had questions. Unfortunately, I didn't take advantage of being able to ask my counselor questions about application fee waivers and financial aid. My counselor told me about a fee waiver for the SAT, but I didn't ask her about financial aid outside of a brochure of scholarships to apply for. When I didn't get those scholarships, I didn't know how I would pay for school. So, a year after graduating from high school, I filled out an online form and was contacted by University of Phoenix. They made the whole process simple by practically doing everything for the student. I have since learned the hard way that it is better to research things and learn how to do stuff on my own. It would have saved me a lot of money if I had done that years earlier.

When I taught at a for-profit, almost none of my students knew that the local community colleges were only about $2,000-$2,500 per year. They didn't know that the $28,000 they were paying for an associate's degree from an NA school was high. They had no point of reference. If they had family members who at least attended some of the local state universities, maybe someone would have told them that they were paying too much.

 

All very good points. The 1st generation college students often has little frame of reference. A non-profit that helps these students sounds like it would be useful. Do you know of any?

 

Why do first generation college students choose for-profit schools? Maybe from lack of knowledge.

 

So your contention is that if the parents went to college that they are knowledgeable about accreditation and financial aid? Granted, I'm sure you have a better shot of finding that skillset in such an environment. But I think it is a bit naive to think that the typical parent, even if they are incredibly well educated, understand what exactly accreditation is. If the students of college educated parents all went out and utilized their parents as objective sources of information we would probably have fewer legacy families than we do. Dad went to XYZ state so Junior goes to XYZ state. Why? Maybe because Dad stays connected through alumni groups and athletics. Or maybe because Dad is a very successful person and Junior figures that he can do the same with the same degree.

All of that is great. It's perfectly fine. But let's not mistake mimicry for making independent decisions based upon thoughtful research.

I'm just curious how you managed that with UPhoenix. I contacted them in 2001, with two years of college under my belt, to explore the possibility of completing my Bachelor's through them and was told that you had to be over 21 or had to have at least 60 credits for admission. Maybe you embarked on this journey well after that. But for at least the first year or so I was in the Navy it was well known that the bulk of my freshly minted shipmates didn't qualify to enroll at Phoenix because of the age/credit requirement. Some went the NA route. Some went with UMUC.

You have people racking up six figure student loan debt to earn degrees from tiny, unheard of non-profit schools. Degrees that they could absolutely receive for a fraction of the cost if they went to a community college and transferred or attended a state school. Who is protecting them from themselves?

 

This is not what I said at all in regards to accreditation. Actually, I said the opposite. I suggest that you reread my post. But, if you filled out the FAFSA, then you know it exists. A lot of young people from poor families do not know that Pell Grants and loans from the federal government exist and don't know how to go about getting financial aid.

Since you misunderstood my post, all of this is irrelevant.

University of Phoenix enrolled me into Western International University.

The article posted in this thread is about a study on why students choose for-profit colleges, most of which are economically disadvantaged, not why middle class and upper class students choose no-name, liberal arts colleges.

 

No need to apologize for SNHU, they may engage in crass and nonstop advertising, and that understandably puts some people off, but according to a decades-long friend whom I trust, who received his undergrad in electrical engineering from a top 20-ish university and received his MBA from SNHU--not because he fell for a hard sell, but because he's from New Hampshire and they had the most convenient options close to him (he also considered Dartmouth-Tuck, but they were too expensive), the masters program he matriculated at was excellent.

 

The SNHU ads I see on TV are not too bad in terms of their content. They are fairly frequent. I've also started seeing ads for ASU and these are a little pushier, a harder selling style.