Worst title ever. Shame on you, Johns Hopkins University Press

Bah. New book out this year called "Diploma Mills," subtitled "How For-Profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream."

It has nothing whatsoever to do with diploma mills, as any regular on this forum understands and uses the term. It is about regionally-accredited schools that are privately owned. The author obviously does not like them, He certainly is entitled to his opinions, although I suspect he is on rather thin libel ice with schools like Capella, Phoenix, Strayer, etc. but the title is so utterly misleading. Bah, once again.

 

A link to the book:

https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/diploma-mills

And on Amazon:

http://amzn.to/2bdMVxO

 

Does anyone know if any of the for-profits mentioned by name? Amazon doesn't have a preview online, and I won't spend the $29.95 to find out.

 

Neither will I. I'm making my semi-annual pilgrimage to Powells in Portland, Oregon this week, one of the world's great bookstores, and if they have it, I'll take notes.

 

The author is quoted as saying, "For-profit education is a $35 billion cesspool of fraud."

 

I think I found the author. Double Harvard graduate, why does that not surprise me?

A.J. Angulo

 

Academic freedom had a bit of a different flavor before the proliferation of the Internet. A professor saying stuff on a college campus or in his relatively obscure book could only travel so far and generally even then only within certain circles in many circumstances.

Now, our professors use misleading clickbait-style titles to grab our attention. They aren't selling books to students of a particular discipline, they are selling something they hope to be a bestseller using their title and position to lend authority to many of their claims.

Academic freedom is not a license for libel. But I suspect that if a named college sued this guy, even if completely justified, the outcry would be how those schools oppose academic freedom and we're trying to censor him. You know, just like when some idiot gets fired for saying something racist on the Internet and people think that is a violation of his freedom of speech.

 

There are now a great many long and thoughtful reviews on Amazon, including an excellent one, I think, from Rich Douglas:
http://tinyurl.com/gl8ae33

 

Well folks, I hope we all enjoyed the meaning of the word "diploma mill" when it actually meant something. Now diploma mill seems to mean "any school we don't like." People use it to describe regionally accredited schools. I've heard people use it to describe both Excelsior and TESC(U). It makes us mad because we base our usage of the term on the work of people who post on this very board.

But now others are just using it haphazardly. And the meaning is changing through common usage. What's even sadder is that people read books like this, with sensationalist titles such as that, and say "Yeah!" Because it's fun to hate something. It's fun to demonize for-profit education or online education or foreign education or whatever education it is that an individual doesn't have. Makes one feel better about all of the woes that have befallen them to think how they are still better off than some schmuck with a degree from Capella.

 

i hate to be critical of for-profit education, but it has lost its way. For-profit reminds me of the sub-prime mortgage. Maybe subprime education is a better description - expensive education, easy access, low quality, high default rate.

 

I was for for-profit education until I was a against it. For a while, for-profit seems to be a great idea until it wasn't. However,mI think I am more disappointed with for-profit than against for- profit education.