For-Profit Colleges Continue to Harm Poor Students

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by sanantone, Jul 12, 2021.

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  1. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    CSWE has a list of accredited online programs. Given the expense of Walden and the relatively low pay in the social work field, there are multiple better options.

    I wouldn't recommend getting a degree in intelligence studies. It's not needed, and there are more desirable degrees for this career. I got a job offer years ago with my security studies degree. They're moreso looking for knowledge of specific cultures, languages, or science and computer skills. Intelligence skills are taught in training. But, if you really want to get a degree in intelligence, there are multiple online options now. I don't think APUS is all that bad, though. It was just cheaper for me to go to a public university in my state that had an online program.
     
  2. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    By what measure? Or is this just an unsupported opinion?
     
  3. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    One good thing about Capella and Walden is that their 3-year student loan default rates are low. However, 1 in 10 doctorates awarded to African Americans come from Walden, and the average debt is $131,000. That's four times the amount of debt doctoral students take on at Howard University, which awards the second highest number of doctorates to African Americans. Most of the doctorates Walden awards are in the lower paying fields of mental health and education.

    One of the reasons why debt gets so high at Walden and Capella is because of delays in degree completion that students have no control over. Because of high instructor turnover, students are often stalled and sometimes have to start over.

    Every time I hear discussions about how Black women are saddled with the most debt, I feel like shouting from the rooftops, "Stop going to schools like Walden!"
     
  4. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    By the way, I love this college scorecard website. Instead of just having the 3-year student loan default rate, you get to see who is in forbearance and not making progress on paying their student loans two years after entering repayment. It gives a fuller picture of which students are struggling to repay their loans.

    https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
     
  5. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    This lawsuit is still proceeding (I assume) over this issue of lengthy doctoral completion times. They claim a student can complete it in 3 years while internal data shows the typical student is really taking 75 months (6.25 years), at $1000 a month. https://www.twincities.com/2019/05/08/judge-makes-room-for-class-action-lawsuit-accusing-capella-university-of-lying-to-students/

    Walden had a similar lawsuit but I think it was dismissed over the exact wording of the recruiting material.
     
  6. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Correction: Walden now awards four times as many doctorates to African Americans as Howard does. The gap increases every year.

    https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21308/data-tables
     
  7. not4profit

    not4profit Active Member

    Oh no! That is terrible! Lol. Stop giving people opportunities and opening access to education for minorities!
     
  8. not4profit

    not4profit Active Member

    The issue is not the degree timeframe. The issue is whether students were sold a bill of goods regarding time to completion. The problem is on the front end. Public schools have the same attrition and challenges in doctoral programs. Half the students wash out or take years and eventually time out. That is the nature of doctoral studies. The difference is that public schools often do not bend over backwards and promise the world to recruit students who will have to do some major growth just to survive the program. When you start with lower entry standards but hold the standard doctoral exit standards you are bound to see problems with non completion. If for profits see anywhere near the successes of other schools it should be considered a major win because students start from further behind.
     
  9. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    If you tell students they can finish in 3 years and literally none of them do, then the issue is the degree timeframe.

    [Edit: Actually, it's more than can. They said the typical learner would finish in 3 years. But never admitted a typical learner, out of thousands of candidates, apparently.]

    The other issue, as was noted, is that Walden, Capella and NCU have a history of changing committee members and advisors throughout a student's program which can interrupt or even destroy their progress. Those specific complaints are rare from other doctoral-granting schools (even Cumberlands and Liberty on the board.)
     
  10. not4profit

    not4profit Active Member

    Negative. The problem is what they were told on the front end. You are not going to squish the average doctoral program into a 3 year timeframe for the average person. That is unrealistic for the average person and even more unrealistic for students who are way less prepared from the start of the program. So the issue is that they were told unrealistic stuff at the start.

    I definitely agree turnover slows things down when schools are overly reliant on adjuncts. However, I have worked for two of the three programs you mentioned and, in my experience, the problem is usually (not always) that the learner was not adjusting to doctoral level work (and faculty turnover was like 20% of the problem). So you would need to have the context of each situation before we could put a bunch of weight behind the complaints you mention.
     
  11. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    For some time they only offered two. They offer three now after adding the Vet program I believe about two years ago.

    That's a tough one. I think the measure as-is mostly fits well for schools that don't have an uncommonly high enrollment number and/or follow a traditional timetable to graduation, many still do, and for generations since the majority of schools did there was no need to re-examine the application of the measure as it did a well-enough job of corresponding with it. The juxtaposition to that sits with many "non-traditional" programs both RA-non-profit (WGU for example: about 120,000 enrollments, low admission standards, low graduation rate) and NA-for-profit (Penn Foster for example, over 50,000 enrollments, low admission standards, low graduation rate*).

    *One could argue that PFC's independent study method is traditional given how long they've been doing it, but for the sake of the topic and taking into account that the online component is still very new by comparison to the historical methods of education that predate it, I think the designation is acceptable for the example.
     
  12. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    True. And I've always been a fan of community colleges for those reasons exactly, especially when the costs are reasonable. Overall, I'm just a big fan of everyone having a shot to prove they belong, so my positions of support for schools that grant it is based around that. I only made that earlier point to show an example of a standard even though it is admittedly a very, very low one.
     
  13. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Complaining about not finishing a doctorate--which has a huge and open-ended commitment at the end--within a concrete period of time seems foolish. Unless:

    • You can demonstrate that applicants were clearly misled into thinking the time period was, indeed, concrete, or
    • You can demonstrate that the university purposely prevented students from graduating in order to collect more tuition, or
    • You can demonstrate that the university was so incredibly inept that it could not process students in a timely fashion and, thus, caused them to pay more tuition.
    That's a pretty tall order. I think it is easy--and lazy--to assume any of these. It's the equivalent of thinking your cab driver is purposely taking the long way. They normally don't. It would be foolish for a university--for profit or not--to do any of these things; a small-time grift on an otherwise multi-million-dollar operation. It doesn't make sense, so the argument that it's happening ought to be pretty solid.
     
  14. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    We'll see what kind of evidence the plaintiffs present in the Capella lawsuit.

    I have a question. Why is it that colleges similar to Capella don't have an 11% undergraduate graduation rate? I looked at several of the more well-known for profit, not-for-profit, and public schools that are open admission and largely online, and Capella had the lowest graduation rate. In comparison, TESU's graduation rate is 44%, Excelsior is 46%, WGU is 43%, Liberty is 40%, and SNHU is 51%. Colorado Technical University, APUS, and Walden have graduation rates of 25%, 22% and 21%, respectively. Ashford University, which just very recently became a public school, has a graduation rate of 25%. These are all 8-year graduation rates provided by the Department of Education.

    https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
     

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