I searched to see if anyone had mentioned this: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/students-left-dark-college-deceptions/ Walden's parent company is trying to sell, and they're now being investigated by the DOJ for misleading students about the price, length to complete, and availability of clinical placements nursing students needed to graduate.
Walden's issues with length and continuity are well-noted. However: "Do for-profit colleges provide students the same level of transparency that they give their shareholders? Unfortunately, the answer is no." Oh, Yan Cao, give me a break. I could ask a counter-question like "Do non-profit colleges provide students the same level of transparency that they give their board members and high profile donors?" and the answer is 'no' in most cases because that's the way it is in business. This has nothing to do with tax status, but in her realm for-profit schools all operate the same, all several thousand of them. Her career has been based on attacks and hit-pieces against them, but usually about the same small handful of schools like DeVry which I knew before reading her article would be mentioned. I'm surprised she didn't find a way to cram in ITT and University of Phoenix, too. "While shareholders are often told when investigation of a for-profit school may result in a hit on their stocks’ value, the students who were misled are frequently kept in the dark—and additional prospective students may even be taken in by the same misleading claims as the investigation continues." "Roughly 89 percent of Walden’s revenue comes from student tuition and fees. For the past three years, 75 percent of Walden’s revenue has come from Department of Education backed grants and loans, with the average student carrying a debt load of over $10,000. With that level of investment, students function as Walden’s most prominent investors, and should be informed accordingly when the institution faces legal challenges." Yan Cao clearly does not understand the difference between a stakeholder and a shareholder and definitely not in the context she's applying her belief to. Or, she's trying to blur the line between the two to fit her agenda. Nevertheless, the amount of tuition money students generate for a school doesn't change that difference. That's not how it works. Also, the problem with her position is that she would never apply that expectation to non-profit schools, many of which have gone through countless legal challenges over the years for issues like racial discrimination, tuition scandals, admission scandals, sexual assault cover-ups, grading scandals, cheating scandals, hazing fiascos, and on and on. Sometimes the schools were in the right, sometimes they were in the wrong, but in pretty much each case those schools kept a low profile about the matters taking place until the investigation was complete and it can be said that most of it had to do with the fact that when those things happened it was already public knowledge anyway when the issue was serious enough. In reality, for Yan Cao and people of her ilk, nothing short of an admission of guilt before guilt has even been proven would be good enough when it comes to a for-profit school.
There are a goodly number of non-profit schools that subsist solely on federal dollars. The transparency at these private institutions is often nil. Those that claim a religious affiliation are even worse at letting outside eyes into their books. Students walking out with few opportunities and a mountain of debt is by no means a for-profit vs non-profit issue, no matter how much politicians try to beat that drum (or how much the lobbyists for private non-profit schools want to push the narrative to deflect attention from their own abysmal outcomes). As we speak, there is a graduate of a charming non-profit private college with a degree in humanities prepping up for an honest day's labor dispensing coffee. Go tell them that they should be fine since their school has a different corporate structure than these "evil" for-profits. Sadly, we have shown that this is how we're going to do it. When the Democrats are in the White House, the war on for-profits is on. When the Republicans are in the White House then shady accreditors run free and the heat dies down on for-profit schools. We're just going to do this back and forth thing until something gives.
Good points raised on the specific arguments raised about transparency and the use of dollars. This just happened to be the first article I came across that discussed the specific allegations against Walden. I've considered their PhD in the past but knowing that each month you're enrolled they get another $1,000 from you, and have no motivation to help you finish (often changing your Chair multiple times, not really allowing you to pick one but just assigning someone to you, regardless of their research focus), and the lawsuits that have resulted from claiming that the "average" learner can complete in 3 years when the "typical" learner will in fact complete it in 6-7 years. I was also almost enrolled in their MS in Data Science, because it lacked accreditation so courses were free until it got approved, which they were expecting to happen within the first 3 courses of the program, but may never. I decided against it, because even with 3 courses free out of 12, it was still going to be unreasonably expensive.
Clinical placements are tricky. For example, when I worked for a smaller, private liberal arts university, the nursing school had agreements with a few care homes and one hospital for the students to do clinicals. The nursing school tried to affiliate themselves with the larger hospital systems, but where denied, because the hospital had agreements with the local community colleges and the larger public universities. Where I currently work, our university is a large public university that is part of a university health system, so we have no issue placing nursing students. I can imagine that Walden has ran into similar issues as well, because some hospitals simply will not partner with a university for whatever reason.
I recall reading somewhere that some of the Caribbean medical schools pay U.S. based hospitals to place their folks for clinicals. It was being weaponized against them, as if to say "Look at how sleazy these schools are! They need to PAY hospitals to let their students work there!" I, however, take a different approach to all of this. Like it or not, education is a business no matter the profit structure of the school. Harvard solid "alumni status" as part of one of their non-degree executive leadership programs that ran six figures. Yeah, it's a business even if it doesn't pay out stock dividends. I see no reason why some of these things should not be business transactions. The idea that a hospital is sitting there thoughtfully examining the clinical placements from neighboring schools for nurses, PAs, medical students, respiratory therapists etc based on the merits of the program is idealistic hogwash. As long as these programs are accredited there is no obstacle save whatever political barriers exist to favor one school over the other. In the case of university healthcare systems, the system feeds itself. The hospital has a never ending supply of student nurses to work as free CNAs and the nursing program can guarantee a clinical placement and be incredibly selective of their students as they steadily raise tuition dollars knowing that people will pay whatever they ask. Besides, how do you say that Ross is sleazy for buying their way into New York Presbyterian without also saying New York Presbyterian is sleazy for taking the money? I worked with an engineer. He had a PhD from MIT. As you can imagine, this is an impressive credential for an engineer (or anyone, for that matter). But he was also very clear that he was extremely lucky that he had a good advisor who was heavily invested in him and his research and wanted him to succeed. His perception, which he said was shared among his former student colleagues, was that MIT was incredibly hit or miss as to whether they actually gave a damn about you and, by extension, if you had a shot of getting that PhD at all. But we, as a society, are comfortable with MIT treating students horribly because we like to think it is part of what makes the school special. This isn't mistreatment or bilking students out of money. It's MIT being "very rigorous" because they're "elite" and the students who washout must have just been not up to the task. People will twist themselves into pretzels to defend in the non-profit schools the same bad behavior they condemn in the for-profit schools. I'm no great lover of for-profit education. Neither, however, am I a major detractor. It's simple. If the requirements to "rein in" for-profits are so good and effective and necessary to prevent abuse then just apply those same standards to all universities; public, private, non and for-profit. Let's let the chips fall where they may. But when some charming little former all women school with leafy quads and small class sizes shows itself to have outcomes worse than Phoenix because they aren't cranking out MSNs and DNPs who continue on an upward earning trajectory, let's talk seriously about yanking their accreditation as well. Or just take federal dollars out of the equation entirely and watch the tuition market crash and school become affordable as the surviving schools clamor for tuition dollars. Either way.
I have no problem with there being watchdogs and whistleblowers in the education sector. They're necessary. But like you illustrated, the requests and expectations of for-profits have to be held in check. I remember a few years back a for-profit from California went bankrupt. Typical small for-profit school that didn't make a lot of money, contrary to the public perception that the typical for-profit is huge and greedy. The school also charged very low tuition and didn't build bad will with the public in its 25 years of operation, but the article was still positioned as a hit piece on all for-profit schools, that they all have high tuition and bad operations, but that had nothing to do with the school being discussed in the article. Someone commented to the author how ridiculous it was to write an article like that when the school being discussed had some of the lowest tuition rates in the country, didn't take federal or state financial aid, and had no public incidents. But that's where we are with this now. In the eyes of these media outlets, a for-profit can do no right even when it does.
I am a contract evaluator for Western Governors University and have a colleague there who is a full time clinical placer for their healthcare school. She has stated that its quite easy for WGU to place their clinical students because one most have an RN to enter their nursing programs, so their nursing students are already working in a healthcare setting where they can already complete their cinicals. I have another colleague who works for WGU's Teachers College and he has stated it can be challenging to find placements for some of the education students, but the back up plan is usually private K to 12 schools to assist students to find these placements. I have a cousin who graduated from one of WGU's teaching prepartion programs and she did her student teaching at a private religious K to 12 school, which she found on her own. Once the school filled out the paperwork and WGU verified the school's status, they accepted the location. Since then, WGU has utilized the same school for other future teachers in the area.
Nursing/medical clinical placements are a huge deal. Schools have shut programs down, over loss of placement opportunities. Many larger hospitals also will only work with a few schools in their area, typical 1-3 universities or community colleges. There have been some tough politicing between schools on clinical partnerships. The notion of students or schools paying for clinical time also isn’t unheard of, although it can essentially end a program. Thankfully, they benefit all parties... or, at least most of the time.
Thinking of my Social Service Worker diploma (evaluated as equivalent to an Associates in Social Work), many nonprofits would work with all the schools in the area for their mandatory placements required to graduate, but because they had different paperwork and supervision requirements some agencies would only work with one school or only one program so that things would be relatively standardized. Is that similar to what's happening here? Or are there other factors I'm not thinking of that determine which programs a clinical site might accept for placements.
The investigation started in September 2020 under the Trump administration. So, Walden must have done something truly corrupt.
Hmm. https://www.investorsobserver.com/news/stock-update/laureate-education-laur-shares-up-after-positive-conclusion-to-doj-investigation This article has a bit too much Latin and legal jargon for me to follow. Did the DOJ investigation conclude without "charges"? Or is someone still suing them but it's not the DOJ?
Yes, it’s certainly convoluted for a hospital to deal with the minutia of multiple programs. Certainly increases the complexity of administration, day to day management, record keeping, and accountability. Would emphasize that it’s only part of the picture though. Maintaining the professional collaborative relationships can be challenging and local politics, personnel networks, board membership, administrator relationships, etc., all greatly complicate clinical partnerships between schools and health care facilities.
Maybe they did. But we cannot assess the severity of the situation based on which administration the investigation began under. Administrations change. Congress flips back and forth. And there are career civil servants who have been employed for decades (Dr. Fauci, for example). The people who do investigations don't swap out with whomever occupies the oval office. Might an administration pressure to not pursue an investigation? Sure. But unless and until such an investigation rises to the level of anyone actually caring about it the career civil servants at USDOE are going to carry on and do what they do no matter whose portrait adorns the wall that season. Did they do something really really bad? Maybe. But to say it must have been truly corrupt because it began in the last few months of the prior administration is a reach.
This is a civil matter so there would be no criminal charges. A qui tam is where a person thinks there is a lawsuit-worthy issue occurring where the federal govt is suffering losses. Basically the qui tam relator takes the info of the alleged wrongdoing to the federal govt who decides if they are going to file a civil suit. If the government thinks there is a solid case they will take over the suit and upon the conclusion of the case the relator gets a payday from some of the money won in the suit. In this case it appears that the DOJ has declined to pursue the matter which might not actually be an indication that Walden did nothing wrong. It may, in some cases, be a simple matter of workloads and the case not meeting dollar amount thresholds necessary for DOJ to take the matter. Even though DOJ has now declined I believe the relator can still follow through with the suit and, if they win, they will get a much bigger payday for their efforts.
That was a great explanation. Thanks for writing that up. Walden's doctoral practices still make me very uneasy, and after what I've read about them I cringe when I think about the times I mentioned them as an option to people.
