The Great DL Depression: Is there is going to be a DL education crash?

IS "public opinion" infected by an "anti for-profit bias"? People seem to be pushing that idea hard here on Degreeinfo, but the assertion's truth never seems to have been established. It's just kind of a rhetorical article of faith, so far.

Your original thesis in this thread would seem to contradict it. If for-profit higher education is supposed to represent some kind of tulip-style bubble, then wouldn't that suggest that students must be flocking to it, rather than shunning it?

True, and people rarely try to quantify it. But qualitatively, subject matter specialists do have a pretty good idea which universities are especially strong in areas of scholarship that interest them. They know who is actively publishing and what their institutional affiliations are. They know where the ideas originate that get people talking.

Probably by means of the same kind of indicators and variables that people already use to identify the stronger non-profit programs.

 

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but US News & World Report publishes an extensive series of quantitative college and graduate school rankings every year. The USN&WR rankings are among the most successful magazine franchises in history.

Now, we might question the overall validity of these particular quantitative rankings, and whether or not they actually capture "academic rigor". However, there is no doubt that they are widely read and influential. Whether we like it or not, there is certainly a widespread perception that these rankings do provide quantitative assessments of academic quality.

USN&WR has no problem ranking for-profits by the exact same criteria that they use for non-profits. For example, the USN&WR law school rankings include for-profit institutions. The law school rankings are based on a number of criteria, including LSAT scores, evaluations by practicing attorneys and judges, evaluations by law school faculty, bar pass rates, job placement, student/faculty ratio, and library resources.

As it happens, all for-profit law schools wind up in the USN&WR bottom tier.

 

I am not sure why profit motive is such a negative or even relevant. It would seem to me that the value of the degree should be very important to a "for profit" organisation. Even "not for profits" still need to make money. The distribution of the profit is the only difference, not the need to make one.

The higher the value, the more profit that can be made. Five star hotels charge more than one stars. Five star hotels also protect their five star rating to preserve the value of their operation.

Quality degrees are likely to equate with sustainablity and successful marketing. The question should not, therefore, about the business structure of the organisation, but about its product. The product either sells or not. Consumer satisfaction with the product underpins the sales.

If a student graduates and cannot gain traction with the degree, then it can be expected that the graduate will spread negative comments about the institution. The institution's sustainability may be made or undermined.

Longer standing "for profits" must be withstanding this market test or are incredibly able to disguise their inferior product to a previously unknown level. Car manufacturers would be very envious.

 

Yes, and a magazine ranking is not the same as an official body that evaluates schools based on academic rigor, that's what I'm suggesting.

 

Yes, I was aware of the WSN&WR rankings, but a magazine ranking is not the same as an official evaluation of rigor. (I understand that there is currently no such thing as this kind of evaluation) USN&WR might be widely read and it might be esteemed, but it is still just a magazine. They report on a myriad of subjects and do not concentrate their efforts solely on ranking schools. I may be wrong about this, but I believe that the rankings are based on more than just rigor. So, IMO, it's not the same thing.

 

"Public opinion" was probably not the best term I could have used. How about something like "the opinion of academia and of some businesses". That's what I'm talking about there. Students are still enrolling in the schools like UoP, but academia and many employers are not so impressed with anything that is for-profit or online. All we need is a bunch more main stream negative press like the profit schools have gotten recently, and it is possible that the flow of students, loans in hand, will begin to diminish. Probably will not happen with the great online schools or the schools that are at least honest with their prospective students.

It's not a contradiction; it's two different groups. Students are flocking to the profit schools and will continue to do so until it becomes widely known that many of the profit schools are engaging in unscrupulous practices and because of that, a student's chances at earning a degree or getting a job from that degree are not nearly as good as they were led to believe.

One thing I have to say about NCU; they did not do this sort of thing. I was even under the impression that they didn't care if I enrolled or not. I left NCU for other reasons, but they were 100% up front with me in the application process.

 

Agree - they were like, "It sucks, it's hard, it takes a lot of time, many people don't finish, and it is not cheap...what to sign up?"

 

LOL! That was exactly it! When I was applying I was thinking "What kind of enrollment counselor are you? Don't you want me?" Guess they won't be investigated for misleading students.

 

You guys are freaking hilarious! Both of you were like, that sounds like fun I want sign up...lol

 

Many ostensible non-profits operate their distance learning programs as profit centers in everything but name, hoping to create a revenue source that will subsidize other activities. Many non-profits operate open-admissions programs. Many non-profits hire lots of adjuncts. Many non-profits have weak academics.

Now if it's true that non-profits are more likely to be academically weak (however we define 'weak'), their weakness would be directly evident when we use academic strength as our criterion. And by using that more direct criterion, we won't be painting with too broad a brush among the for-profits, while giving weak non-profits a free-pass.

But this isn't so much a question of what people should do, it's a matter of what they will do. My argument in my first post was that as low-end degrees (whether profit or non-profit, it doesn't matter) become more highly commoditized, employers will likely become more selective and favor stronger programs. Employers will do this, not because of any sudden revulsion against the evils of profit, but because they are looking for people with real skills and expertise that will truly benefit their orgnization (and typically help it make a profit). So naturally, these employers will favor graduates of places where the desired kind of expertise is known to exist.

The really high-powered distance-learning degree programs are often very expensive, in large part because employer tuition-reimbursement is picking up the tab. If employers increasingly favor higher-end programs, especially for key employees that are vitally important to the future of their organizations, that's going to be a market that somebody will serve.

Just because McDonalds makes a bundle selling cheap fast food to the masses, doesn't necessarily mean that expensive gourmet restauants will be money losers. It certainly doesn't lead to the conclusion that the best dining will be found in government cafeterias and charity soup kitchens.

I can think of for-profit models that aren't even tuition-based. For example, there are for-profit biotech firms that run huge research efforts, have entire campuses full of laboratories and hire hundreds of PhDs. So it's not a stretch to imagine one of them creating an in-house doctoral program, bringing in a bunch of highly selected graduate students, providing all of them with generous full-ride stipends, and then putting them to work in the laboratories as cheap labor on the company projects with the firm owning the rights to their work.

Precisely.

 

No, schools cannot "decline to participate" in the USN&WR rankings. All schools that meet the criteria (e.g. ABA accreditation for law schools) get ranked by USN&WR, even if they publicly disapprove of the concept. And most of the USN&WR ranking criteria are based on publicly available information, which schools are required to disclose anyway.

The only parts of the USN&WR rankings that actually require school cooperation are the academic reputation surveys. Now, it is true that schools can refuse to participate in those surveys, and it is true that some schools do just that. However, most schools do cooperate, so the surveys continue despite the abstentions. The relatively few schools that abstain from the academic reputation surveys still get ranked in this regard, based on the results from the other schools that do participate.

In theory, the USN&WR surveys could be stopped if every single school agreed to a boycott. One branch of academia has actually done this: the dental schools. As a result, USN&WR actually did drop its dental school rankings. Other branches of academia could do the same, if they got their acts together.

You might suppose that USN&WR could have continued ranking dental schools, based on the publicly available criteria. This is true, but it doesn't work for them in practice, given their business model. The annual survey data are proprietary and exclusive to USN≀ no one knows the annual survey results before USN&WR publishes them, and since the survey results are a large percentage of the ranking criteria, no one can predict the overall ranking either. If USN&WR were forced to rely on publicly available criteria (as the dental schools made them do), then anyone else could find and crunch the same numbers, and get the same rankings. No one would have to buy the USN&WR annual issue.

 

I was shocked to see that USC is now offering a totally online master's degree in education. I was thinking it was probably a way to create a new revenue stream and was not motivated by a desire to share the love. But dang, I wish that had been available when I was doing my master's, I would have jumped on it.

 

Because while the for-profit school sector has grown dramatically in recent years, no for-profit school has yet developed a strong reputation for academic excellence. On the contrary, the for-profits are consistently associated with "commodity" degrees. There are currently few or no "high end" degrees associated with for-profits.

The "high end" degrees are consistently associated with non-profits. Of course, this isn't the whole picture, because many non-profits produce "commodity" degrees, similar to those produced by the for-profits. But the "high end" degrees have a halo effect; they make the whole non-profit sector look good.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of degree-granting institutions out there. This is complicated. Like it or not, people are apt to generalize. One possible generalization is that "for-profit schools produce commodity degrees, rather than high end degrees". This generalization is common, and it is common because it is accurate.

Could for-profit schools defy this generalization? Well, anything is possible -- in theory. In practice, it has not happened.

 

The USN&WR rankings have their drawbacks, but they are based on reasonable, objective, and defensible criteria. For example, here are the exact criteria that USN&WR uses to rank law schools:

- Reputation as assessed by law school faculty and administrators
- Reputation as assessed by practicing attorneys and judges
- Median LSAT score of students
- Median undergrad GPA of students
- Acceptance rate
- Employment rates for graduates
- Bar pass rates for graduates
- Expenditures per student
- Student-faculty ratio
- Library resources

All of this info is publicly available, except for the reputation surveys.

It's hard to imagine any meaningful "official ranking" that would rely on significantly different criteria. One reason for the popularity of the USN&WR ratings is that they are based on real data that people actually do regard as important.

 

I looked into it, but I decided that 40k a year was just too much.

 

Very good info, thanks. You could certainly get a feel for overall program quality with this report, but it is still not solely a measure of academic rigor, it's a school ranking based on a number of criteria. You could infer rigor from possibly the Bar pass rates, but it would be an indirect measure. Student ability would still cloud the issue; some students would do better than others due to innate ability despite consistent academic rigor.

 

Yikes! Ok, I don't feel so bad for missing out! Thanks, I feel better!

 

I thought they were making it sound bad just so I could say, "that was not so bad" but really they were painting the pretty picture

 

Oh, it wasn't that bad....uh, OK maybe it was.