Why you can't sue a for-profit college

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/04/28/its-almost-impossible-for-students-to-sue-a-for-profit-college-heres-why/

Further: anyone who has ever done arbitration knows that you wouldn't win that EITHER because the arbitrators are far from unbiased.

Typically, each side gets to eliminate alternate proposed arbitrators. This doesn't help. Look at it this way: an arbitrator is likely to be called upon to arbitrate for the big guy many, many times. For you, even for your attorney, maybe once. He doesn't want to be eliminated in the choosing - so he finds for the big guy who will be choosing over and over again. Not you, who will never choose again. It's a farce. The only way you can even the odds is have a "frequent chooser" doing the choosing - - like a lawyer who does lots of arbitration, or a labor union.

 

If the arbitrator is biased, federal law allows an aggrieved party to head to the courts to get the arbitrator's decision overturned, this is so even in a voluntary, binding arb situation. This bias may not be easily proven and it may be expensive to appeal to a court of law to overturn an arbitration hearing decision, but of course, such is the plight of anyone in virtually any form of litigation; it's always costly and difficult.

 

The media continues its witch hunt. All of this investigating into for-profits, so little into the non-profits.

I'm wondering how long it'll be until schools and general employers start requiring it's applicants hold degrees from non-profit schools, smh.

 

arbitration

State law permits this also in most states. As a practical matter showing the arbitrator was biased is impossible without a smoking gun (eg: a video showing the other party handing the arbitrator a wad of cash). From the Courts' perspective, appeal defeats the purpose of arbitration.

 

Fair point, certainly proving up bias is not as easy as making a good faith argument that your argument should've prevailed, courts are loathe to substitute their post hoc views for that of an arbitrator or judge who was eyewitness to the testimony, though I doubt it'd quite require the wad o' cash video (but I understand, hyperbole is a time-honored way of making a point). Sure, appeal defeats the purpose of arbitration, but legislatures are forever defeating the purposes of all sorts of things, including the courts and alternative dispute resolution, the provision of the Federal Arb Act allowing such appeals is just another example of that grand old tradition.

 

Many people assume that for-profit schools are unaccredited. I've run into many who think that UPhoenix is an unaccredited diploma mill and they just mail you a degree after you supply your credit card information. The Everest debacle revealed plenty of people, online and in person, who had similar sentiments and who assumed that "not regionally accredited" was the same thing as "unaccredited."

So I don't imagine employers will reach the point where they require degrees from non-profit schools only because those who actually care about this (likely a minority in the grand scheme of all private employers) don't actually understand what they are for or against.

It's a scandal that is high on both emotion and ignorance which is a very dangerous combination.

 

You're greatly underestimating the ignorance of the general employer. The people who run those places are made up of people from the general public who are ignorant of these subjects. There are so many people on LinkedIn holding high positions with milled degrees that it tells us if major companies don't know any better, the lesser employers certainly won't.

I wouldn't be surprised by anything at this point. After all, there are employers that specifically detail a requirement of a regionally accredited degree and I doubt they all even know what that actually means as I've seen some require a nationally accredited degree. There are employers that just hear things and add them to their list without deeply researching what they mean.

 

That's my point. Most people don't know what makes a school "for-profit." I've run into people who think that if the university has leafy quads then it is unmistakably legitimate. For those people, even if they imposed such a rule, they might easily write-off a degree from the University of Phoenix while being perfectly content to hire someone with a degree from Grand Canyon or Waldorf.

In fact, the latter two examples bring up a deeper question, how would those employers police the schools that were non-profit and then went for-profit? Or, in the case of Keiser University, the other way around? Would they have a chart? Highly doubtful. Most companies just don't think about these things to that level of detail.

I wouldn't be surprised either. But I've seen quite a few companies require regionally accredited degrees and then promptly hire someone with an NA degree. My company requires the degree be awarded by a school with a USDOE recognized accreditor or foreign equivalent. The thing is, we don't require evaluations for foreign degrees in most cases. The reason? It takes too long. It costs too much. And, frankly, we have better things to focus on.

Here, we focus on degrees and accreditation. In the workforce there are many things that, if not done, mean we don't get bonuses or the company risks downsizing. The minutiae of accreditation, for-profits and the like, even if its in the minds of the people in a company, seldom makes it very high on the priority list.

 

Employers won't care about the changes though. I could see some posting for non-profit school grads just as a first-line filter, and then still hiring people from for-profits if they come.

That's the sad part. We're told from childhood and up that these institutions that run our society are only trying to maintain a standard and we're supposed to live in a way that works with it by going to the "right school" and getting the "proper" education. But in reality, the people running these things are largely apathetic. That's why I like to look at LinkedIn because it really gives you a good picture of what's really going on. The crazy part is that when someone is outed for fake credentials, employers many times still keep the person employed there. It's madness.

 

In the 1950s my then 20-something father got a job as a machinist in the aerospace industry on faked up credentials. He was caught and called into his supervisor's office. His boss said something to the effect of "So you lied on your application, you didn't have aero experience...well we would've fired you, but you're a danged good machinist, so keep up the good work and don't do any tomfoolery like that again." My dad later worked his way up to master machinist and made gimbals for NASA's spaceships in the glory years of the 60s and did a darned good job of it. Talented and hard-working, witty and social, but under certain conditions, he wasn't always the most ethical guy.

Doing the job, at the end of the day, is all that concerns most employers; they're not looking for Gandhi (in fact, they'd likely fire him--they say he was a terrible lawyer); they want someone who will make them money while not creating too many liabilities. If the job isn't one in which ethics is absolutely paramount--such as an accountant or pastor, to most it just doesn't matter (that said, having spoken with the chairman of my state's Board of Accountancy just two days ago, it seems as if a chillingly substantial percentage in that profession are willing to play fast-and-loose, and don't even get me started on pastors, as a person very much of faith, I want to retch when I think of what has happened generally to the ethics of the pastorate).

 

It's funny you bring that up. I have a co-worker who told me that her brother signed up at UPhoenix and was livid that he received a failing grade and couldn't get a refund. He turned in no coursework. He just assumed that the terms were a formality and he would get a degree if he paid. He withdrew immediately.

I had never considered that there were probably a thousand other idiots just like him, though.

Interestingly, I've also encountered people who seem to have given UPhoenix a status similar to that of Coca Cola in that (at least in some regions) the brand becomes synonymous with the product. Just as, in some areas, "a Coke" is used to refer to all sodas of all brands and varieties, I've heard a few people ask if some random for-profit school "is the University of Phoenix." It was during the Corinthian downfall and every time Everest came up someone at work kept asking "Oh, is that (Everest University) the University of Phoenix?"

 

It isn't a first line filter if no one actually uses it to filter.

Employers have no means of determining if a school is for-profit. Some of them are incredibly clever about hiding that fact about themselves on Wikipedia and through other sources. And some people are so ignorant that they don't know that their own alma mater is for-profit. As I mentioned on another occasion one woman (an HR colleague outside of my company) was doing some serious for-profit trash talking around the time of Corinthian and then, at the same event, was publicly acknowledged for finishing her MBA at Walden.

The only filtration aspect such a job requirement might have is if a job seeker was so self-conscious that they didn't apply for a job because they saw the requirement or because the employer simply wants to filter out the 1-2 schools that they had in mind when they imposed the rule. To quote a wise thinker (FTFaculty):

The only time during an interview there was ever any discussion of my degree it was always because the interviewer had previously lived in Colorado and wanted to chat about familiar areas.

 

Among the idiots, there is a misconception that online college programs are easy and require little to no work. I knew a moron who thought this, and this was a person who admitted to cheating her way to an Associate degree in General Studies at the local community college, a crummy community college to boot.

 

I once interviewed a candidate and asked, something to the effect of, "Have you ever been in a situation where you were working up against a tight deadline and didn't think you would be able to finish your project in time? If so, what did you do?"

Without skipping a beat he looked me in the eye and said "I just worked faster and didn't care about quality or accuracy. You either get it done quick or you get it done right."

I'm not sure if stating in a job interview that you'll do a half-assed job if you get a deadline crunch is better or worse than admitting you cheated your way through a degree. But I believe the moral of the story is that people tend to be self-serving and hypocritical. There are surely great persons in the world. But people, as a whole, are a really sucky species.

 

Several years ago, we had a lively thread going where we posted links to faculty listings of accredited (both NA & RA) schools, both non and for profit, where people with outright diploma mill degrees were employed as teachers. Probably the most infamous was the maroon with his M.A. & Ph.D. from Columbia State University, employed as a professor at RA, non-profit Cleary College (now Cleary University) and was featured in a Good Morning America special on degree mills.

So, yes, employers are ignorant for the most part about accreditation, non-profit status, etc.

 

Never mistake the outrage people display as an indicator that they know the first thing about whatever they are talking about.

 

Wow!

Is this it?:

GMA: Unaccredited Degree Holders Fool Public - ABC News

 

hyperbole

It's hyperbole for the sake of humor but not by much. The most common reason that an arbitration decision is that the agreement to arbitrate the dispute was entered into under pressure or lack of knowledge. That the agreement itself was "unconscionable".

Very, very rarely is the substantive decision of the arbitrator subject to review.

http://www.stblaw.com/docs/default-source/cold-fusion-existing-content/publications/pub1124.pdf?sfvrsn=2

 

That was the expose, yes. Too bad the video has been removed, it was pure entertainment, with the Academy Award going to the fake college teacher and his faux outrage, trying to explain that his Master's & Ph.D. obtained in 7 months were perfectly legitimate.