For-profit college cancels $500M in student debt after fraud allegations
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
“give all prospective students a single-page disclosure with information including job placement rates, anticipated costs and the average earnings of graduates.”
Not everyone goes off to an expensive school at 18. Rest assured, those institutions are going to stay available. This is about for-profits, and calling those "educational institutions" is already an arguable proposition.
A few possible purposes come to mind.
1) To train students in skills that are immediately relevant for one or more careers.
2) To train the next generation of researchers and expand the body of known knowledge through research and discovery.
3) To give students a quick but lasting foothold into the professional networks of their future peers.
There might have been a few more that I fail to recall now.
People pay a lot for college, in large part, because they expect they can pay it back with their increased earning potential afterwards. And many are wrong.
Withholding knowledge (how ironic) is not the way to correct the education system.
While I agree in spirit, I disagree in reality. The fact of the matter is, "higher level education" has been co-opted by industry to train employees. I think overall it's a round-about way to train employees and we should break apart the concept of higher education/training into discrete parts: apprenticeships and academics. The problem for me is that college is a one-size-fits-all solution for the US and I think we are starting to see it burst at the seams.
I mean we can't even agree on the purpose of college, how can we possibly optimize the institution if we cannot answer that question?
Perhaps on the vocational side, it is easier to determine exit level salaries and trajectories. However, I am not quite sure that is the same case with an institution offering a liberal arts education. For instance, when I graduated from Dartmouth, 20% of the student body majored in Economics or Government, and in less than 10 years, 20% of major are either CS of Engineering. I don't think it is that easy to extrapolate the likely salaries and career outcomes in these cases.
There were definitely students in my CS classes who were genuinely interested in the academic topics, but most of the people in my compilers class seemed to think it was just something to suffer through.
In my experience at an R1 university (not an Ivy, but still respectable), even before the latest tech bubble, very few undergrad and master's CS students saw it as anything but vocational. However, they were a nice source of profit for the department, especially the international ones, so everyone went along.
I’m inclined to agree. The way to make that happen is to figure out some superior proxy for the characteristics employers are looking for (intelligence, diligence, willingness to conform, etc.) than university degrees. When the signaling value of a degree is no longer necessary, colleges will be truly optional and so for and about learning.
However, it should be noted the implications are fairly radical. A college system for and about learning about is going to be much much smaller than the status quo. Which in turn means either much less research output or some other method of funding research has to be found.
Just be careful with stats. They are easily gamed.
If your students expect they will get a job because you said so, and expect it to cost 30K, there should be some truth to those claims. They shouldn’t end up unplaced and 100K in debt if you effectively made guarantees in your marketing / sales materials. The same is true for investment firms. You can’t promise 50% returns.
The first camp believes education shouldn't focus on graduate earnings, and shouldn't cost anything.
The second camp believes student fees are unfortunate-but-currently-unavoidable, and so long as they're in place we should ensure students make informed, rational decisions before taking on a lifetime of debt.
do that every semester when they return to the financial aid trough, include the estimated amount they'll need to borrow after this, do all the interest calculations, show them how much they'll have left to spend after their loan payments, and include a map of the parts of the country where monthly rent is <1/2 of that amount, and make the students sign that they read it.
anyone with unlimited funds who cares about nothing but learning will gleefully take their piece of paper and sign that they got it.
everyone else can have a little momento mori moment as regards their future financial situation.
tricking those without the funds (present or future) into thinking they should ignore these issues because "omg learning" is profoundly immoral.
Unfortunately it isn't really measurable except as a tick box. So all you end up getting is an appointment with the careers 'advisor', which as I recall took all of 2 minutes. /rant
Allow students to test out of any required course. Require classes to be priced and offered individually.
The article makes it sound as though these weren't government loans. Are students of that institution able to tap government loans?
Bootcamps often post misleading statistics about placement numbers [0]. Will they be subject to the same fraud allegations? I would think misleading statistics are pretty much par for the course for nearly all form of sales. I generally apply by the principal of "never ask your barber if you need a haircut". These seem kind of fraud allegations seem to be arbitrarily enforced and politically motivated.
[0] https://medium.com/@abinoda/coding-bootcamp-placement-rates-...
Your statement feels like too broad of a brush. In my view, there’s a huge fat tail of non-value add schools that are only surviving because of this perception, but the narrow bulb of the elite schools maintains that value if only due to networking and social proof.
That would be awesome.
Ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/this-...
Also, whatever the feelings of politicians, I'm pretty sure _the people whose debt was canceled_ have a feeling or two on the matter, too.
I'd be curious to see some data on whether or not people graduating from Harvard today make as much as people graduating 20 years ago. My guess is Harvard grads today probably make less because there are more college grads nowadays than 20 years ago.
In the UK, most move away from home to study, and then move away from their University to work.
Anecdotally I don't know a single person who studied at University and works near their hometown.
For many it's the main reason they study. To get out.
Edit: Source for anyone interested[1]. Federal law provides individuals with federal student loans to discharge their loans under the "borrower defense" if the students were defrauded into taking out those loans. The intent was to allow debt relief for students of for-profit institutions who are saddled with with enormous loans when the education has little or no economic benefit. On paper, the CEC students are eligible for this program but DeVos has been reluctant to allow any borrowers to take advantage of the program. It's been an ongoing legal matter.[2]
[1]https://www.capemaycountyherald.com/news/government/article_...
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/10/17/student...
I'm guessing there isn't any capital left.
Morally it seems appropriate. Execs who participated in or knew about and didn't report fraud sound like accomplices, and investors who received the proceeds of criminal activity shouldn't be able to keep those proceeds.
Thank you for clearing that up for us.
That's a huge number. I believe online education is going to be an important part of college education, but that's almost the entire student body. Good to see this debt being cancelled.
The entire premise of these (snobbish) comments seems be: if you majored in anything that is employable, then it’s “vocational”, and you really didn’t learn anything.
That’s insulting and a load of bullshit. I can only speak for EE, but it’s all theory and loaded with difficult math, physics, etc. So an English major is “educated”, but an EE education is trade school? I think the “educated” majors ought to take graduate level electromagnetics. They’d be raked over the coals.
/rant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Technical_University
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American%20InterContinental%20U...
AIU was founded in 1970 'as the American Fashion College of Switzerland'. CEC has been under investigation since the mid-2000s, and decided to close most of its schools in 2015.
Not that for-profit vocational-training schools with credibility problems are a new thing. They are 'accredited' by ten nationally recognized accrediting agencies overseen by the Dept. of Ed. It should be dismaying that schools which primarily 'serve' federally-funded DoD and GI Bill students are not held to objective claims about their efficacy.
Surely you jest.