CCA President and CEO Harris Miller recently took part in an hour long roundtable hosted by Philadelphia's WHYY. To wit:
Enrollment in for-profit colleges and trade schools has soared with the recession. An estimated 2.6 million students are enrolled in schools such as ITT, Corinthian Colleges, Career Education Corporation, and the University of Phoenix. But critics argue that in the drive for profits, these schools fail to deliver what they promise, employ deceptive marketing and recruitment techniques, and have low rates of graduation and job placement. This hour, a look at for-profit schools with ProPublica reporter Sharona Couttes, education professor Brian Pusser, and Career College Association President Harris Miller.
These stories often do not get told and certainly not aggregated to give a wider perspective, so it's worth collecting them on this blog. Las Vegas, Nevada:
The long hours of work and study are “a little rough,” said Dewees, who estimates it will take him another two years to complete his bachelor’s degree, which will come with a $40,000 price tag. “But I can see the accomplishment waiting at the end.”
Dewees illustrates one effect of the Great Recession: Although the tanked economy has brought some private colleges and technical schools to their knees, others have thrived amid greater demand for career training programs that people like Dewees hope will help them land jobs.
Indeed, the federal stimulus program includes more money for student loans, including programs designed specifically for laid-off workers seeking to train for new careers. The assistance resonates in Las Vegas, where the unemployment rate of 13.8 percent towers above the national rate of 9.7 percent.
Career colleges here are offering classes thought to best suit the local job market. At Kaplan College, that means new associate degree programs in computer networking and radiologic technology. The Art Institute of Las Vegas has a new degree in audio production. And DeVry, responding to student interest and federal labor reports, offers master’s level classes in network communications and accounting through its Keller Graduate School of Management.
The schools also are focusing on finding jobs for students who haven’t yet graduated. After all, “When you can’t put food on the table or pay the bills, that’s when you drop out and don’t come back,” said Rob Dillman, president of Kaplan’s Las Vegas campus.
Everest University Online will open a service center in northwest Colorado Springs on Monday with 70 employees, a number that officials expect will grow to as many as 600 within 21/2 years, an executive of the school’s parent company said Friday.
The center will admit and enroll students, secure student loans and other financial aid and handle career placement and administrative tasks that include grades and other records, said Steve Quattrociocchi, president of online learning for Corinthian Colleges, Everest’s parent company. The school will move into temporary space in the Corporate Ridge Office and Technology Center while the 70,000 square feet of office space it has leased is renovated, he said.
“This is great news; I’m glad that Everest decided Colorado Springs was the right location for them. These are good-paying jobs for our economy,” Mayor Lionel Rivera said Friday.
Everest will receive $2.5 million in local and state tax breaks to help train its employees, which was “several multiples less” than one of the competing cities, which Quattrociocchi declined to identify, offered to attract the center. The school selected Colorado Springs because it wanted a large and well-educated work force, a growing local economy, economic incentives and a location where it could relocate some of its managers and other employees, he said.
As an Atlantic subscriber, I normally enjoy Megan McArdle’s reporting and blogging. But her blog attack on the 2.8 million students who have chosen private sector postsecondary education is way off the mark. Where data about the sector and its student should inform her judgment, McArdle instead relies on the outrageously biased reporting of others and her own granular experience to make sweeping, wrongheaded charges against an entire sector of higher education. McArdle is entitled to her own opinions. She is not entitled to her own facts.
McArdle suggests “Many, many trade schools” take money from the government and equip gullible students with worthless degrees whose price tag sinks them into indentured servitude. First, private sector postsecondary educational institutions do not receive a dime from the government and, in fact, pay out millions in tax dollars – something traditional higher education does not. Students receive federal loans or grants and make their own decisions about which colleges or programs best serve their career needs, with many theoretical options (though good luck getting into our elitist traditional schools, unless you come from the socio-economic elite yourself). Second, on what basis does she insult these students by using the term “gullible”? I doubt the current and former senior government officials, medical professionals, educators, award winning artists, chefs, and designers, who graduated from our institutions, would agree they are “gullible.”
Thirdly, McArdle provides not a single data point to justify her claim that “many, many” career colleges operate outside the boundaries of ethical conduct. Do we get a negative headline at one of our schools from time to time? Yes. As do many traditional schools. But as a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Congressional watchdog showed, violations of prohibitions on admission practices, an area the media like to focus on, are a) extremely rare and b) just as frequent in traditional higher education as in the private postsecondary sector.
What McArdle fails to appreciate, because her commentary is based on anecdotes, not facts, is how our colleges benefit the students, the workforce, and the economy. Our colleges are not merely alternatives in a field of education choices; they are integral to America’s economic competitiveness. For instance, in the allied health fields last year, 54 percent of all graduates were career college students, as were almost 10 percent of nurses; the graduation rate for two-year career colleges is more than twice that for community colleges. We agree that colleges that make misleading claims should be subject to investigation, but McArdle fails to state that our schools are already subject to the “triad” of regulation—federal, state and accreditation. And she fails to explain that schools in our sector that are nationally accredited, the large majority, have to meet both minimum placement and retention rates to continue to have their students eligible for federal aid. One of the largest accreditors recently reported that its schools have retention and placement rates above 70%. If McArdle wants a debate about which postsecondary institutions do or do not significantly improve earnings potential for students, especially lower income students, and fundamentally improve their lives, count me in.
It is true that our students do receive generous financial aid, but that is for two reasons. First, it is well-documented our colleges make it a priority to help students navigate a difficult financial aid process to ensure the financial support to which they are entitled, unlike traditional schools as was documented in another of a succession of reports released this week. Secondly, our sector attracts primarily non-traditional students (though such students are becoming the majority). These are typically older students, often the first in their family to attend college and do not have a parental or familial financial support system upon which to rely. In a tight private lending market and in order to receive any form of higher education, they look to the federal government for access to higher education.
McArdle lastly labels our colleges as “sharks” which “prey on the most vulnerable members of our society”. Nonsense. No schools are more student (as opposed to faculty) centric than career colleges. We do not consider higher education a scarce resource that must be made available only to the “best and brightest,” as determined by standardized test scores. We do not believe that faculty schedules and a “summer off” system developed in the agricultural age should impede student progress. While we wish every student had a perfect K-12 preparation system and no personal life challenges during her college years, we understand that is not reality and are structured to help students with educational and personal issues.
Given her usual view of society and the economy, I would have expected McArdle to praise, not attack, our sector for helping to address a critical national need—a stronger, more flexible, and more outcome oriented higher education system. With state budgets across the country under backbreaking constraints, traditional higher education institutions and community colleges simply cannot serve the interests of potential students by themselves. Where these students – now 10 percent of all higher education students – would get an education were McArdle to get her apparent wish to cut back the sector is anyone’s guess.
To be sure, there are sharks in the water. But the only sharks we see are small pool of determined critics biting at the chances of tens of millions of Americans who want and deserve postsecondary educational opportunities.
By one estimate, Amazon has sold 1.5 million Kindles, and on Christmas Day 2009, e-book sales exceeded hard-copy sales for the first time in Amazon’s history. Those are pretty impressive figures for an expensive new device with uncertain market potential. But they pale next to iPod sales, which reached nearly 250 million by the end of 2009. If Amazon wants to win the e-book wars, it will need to radically step up its game.
Indeed, it already has; shortly after the existence of the iPad was confirmed, Amazon announced an applications store for the Kindle, to rival Apple’s for the iPad, and promised publishers a bigger share of the pie. Amazon has also reportedly bought a touch-screen company that could allow new versions of the Kindle to match one of the iPad’s advantages: a color display that is critical to winning over the lucrative textbook market, and glossy magazines.
When I read articles like this, I wonder what the point is. I’m all for fairness in marketing or regulations lowering some for-profit tuition. I’m against increased education standards for trade schools; with an accreditation process recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, standards at trade schools are set at the same level as public schools.
But it always seems that the point of these pieces is the classist sentiment that trade and for-profit students should have reduced access to financial aid or fewer options for accredited training, freeing up cash and resources for those lucky enough to have the means and ability to attend the sunny California school of their choice. In response, I’ll sum up the reaction I imagine from trade school students and graduates across the country: screw you, guy.
Not everyone is able to attend U.C. Berkeley, nor should everyone try. And for those who don't, they shouldn't be the targets of Berkeley alums hellbent on weaving together nakedly weak narratives about who is and isn't "the new poor". Most of these students and graduates are doing just fine.
As a result, Nevada universities are preparing to close colleges, departments, and programs; demoralized professors are fleeing the state; and thousands of students are being shut out of classes at community colleges. The prospect of shutting down an entire institution remains a "distinct possibility" for the future, the chancellor says.
Shortfalls in California, which faced the largest budget gap in the nation this year, have grabbed much of the attention as tens of thousands of students were turned away from public colleges and tuition rose by more than 30 percent. But other states' public higher-education systems are getting hit just as hard or harder.
Utah saw the biggest percentage drop in state general-fund spending over the past two years, while also facing one of the fastest projected growth rates in high-school graduates. Arizona's budget gap was nearly as large as California's, by percentage of its general-fund budget, and it is facing much faster growth in its traditional college-age population. Florida, too, is seeing rapid population growth and big drops in state spending that have resulted in large cuts in higher education.
In Colorado federal stimulus dollars have made up close to one-fifth of the total state budget for higher education in 2009 and 2010 combined, making the state the most heavily reliant so far on that temporary pot of money for financing higher education. Illinois is facing a cash-flow crisis, with the state last month falling more than three-quarters of a billion dollars behind in budgeted payments to its colleges. Over the past five years, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and New Jersey have seen the fastest drops in state higher-education appropriations per full-time-equivalent student.
And we are to believe the private sector cannot help with this issue?
The following was written by the President and CEO of the Career College Association, Harris N. Miller:
Peter S. Goodman's March 14 article, "In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt" relies on a few anecdotes to attack the institutions that educated 2.8 million post-secondary students last year.
He gives no sense of career colleges' critically important role in educating almost 10% of college students, many of whom would otherwise be shut out of higher education. Also ignored were the millions of satisfied and successful graduates who chose career education over other alternatives.
His original claim in the second paragraph that our institutions charge in "excess of $30,000" per year for tuition is untrue, and was corrected at our request: the average annual tuition for tax paying career colleges in 2009-2010 was $14,174.
My organization provided the reporter ample data about the positive impact of career education --none of which appears in his article--including:
* In the allied health fields last year, 54 percent of all graduates were career college students, as were almost 10 percent of nurses.
* The graduation rate for two-year career colleges is more than twice that for community colleges.
* The average retention and placement rates of career colleges were above 70 percent, according to a report by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools. These numbers are not tracked for traditional schools.
Needless to say, our 2.8 million students -- primarily working adults, including many veterans -- are insulted that The New York Times brands them as "the new poor," and asserted that they were "lured" into our schools. We are confident current and former senior Washington officials, leaders in the hospitality sector, medical and legal professionals, educators and health care professionals who have graduated from career colleges would take issue with such a characterization.
Mr. Goodman repeats the canard that students who receive Pell grants and attend our schools in large numbers are tied to "aggressive, sometimes deceitful recruiting practices." Our sector prides itself on doing a better job helping Americans who want a choice navigate the often confusing path to federal aid, competing for students who can choose among 7000 accredited postsecondary institutions, all of whom have access to information that must be presented by schools and easily available internet data about the institutions. Mr. Goodman should question those in higher education who are either not helping students receive the funds to which they are entitled or just not accepting students in need, rather than attack our sector's focus on increasing student access.
Student loan default rates are higher for low income and minority students. The rate in our sector is consistent with community colleges and minority serving institutions. As a witness for the Government Accountability Office explained in a Congressional hearing last fall, student default rates are tied to socio-economic and demographic status, not institutional type.
The article also failed to mention: more than 75 percent of our students work while pursuing their education; 76 percent are independent; 47 percent have dependents; 31 percent are single parents; half are the first in their families to go to college; nearly a quarter come from families with incomes of less than $20,000. Quality, affordable, accessible, outcome oriented education matters to these students and to our country.
Career colleges are a key to restoring this country's global educational and economic standing. Our schools play an essential role in helping the United States lower unemployment, fill jobs in key industries, and increase the number of college graduates dramatically by 2020.
Pictured L to R: Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Brian Moran
Link to the Hill Day set here, slideshow here. If you have any pictures from this event or any other CCA-related business, please tag your photo ccanow on Flickr.
For the past 30 years, career-college enrollment has grown an average of 11 percent per year, compared with an average increase of less than 2 percent for colleges overall. From the mid-1990s through the middle of the past decade, the number of degrees — from associate degrees through doctorates — awarded by career colleges rose at a much faster rate than those granted by traditional institutions.
Career colleges are growing because they make higher learning accessible to nontraditional and underserved students. That’s a lot of potential students: Statistics show that only about 25 percent of the population has the money or time to attend a traditional four-year college.
Career colleges serve all Americans — not just the fortunate 25 percent. Just look at the demographics for career-college students: A majority are 25 or older; about half come from families with incomes in the lowest 25 percent; almost half are the first member of their family to go to college; and many have just completed military service. Tellingly, more than 75 percent of adult students work while they attend college.
Career colleges meet these students on their own terms. The schools offer schedules that suit busy lives and courses that meet the demands of an evolving economy, with its fast-changing job opportunities and ever-increasing requirements for new skills and credentials.
A Rialto police officer who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan before returning home to finish her college degree was honored for her perseverance Wednesday.
Crystal Gonzalez, who lives in Rialto, was among five recipients of the Graduate Recognition for Excellence, Achievement and Talent (GREAT) award during a ceremony on Capitol Hill.
The award is given to recent college graduates who have overcome difficult circumstances to complete their education. For Gonzalez, those obstacles came on foreign battlefields.
Gonzalez, of Fontana, joined the military just before the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001, going first to Afghanistan and then to Iraq, according to a biography supplied by the College Career Association, which administers the award.
While in Iraq, the tanker truck she was driving crashed into a ravine filled with water, trapping Gonzalez and her partner. Gonzalez managed to escape through a gun turret hatch, swam to the surface for air and then dove back to drag her partner to dry land. There, she was credited with reviving him with CPR.
"Some people freeze when it's a matter of life and death," said Rep. Joe Baca, who serves as Gonzalez's congressman and presented her with the award. "Well, she didn't freeze."
The CCA Communications department launched a newsletter to Capitol Hill Congressional staffers and assistants this week. The newsletter, titled “HigherEd.Jobs: News at the Nexus of Careers and Postsecondary Education”, will be a bi-weekly newsletter sent to those legislative assistants to members of Congress (both House and Senate) directly involved with issues related to higher education, workforce, labor and veterans. The newsletter includes timely, condensed information and recent news about the growth of the sector, the intersection between career education and jobs/veterans issues, the value-add of proprietary education and general good news related to the sector.
It's been more than a year since Wells Fargo Bank closed an office in Fontana and Jaqueline Bermudez of Rialto lost her job as an office assistant.
"It gets a little depressing when you get out there and there aren't really any jobs," said Bermudez, who has been out of work since November 2008.
But since she finished training last month as a medical assistant, she's feeling more hopeful about finding a job.
"I can see it happening," she said. "Some days, I wake up and I just feel like it's going to happen."
In June, Bermudez started a training course at Summit Career College in Colton. She's one of about 2,500 San Bernardino County residents who, with money from the federal stimulus package approved last year, has received free job training through the county Department of Workforce Development.
"We received $16 million" in stimulus funds, said Sandy Harmsen, the county's director of work force development and executive director of the county Workforce Investment Board. "That basically doubled our budget for the year."
In a typical year, Harmsen said the county would be able to train between 500 and 550 people. Between July 1, 2009, and June 30 of this year, she said she expects to have more than 3,500 people in training programs.
Harmsen said all of the stimulus money went into paying for job training programs. While the cost of training programs vary widely, the Workforce Development Department estimates programs
would cost participants an average of $5,000. Kelly Benson of Colton will graduate later this month from a three-week licensing program for commercial truck drivers. The program would have cost him at least $1,600, Benson said.
Due to the state budget crisis, California's community colleges are seeing a decline in enrollment despite a big demand of students clamoring to get in, a top education official said.
California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott said at a Wednesday media conference that new figures show a statewide drop in enrollment of nearly 1 percent, or 21,000 students.
"This is not because of lack of demand, but a lack of resources," Scott said. "The demand is there and customers want service, but we cannot afford to continue to offer more and more courses."
After peaking at nearly 2.9 million students last year, enrollment figures are falling -- even in the face of a record numbers of high school seniors, high unemployment, and
students being turned away from University of California and California State University campuses, Scott said.
Community colleges lost about 8 percent in state funding, or nearly $520 million this year, Scott said. As a result, colleges are handling about 200,000 students for which they are not receiving any state funding, he said.
"This is not something we can continue to do. Obviously, when districts go into their reserves it's like individuals going into their savings accounts," Scott said.
Another reason why it will take every sector of higher education to meet President Obama's goal of making the U.S. number one in the world with citizens with higher education degrees.
As everyone in this sector knows, it's actually a way to keep costs down and facilitate entry into the workforce. To wit:
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is announcing today that it will allow “highly motivated students” to graduate in three years, beginning with the freshman class that will be seated this fall.
Specifically, the program will be offered to incoming freshmen who already have at least 12 college credit hours, either through Advanced Placement or community college classes, or other accelerated work. By paring a year off their undergraduate experiences, those students would save an estimated $8,000, 0r 22 percent, in tuition, room, board and other fees, compared to their peers in four-year programs.
In a statement, Linda P. Brady, the university chancellor, described the program as “perfect for students who are eager to earn a degree and get on with other life goals.” Among the majors for which the accelerated program will be offered are those in accounting, elementary education, information systems and romance languages.
More and more, online or distance learning will play an increasingly significant role in higher education as the paradigm of postsecondary education shifts from brick-and-mortar only to a hybrid model. At least, that's what Michael S. Bassis of Westminster College argues in BusinessWeek:
The challenge is to create new educational models that provide a high-quality education affordable for as many students as possible. Hybrid or blended learning, combining sophisticated online learning with face-to-face student/faculty interaction, is one promising method. Built on the latest research on how people learn, such "high-tech, high-touch" programs work. A 2009 Education Dept. meta-analysis showed that students learned more in hybrid programs than they did either in those delivered online or in the traditional classroom. And hybrid instruction can be delivered at considerably less cost.
Some colleges and universities and some families have the resources to ignore cost in pursuit of their educational ideal. And in some fields, and for some students, high-tech/high-touch may not be the most effective instructional design. But it is a model that may help many brick-and-mortar institutions increase both their quality and affordability. If they don’t integrate online or other alternative forms of learning into their programs, more than a few are likely to fail. Market forces will determine what higher education will look like in the future. The smart money isn’t betting that traditional bricks-and-mortar model will continue to dominate the landscape. More than a few brick-and-mortar institutions are likely to fail if online options consistently deliver more learning at a lower cost.
An agreement between Kaplan University and the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office would provide community college students an online course option, but College of the Desert students may not be able to take advantage of the program.
The agreement would let community college students take online courses through Kaplan at a 42 percent discount and transfer the credits back to their school.
Kaplan, which has a campus in Palm Springs, is in the process of developing plans with individual campuses to offer the online agreement, which was announced Feb. 8, Kaplan spokeswoman Michele Pore said.
“It's providing a solution, an alternative so that students can keep going and not be stymied by the budget,” Pore said.
Budget cuts have led to fewer classes at community colleges throughout the state. College of the Desert cut about 9 percent of its course offerings this spring, spokesman Tom Wixon said.
Kaplan classes cost more — a three-credit class would be about $467 through the for-profit school, compared to $78 at COD.
The convenience of online learning appealed to some students.
“That is a great idea, especially being an athlete,” College of the Desert freshman football and basketball player Dreu Johnson said. “We're on such a strict schedule because we have to be done in two years.”
Second-year student Yvette Mejia, 20, would particularly be interested if she could take online course in the summer, since COD cut back its summer offerings.
“As long as it credits back to COD, then why not take an online course that you can't get here,” she said.
Not surprisingly, the banks are working hard to block our common-sense proposal. Sallie Mae, the largest player in the student lending business, has spent millions of dollars to lobby Congress and run ads in several states, claiming that our proposal will cost jobs and inhibit service. These claims must be challenged.
The president's plan actually creates jobs and draws on free-market principles by selecting private companies through a competitive process to service student loans issued directly by the Education Department. These private companies, including Sallie Mae, compete for our business and are evaluated on the quality of their customer service and their default rates.
Loan servicing is a growing industry as more and more Americans pursue college degrees. Under our contract, the high-performing companies will get more business over time while poor-performing companies will get less. The market will play, and students and taxpayers will win.
...
The banking industry's claims that it wants to protect American jobs are also suspect. The fact is, Sallie Mae sent thousands of American loan servicing jobs overseas in 2007 to further increase profits, and it agreed to bring them back last year only to compete for our loan-servicing business.
The Education Department has issued more than $187 billion in student loans since the Direct Loan Program was created in 1993. The number of universities participating in the program has more than doubled, to 2,300, in just the past three years. There is no justification to continue wasteful subsidies to banks. It is time to complete the shift to direct lending.
CCA's position on the Direct Lending program here and here.
Sue Smith is executive director of Western’s Sacramento campus. They offer certificates in the healthcare field from registered nursing to dental hygiene as well as job placement services. She says they’ve hired 20 new employees since last September to serve a booming student body that has grown by 25% in the past 15-months.
“Right now we’re seeing a lot of people come back getting retrained. We see a different group of students coming to find a new career, a little bit older.”
And it’s the same story across the country. Harris Miller is president of the Career College Association based in Washington DC. He says the industry is growing by 20% a year. And that career colleges are training workers who will propel the region out of the recession.
“One of the reasons we are in a recession is because of a skills mismatch. A mismatch between the skills employers are expecting and what many prospective employees have. Where are we going to get the ability to expand the population? Through the career college sector.”
An examination of the educational records of more than 62,000 adult undergraduates at 48 colleges finds that students who had sought and been awarded academic credit by their institutions for "prior learning" earned in the military, corporate training and other non-classroom settings were more than twice as likely to graduate, and to persist even if they did not graduate, than were their peers who had not earned such credit.
"That’s a sit-up-and-take-notice finding,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president and CEO of Lumina Foundation for Education, which financed the study by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. “CAEL’s research confirms that prior-learning assessment can help adults move faster toward their associate’s and baccalaureate degrees. We need to see more institutions offering this option and more adults participating in it.”
There are still many unanswered questions in the study about the specifics of why these students tend to graduate more and faster, but the impications for President Obama's higher education goals are unequivocal:
More fully tapping into the learning that American adults have derived outside the classroom could provide a wise and cost efficient way to speed progress toward the Obama administration's completion goals, said Peter Smith, senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education and author of a new book,Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Wiley). "In a work force where there are roughly 60 million men and women with a high school diploma and, in many cases, some college, assessing this learning would recognize their unrecognized knowledge and tap their untapped potential both for college and for work advancement. And for people who value testing over deeper assessment, this data suggests the value of prolonged and interactive thought about what one has learned as a part of the learning experience."
For-profit educators are taking advantage of California's fiscal crisis and alleviating pressure on the state's overwhelmed and underfunded higher-education system by tapping the state schools for new customers of their own.
Washington Post Co.'s (WPO) Kaplan University is allowing the state's community-college students to take courses at its online school while still graduating from their home campuses, and Bridgepoint Education Inc.'s (BPI) Ashford University promised to accept up to 90 credits from community-college students looking to complete their bachelor's degrees at places other than the state's distressed public colleges.
The moves, announced last month, come as California's two-year schools face increasing demand from students being turned away from crowded universities, as well as from displaced workers looking to retrain. Enrollment at the state's community colleges rose 4.9% in the 2008-2009 academic year. At the same time, budget strains have forced some schools to reduce their course offerings by as much as a fifth. (California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott said last week that 2009-2010 enrollment may actually drop 1% as schools are forced to cut back.)
"Community colleges are probably more open to it than at any other point," Signal Hill Capital Group managing director Trace Urdan said of the relationships with for-profit institutions. "It makes sense for the schools to be making these partnerships right now."
Traditional colleges and community colleges are excellent options for many students. But our schools should also be viewed as a valuable choice, particularly when existing state resources are stretched too thin to accommodate students who need to enter today's workforce. We are ready to educate them.
Their flexible methods of delivering instruction — and an enormous amount of advertising spending — are enabling for- profit schools to build their enrollment levels with students who otherwise might have chosen the traditional, nonprofit colleges that have called Northeast Ohio home for decades.
“They're obviously taking a big chunk of the market away,” said David A. Armstrong, vice president of enrollment and legal counsel at Notre Dame College in South Euclid. “They have made all colleges look at what they do and see if what we do, we can do better.”
About 2.6 million students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, and that number is rising by an average of 9% annually, according to a Feb. 8 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Overall, about 19 million students enroll in degree-granting schools every fall, the article noted.
Such figures have caused Notre Dame to take notice. Though enrollment is up in all categories at Notre Dame, Mr. Armstrong said the college still worries it's losing market share to the for-profit schools. As a result, Notre Dame recently launched the Finn Center, which will oversee its adult, graduate and professional programs.
Under the Finn Center, Notre Dame will increase assistance it provides to adult students in areas such as recruitment, financial aid and retention, Mr. Armstrong said. The adult programs also will be revamped to offer more convenience, partly by offering more online classes and majors, he said. Classes will be offered in person days, evenings and weekends.
“Adults, when they're learning, have different needs than traditional students,” Mr. Armstrong said. “When adults go to school, it's all about convenience and cost.”
Competition within the sector is good for the sector. And the student.
Career colleges are committed to their students and what best serves the interests of students. Purchasing non-profit colleges for their regional accreditation? Suppose for a moment that regional accreditation was the “gold standard” of higher education (we do not necessarily agree). Gaining regional accreditation is not the same as keeping regional accreditation. Maintaining regional accreditation requires audits, reviews, and re-accreditation.
Beyond the accrediting agencies themselves, oversight is also provided by states and the U.S. Department of Education. This is not some wild west scenario with schools making up the rules as they go along. Rather, the lines of acceptable institutional behavior are well marked, and those institutions crossing the line can and should be sanctioned.
Meanwhile, transferring credit between institutions is a significant challenge no matter what the circumstance, even between regionally accredited institutions in the same state. Transfer of credit, the last bastion of academic elitists, is in real need of reform, but moving from one type of accreditation to another is not the answer to the problem.
So is buying a non-profit college a workaround to the rigor imposed by regional accreditation? No more so than buying a nationally accredited institution. Higher education is a reputation-based, word of mouth proposition, with strong oversight by the triad of the federal and state governments and the accrediting bodies. Students have choices among almost seven thousand accredited postsecondary institutions in this country. Institutions failing to achieve and maintain quality standards, whether online or in place, will quickly find themselves with a failing grade.
The article also makes much of the fact that career education companies purchase financially troubled institutions and change them. Why shouldn’t they? Financially distressed schools get into that extreme situation because they are facing significant challenges in delivering on their fundamental educational mission. Career education by its very nature is transformational. It transforms the lives of students, helping them gain new skills and abilities. It transforms institutions by introducing new methods, pedagogy and delivery mechanisms, such as online learning. And ultimately, it is transforming the higher education landscape as more students demand more real world applicability and benefit from their postsecondary experience.
A final point: students receive federal aid, not private sector colleges and universities, and they decide which institutions to attend. Big difference. It’s true that taxpayers support non-profit institutions by subsidizing the cost of student attendance and not taxing their annual “surplus”.
As you can see, using this broader measure of joblessness, the jobs picture looks even worse than once believed. In three states — Michigan, California and Oregon — more than a fifth of people were working less than they’d like to be. Job conditions were most dire in Michigan: The state had a regular unemployment rate of 13.3 percent last year, and a broader unemployment rate of 21.5 percent.
Focusing on the U-6 number also reveals that things aren’t totally hunky-dory in the states that have reported relatively low levels of unemployment.
In South Dakota, for example, the unemployment rate was at a managably low level of 5 percent in 2010. But the rate nearly doubles to 9.9 percent when discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers are taken into account.
CCA President and CEO Harris Miller recently took part in an hour long roundtable hosted by Philadelphia's WHYY. To wit: 
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