James Warren (once I start going through one of his columns, I end up reading a bunch) addresses the recent hearings on for profit universities.
As a former Big Ten president said to me, “The for-profits have kicked our butts,” meaning those of the nonprofit higher-education sector are slow to change and are rarely analyzed for efficiency, productivity or quality. The likes of the University of Phoenix, with 450,000 students, have adapted better to change via online offerings and scheduling flexibility.
The Career Education Corporation and DeVry Inc., both based in the Chicago area, are among those that flourish, generating 90 percent of their revenue from their students’ Pell grants and federal loans. In 10 years, federal aid to for-profits has soared to $26.5 billion from just under $5 billion.
Scrutiny by the Department of Education and Congress is inspired by the for-profits’ huge sums, a seemingly ideologically based suspicion of tidy profits, and obvious misdeeds. The latter include deceptive recruiting, low graduation rates and some attendees’ winding up with mountainous debt in a sector accounting for just 10 percent of post-secondary students, but 25 percent of all Pell grants and 44 percent of student loan defaults.
I usually avoid these issues given I try and keep my professional day life separate from my political writing/activism hobby . The interesting thing is that DeVry is probably one of the better actors in the private market and there are some fine schools that are for profit, but many of the new entrants are rather troublesome. On top of it there is a new category of non-profits that act like for profits establishing strange online offerings and tons of remote campuses. If we want to get ahead of the curve, that’s probably the next place problems will emerge.
Warren’s indictment of Chicago State is completely fair, but when someone fails out of Chicago State their debt load is likely lower. That doesn’t excuse the place, but it does put the context of the for profit problems in a different light. The bad actor for profits tend to rack up debt for students at very high rates, but also not teach them much. It’s a double disaster instead of just a single one. That doesn’t let Chicago State off the hook and I would hope we can develop some accreditation standards that do force non-profit failures to improve or lose accreditation.
The problems though, are fairly significant with the column. First, the former Big Ten President’s statement is fine and somewhat true, but misses that those institutions aren’t simply schools to turn out graduates. They are institutions designed to develop and create knowledge. I know that sounds silly and all academic and I admit to rolling my eyes when it’s used in committee meetings to explain why I can’t get the IT people function in a manner that resembles competence. It is true though. The University of Illinois produce the technology that you are reading this on right now–the web browser. University of Phoenix has produced how many patents from research?
Most of our pharmaceuticals are designed in university laboratories unless they are for widely held diseases that can be marketed successfully. All that nonsense about the market creating pharmaceuticals–forget it. It’s mostly done through NIH and NSF funding with some private funding as well (including funding from foundations not just drug companies).
That’s not an excuse for not improving teaching and for too long that has been ignored at many great universities. That said, some of the best universities teach very well because they are so expensive they have to cater to parents who pay full tuition.. However, those institutions are limited in the number of students they can serve.
Additionally, a big part of community colleges look for in new faculty hires is the ability to do quality assessment. There’s a long way to go, but the culture of assessment and evaluation of teaching has advanced greatly in the last ten years. At four year universities and colleges it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but improving.
Continued below the fold
The problem on the other end of the statement is that it’s not clear the for profits are teaching all that well in many cases. The examples of not being qualified in the story are one example, but they also rely heavily on student satisfaction with a course. That matters, but it’s not a measure of learning. Assessment is far more complicated than that and has to be attached to the eventual outcomes one hopes to achieve.
I deal with low income and first generation students where I work (an elite university in the Midwest you can figure out with a quick Google search) and I would do everything I could to discourage a student from racking up the loans that are typical at for profit institutions and the students have a far better ability to make money coming from this institution. The notion that any school would encourage that sort of borrowing simply foreign to me. In the case of Harvard Medical School (or it’s counterpart that is in the Midwest and they compete for the top ranking every year) the student is likely to make enough to pay the debt and often there are paths to loan forgiveness depending on your particular path. Additionally, many elite academic institutions have moved to eliminate the need for loans for students with families under $50-60,000 in income. Not every institution can do that, but you get the point.
Gainful employment is a standard in most cases of accreditation of non-profits. Does the program lead to a set of skills that are standardized is generally a standard for accreditation. It doesn’t always work–see Chicago State, but it’s not a bad system. We probably need to expand it to deal with the expansion of areas in community colleges, but the model works at providing basic standards.
In dealing with the student and family knowledge and performing their own due diligence–again a fair point, but like most complicated things standards need to be provided to allow an easy understanding of the quality of the education one is going to get. A student could theoretically look up stats at various Department of Education web sites that provide fairly comprehensive information about institutions, but few people can interpret that information. That is why we have accreditation bodies. I can spot problem statistics in those, but I’ve been doing this for years. I would challenge anyone, including James Warren to understand those numbers better than understand that there is a quality accreditation body that gives them the gold standard. So yes, students and families need to perform due diligence, but accreditation is probably the best way to communicate quality.
Finally, it’s a false choice to say we can’t do both and do both well when discussing improving primary and secondary education and higher education. We can walk and chew gum at the same time and many of the problems are interrelated. Even at elite institutions brilliant students coming from weak schools have deficiencies in their skills. The students are remarkably capable, but often lack specific skills their new peers have learned at the New Trier’s of the world. There are a variety of efforts at the college level to mentor teachers at the secondary level to help them understand what they need to be doing. There are similar efforts to improve and expand efforts to reach students from such backgrounds. Beyond that , students graduating high school even if they aren’t elite bound are bound for more training if they want to do well whether it be community college, technical school, or apprenticeship. Coordinating that transition has to improve and treating higher education as something superfluous to the needs to students because primary and secondary education needs work misses the point of how should that work be shaped to send them on a path of success.