What sets for-profit schools apart is that, unlike most
other companies, these organizations are attempting to serve the public
interest as well as generate revenue for the owners. Much like a for-profit
hospital or a for-profit insurance company, these schools are still trying to
generate a positive bottom line, but also like these institutions they are
serving the need for educational opportunities (on the part of the citizens)
and the need for a better-educated workforce (on the part of society). Or, to
look at it another way, if a for-profit school is not providing anything of
value for its customers (let alone defrauding them or leaving them in debt) it
is cheating not only its “students” but all of the rest of us who live in the
community where it is allowed to exist. Clearly, then, the ethics of running
such an institution are more complicated than those of a company that sells
filtered tap water for $40 a bottle or fermented grape juice for $500 a bottle;
but what are those ethics specifically?
First, it seems reasonable that any for-profit course of
study that enables its graduates to obtain gainful employment – or to upgrade
their career prospects, if they are already employed – has some concrete value.
Whether it’s a cost-effective method of obtaining that value is up to the
student/consumer to decide; a school which costs as much as an Ivy League
degree but offers only a $1-per-hour increase in salary probably isn’t
worthwhile, though it’s clearly not useless. This suggests than many vocational
and technical training programs should be ethically acceptable, and some of the
STEM disciplines might be, but most of the Humanities and Liberal Arts subjects
should probably be left to traditional institutions…
Second, there’s the issue of predatory lending. For our
purposes, lending someone money they can never repay for a useless degree is
even more egregious than lending them money they can never repay for a real
estate purchase, considering that student loan debts can never be discharged through
bankruptcy the way a conventional loan can. Schools obtaining tuition this way
are clearly crossing the line. Likewise any school which is deliberately
misrepresenting the value of its training programs – advertising the salaries
of famous chefs, for example, when all their graduates can look forward to is
$14 per hour as a line cook – should be prosecuted under the truth-in-advertising
laws and driven out of business. But in both cases, if the costs and benefits
are clearly explained up front, and the risks of pursuing such a course are
make apparent to the applicants, it’s difficult to say that the companies
involved would be committing any crime by accepting payment and providing the
classes…
All of which brings me to the real ethical question
underlying this issue: how safe a proposition does a given course of study have
to be – and how much absolute value does it have to off the student – before we
consider it ethically acceptable for a company to offer it to students at a
profit to itself? Any number of students will graduate from public and
non-profit private schools every year with crushing student loan debt and degrees
for which no employment opportunities exist (the so-called “Do you want fries
with that?” majors), yet these programs do not generate accusations of fraud or
calls for closer regulation. Such events may seem more reprehensible when
someone is using those graduates to obtain profit, but there is no appreciable
difference in the effect those debts and degrees will have on the lives of the
students. So how do we decide what is simply a cost-ineffective educational
opportunity and what is a dastardly fraud used to separate would-be students
from their money? And who gets to make that decision?
It’s worth thinking about…
No comments:
Post a Comment