For-Profit Revisited

A few months ago I wrote in this space about the issue of for-profit colleges, and the ongoing debate regarding whether these can be considered legitimate institutions of higher learning, or if they are actually a means of suckering prospective students into paying large amounts of money for meaningless degrees and certificates. I was forced to conclude that it depends on the college. On the one hand, there are some instructors at University of Phoenix, for example, whom I know personally and can attest that they know their subject and teach worthwhile lessons; on the other hand, you have “schools” like the so-called Trump University which don’t even pretend to offer anything that an accrediting body would consider education. Reports of outright fraud have remained rare, however, which is what makes a story from last month so disturbing…

According to a piece on the Huffington Post Business page, an outfit in Atlanta that calls itself Everest College has been paying local companies up to $3,000 to hire their graduates and continue employing them for long enough to claim these dubious positions as “placements.” Similar accusations have been made regarding Everest facilities in six other states, and the linked story claims that the school’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges, was behind these practices – which would make this systematic fraud. There are legal actions pending in several of the states, including California, which claim that the entire set-up is nothing more than a scam to obtain money by getting customers to take out massive student loans (which can never be discharged in bankruptcy or otherwise escaped) in return for technical and professional training which is generally no help in getting a job in the first place…

Naturally, the company is claiming that all of these complaints are coming from a few disgruntled former students, and that all of the accounts of fraudulent behavior are being taken out of context. And, in fairness, we should probably concede that Huffington Post is not the most pro-business organization in the world. But given some of the complaints profiled in the linked story, the idea that these are all misrepresentations or isolated incidents passes beyond credibility and into the fantastical. The company’s advertising claims are a matter of public record, and so are the amounts paid for tuition – many of which would be preposterous for any college or university, let alone for a six-month certificate program in a technical skill that would be useless without years of experience and a contractor’s license…

Now, we should also note that it is possible for the average person to identify what entry-level jobs in a given field are likely to pay – there are a number of online salary calculators that will even account for the region in which you are attempting to find work and the specific education and experience you can offer to an employer. One might reasonably expect a careful consumer to investigate such matters and compare the potential raise in pay to the added expense they will incur in the form of student loan payments should they go through with a given training program – unless they have a high-pressure salesperson telling them that they will be placed in a much higher-paying job as part of the package. It’s that last part that takes all of this out of “let the buyer beware” territory and into outright fraud…

I can’t help thinking that the whole thing is an abuse of the trust placed in teachers and “educators” by a surprisingly naïve public. It’s true that no one goes into teaching for the money; it’s true that most people you will meet working in or running institutions of higher learning are professionals who consider what they do a vocation more than a career; and it’s true that no one associated with a legitimate college or university would ever consider misrepresenting the prospective income levels of graduates from any given degree program (or that they’d be fired immediately if they did). What the general public needs to consider is that for-profit colleges are run for the benefit of their owners, just like any other company, and are not operating on behalf of the public good – and therefore, that their advertising claims are no more trustworthy than those made by any other company in a poorly-regulated industry…

It would probably also help if we started regulating those schools a little more closely, too…