Protective Parents or Flaming Hypocrites?

 I’ve written in this space before about ordinary people generating risqué content for online distribution, and questioned if anybody other than the people involved and their families (and, presumably, their customers) have any real right to complain about it. Granted that somebody who us posting adult content on social media while also broadcasting who they work for probably shouldn’t, complaining about content that you had to track down and then pay to access is reminiscent of the joke from the last century about somebody being offended by nudist neighbors they had to use a telescope to see at all – that is, it’s stupid. But if anyone out there is surprised about private school faculty and/or religious organizations going berserk over such a situation, I’ve got to ask if you are at all familiar with American culture…

You can pick up the story from the People magazine Human Interest page, or from the local television station’s story about it, but the case seems to be spreading all over the Internet. It seems that the local Catholic diocese has decided to expel three students from their school in Sacramento, California, because parents of some of the other kids found out that their mom posts “adult” pictures of herself on a subscription site called “OnlyFans.com.” Up until the scandal broke, the mom in question was an unremarkable member of the community, who actually served as a volunteer teacher’s assistant or “Room Mom” for one of the second grade classes as the school. Now, however, she and her children appear to have been blackballed from all Church facilities in the diocese…

It seems worth noting that the woman at the center of this case insists that none of her pictures are actually pornographic, and that this is not being disputed by the school, the Church, or even the other parents raising an (anonymous) ruckus over the matter. I should also point out that “OnlyFans.com” is a subscription site that does check the ages of subscribers, and that the mom in our story doesn’t advertise her work; you’d have to know who she was, deliberately go looking for her, and then pay to get access to her pictures before could see them. I could also point out that by the time any child is old enough to have any interest in risqué pictures of any kind there is no power on Earth that will prevent them from finding some, even if they aren’t pictures of a classmates’ mother…

Now, I’m not about to suggest that any organization should be required to utilize volunteers or employees regardless of who those people are or what else they do. Certainly, there are people I wouldn’t want directly interacting with a room full of seven-year-old school children. Moreover, a religious school is, by definition, a private organization, and is therefore not subject to Equal Opportunity Employment laws or First Amendment protections. But throwing three children out of your school because you don’t approve of something their mother does on her own time to make extra money and/or improve marital relations does seem a bit harsh. It’s hard to imagine what harm the kids themselves could possibly be doing to anyone – and if any parents are allowing their seven-year-old children to access adult sites on the Internet, with or without adult supervision, they probably deserve whatever happens as a consequence…

The other question that strikes me is, how did the parents who sent in the packet of pictures to the school authorities get them in the first place? It’s possible that somebody’s kid got access to their credit card or hacked the site’s firewall, but given the vast amounts of pornography available for free online it seems unlikely that anyone would bother. Absent any evidence to the contrary – and the school hasn’t even claimed to have any – I think we have to assume that someone in the community got wind of the mom in our story posting adult pictures of herself, and then spent hours or days combing through the seamier side of the Internet until they found the pictures. At which point my first question isn’t even “Why do you care?” so much as it is “If you are so against this type of material, why are you surfing adult websites in the first place?”

Think about that one really carefully before you answer…

The Ethics of Expectations Revisited

In my July 2014 post “The Ethics of Expectations” I was writing about the rash of people complaining about, and ultimately suing over, for-profit programs in the culinary arts that ended up costing them tens of thousands of dollars to take, but would only qualify them for $8 to $10 per hour starting jobs. At the time I wasn’t really aware of for-profit schools offering law degrees; it’s not a part of the field to which I pay a lot of attention, and there are already a huge number of law programs available through traditional institutions anyway. Last week’s article about the fallout from the Charlotte School of Law fiasco (and my post on the subject) seem to have re-opened the issue, and I thought a follow-up might be in order…

There is a common perception in some of the States, particularly those with a particularly difficult Bar exam, that provided you can pass the Bar no one will care where you got your law degree. In California, for example, where fewer than half of the people who sit for the exam each year will pass it (and stories about people taking five or six tries to pass are common), it’s difficult to imagine that anyone who did pass would have trouble finding work. Maybe it won’t be the most glamourous (or high-paying) job, but surely there will be something you can do with your new credentials. Unfortunately, this wasn’t true even before the market became glutted with lawyers in the 1990s, and it is even less so now…

Despite the old joke about the person who graduates last in his or her class from medical school still being called “Doctor,” unless you plan to hang out a single and go into practice by yourself the school from which you received your degree will still matter. In a field where there will generally be more applicants than available jobs, such as in legal practice, you will very rapidly encounter situations where a managing partner has a choice between multiple candidates with identical credentials except for the quality of the school that conferred their degrees. At that point priority will probably go to the candidate from the best school, or at least from one that does not have a “horrible” reputation…

At that point, we have to question whether allowing anyone who wants to enter your law program, regardless of their odds of passing the Bar or getting a job afterwards, is any less fraudulent than promising people that they can become a celebrity chef with nothing more than a few months of school and a significant amount of debt. I’m not going to address the shenanigans the Charlotte School of Law (and others) have been pulling with fake scholarships and gaming the student loan system, because that absolutely is fraud, but the question of how bad a student can be before you have an ethical responsibility to tell them to do something else with their money and ambitions is still valid…

The problem becomes even murkier because there really are people who don’t do well on standardized exams like the LSAT, or even in regular classes, who really can excel when actually doing the job. When we include possibilities such as regulatory agencies and corporate positions that require law degrees but do not actually involve legal practice, things become even more convoluted, and when you consider that there are also people who have completed fully accredited law school programs and passed their state Bar who are still failures in practice, the question becomes hard to resolve even in the abstract. So I have to ask:

Do we, as business people or as teachers, have an ethical responsibility to exclude students from educational programs in which we sincerely believe they have no realistic chance of achieving any eventual success? Granted that as decent, caring human beings we don’t want to strand anyone with a huge debt that they can’t repay and no viable job opportunities, do we have any right to tell someone that their commitment and hard work will get them nowhere? Does our answer change if our own employment (and survival) depend on keeping students in school, or at least not driving away paying customers? I’m not suggesting that we have an obligation to keep anyone in a program that we know is beyond their abilities just so that our employers can continue to collect their tuition, but things are rarely that cut-and-dried in the classroom. How do we decide when it would be kinder to cut someone loose than string them along, and where do we draw the line?

It’s worth thinking about…

Enough Already!

If I ever decide to relaunch my blog about non-business topics that I still feel are deplorable enough to reflect a possible end of our civilization as we know it, which I called “Racing to the Bottom,” I think I could do an entire series on the state of education in American, and in particular about how the for-profit schools really aren’t helping. To be fair, I could also do posts about the way the nasty anti-intellectual streak that has be present in the United States since the beginning is eroding both the quality of education and the importance placed on improving it, on grade inflation, on entitlement and cheating, and on the ways in which appointing someone Secretary of Education on the basis of how much money they contribute to your party’s candidate is almost as idiotic as confirming someone as Secretary of Education for the same reason. But even in the present context, I still think the situation at the Charlotte School of Law is unusually loathsome…

You can pick up the Washington Post article if you want to, but when you start reading into the details of the case things just get worse and worse. The Charlotte School of Law, despite the name, is a private institution operated by a for-profit company that chose to open a facility in Charlotte, NC, mostly because it was the largest city in the US that did not have a functional law school. They then started admitting students with no realistic chance of passing law school classes, even less chance of passing the Bar exam, and no possibly way of paying for the program except for massive student loans – although we should probably acknowledge that some real law schools have also been guilty of that last point…

Some of the tactic described in the Post article are unusually disgusting even in the for-profit college industry, such as offering students “scholarships” that they would only get to keep if they maintained a grade point average higher than they would be allowed to get on the curve. The Charlotte School of Law also had some more common frauds in its arsenal, such as hiring unqualified instructors, providing substandard (or completely useless) course content, and spending more money paying administrative salaries and management fees (not to mention dividends for their ownership body) than they did on instruction. All of which was made that much worse by the nature of their curriculum – and the requirements needed to practice law…

If a for-profit school offers you substandard training in the Humanities, or even in some of the less-regulated skilled trades, there isn’t going to be much impact. As I noted in a previous post some years ago, line cooks aren’t going to make executive chef money to start regardless of what school they attended, and not really understanding George Elliot’s Middlemarch might not even be a problem to you if you did pursue a career in English Literature. Unfortunately, in most jurisdictions in the US, if you want to practice law you are going to have to pass the Bar exam for that state (or district), and if you can’t it won’t matter where you got your law degree. Even worse, in some ways, is that even if you do pass the Bar, getting a job when your law degree is from a school with a horrible reputation may not be possible anyway…

What really takes the prize in the Charlotte School of Law story, in my opinion, is that once their academic failure rate and the failure rate their graduates experienced in trying to pass the Bar came out, and their accrediting body began investigating the school, the leadership made no effort to warn their students of the possibility that their program might lose its accreditation, the Department of Education might cancel their student loans, and that they might all be out on the street with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and no law degrees. Which is, of course, exactly what happened to them. The school’s leadership claims that they were under no legal obligation to warn the students until they actually lost their accreditation, and the Department of Education moves were beyond their control anyway – all of which is true, of course, but doesn’t make those lies of omission any less despicable…

I could make some comments about how the students attending the Charlotte School of Law should have known better, and maybe I will in a later post. Certainly, if being told that you have what it takes to be a lawyer, despite not having any existing academic credentials and not being able to pass the LSAT, doesn’t send up any red flags you are definitely far too trusting. If people telling you that you can complete a law degree program provided that you give them very large amounts of money and stop worrying about ever paying it back doesn’t clue you in, you’re probably not paranoid enough to be a lawyer in the first place. But just because someone is naïve, trusting, or gullible is no reason for the rest of us to allow something like this to happen to them…

Think About It

I didn’t really plan to follow up on my last post. I would imagine that if you feel that education in America has finally taken that last step over the cliff and into irrelevance, or that our culture has devolved to the point where tuning in, turning on and dropping out has really become sage advice, that the opinions of a humble fixed-term instructor teaching business strategy and policy would be of no interest to you. And if you read yesterday’s collection of statistics, business research, and operational strategy, and still are siding with young people who think dropping out of school is courageous and failing your classes “on purpose” (so that you can’t back out and take a mainstream job later, even if you wanted to), then I don’t believe any additional rational arguments will convince you of anything. So perhaps we should consider some theory and/or philosophy instead…

One of the first things that came to my mind is that even in the arts, where we kind of expect people to give everything up to follow their dreams, this kind of behavior makes no sense. Most of us need some kind of day job while we pursue our art, and without a college degree you will be limited to traditional pursuits, such as waiting tables (actors), driving cabs (writers), or dressing up as corporate mascots and playing with children and badly-behaved adults (dancers). Granted, the alternative has its own hazards – faced with having a B.A. in English and no specific training I got a job in the service sector, got promoted into management, got an MBA, and eventually became a management consultant and a management teacher. But throwing any chance of getting a job that does not involve rancid pizza and vomit (which all of the above do) seems absurd, especially if you were only two more weeks from finishing…

In a business context, however, this behavior isn’t just absurd, but idiotic. Business strategy is all about being better than the competition, and one of the key concepts is using the available resources to gain that competitive advantage. I don’t know if having a degree in Computer Science will be of any relevance in whatever entrepreneurial pursuit the self-proclaimed “former valedictorian” is going to begin next – he does not mention it anywhere in his open letter – but just throwing it away because you can isn’t a good policy. Especially when you consider that he (or his parents) have already spent the money on tuition. It’s also not a good demonstration of the mentality you need to be in business, let alone become an entrepreneur with nothing but willpower and a hankering for taking on the world…

I think that the late Sir Terry Pratchett said it best, in his YA novel The Wee Free Men:

‘…if you trust in yourself…’

‘Yes?’

‘…and believe in your dreams…’

‘Yes?’

‘…and follow your star…’  Miss Tick went on.

‘Yes?’

‘…you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.’

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that this particular young dreamer, or any of the others like him, are actually lazy, or that they don’t have every intention of working eighty or ninety hours a week to make their entrepreneurial ventures a success. I’m certainly not the world’s expect on entrepreneurship, as witnessed by the fact that I work for the State of Michigan these days. And goodness knows, I’ve made the mistake of ignoring the evidence of history and assuming that when I try something it will be different. But if I’ve learned anything in the last twenty-some years of bouncing around Corporate America (and studying it, and teaching people about it), it’s that the things we think are unique are often common, and the problems that we believe no one can solve have often been solved many times before…

In the end, all we really have are intelligence and knowledge, as guided by experience, and throwing any of it away so you can thumb your nose at all of the people who are somehow less special than you are doesn’t make you an entrepreneurial genius…

Although it might make you a Computer Science major who needs to read more…

Yeah, About That...

When I first ran across the (viral?) story about the self-proclaimed “Valedictorian” who intentionally failed all of his classes and dropped out of school two weeks before graduation to become an entrepreneur I’ll admit I was annoyed for more than just professional reasons. To be sure, as an instructor in the business college I find the assertions that all education is a waste of time and all one needs to be successful in life is to believe in themselves to be arrogant, self-serving intellectual drivel. I’ve seen too many young philosophers who believe that they already know more than they could possibly learn in school; they generally skip lectures a lot and end up grubbing for grades. But I’ve also worked with (and occasionally for) a large number of actual entrepreneurs over the years, and what this unteachable young genius is saying also fails to match up with the observable facts…

To begin with, the statistics on entrepreneurial start-ups are fairly conclusive: 90% of them fail before ever breaking even, regardless of the confidence or self-actualization of the entrepreneur starting them, or even of how many previous times the same individual was successful. This is not to say that no one has ever gotten things to work on the first go – that’s not how statistics work – but it does mean that even people who are relatively good at this process will need more than optimism and commitment to their ideals if they plan to succeed. They will need a viable business concept – not just a product of service that people will actually want to purchase, but one that can generate enough revenue to meet expenses when they do. I’ve seen too many projects that came to grief because the person or persons in charge never actually figured out how they would earn money doing it, and if you go on the “unfunded” page of any of the crowdfunding sites you can find dozens more…

They will need a plan. I’ve already spent a lot of time on this site talking about business plans, and why they are important, including the boring parts that nobody ever wants to learn about, let alone do. A business plan is great for showing to potential investors, including friends and family, and is absolutely critical if you want to get loans or grants, including the SBA loans and grants for which I used to help people apply. But the most important reason for doing one is for yourself; if you can’t articulate everything you plan to do, in plain language, you have no realistic chance of doing it. That goes double for the vision statement (which lays out what you are trying to do) and the mission statement (which details how you intend to accomplish your vision) – your investors may or may not want to see it, but if you can’t explain these things you’re not likely to have any…

They will need money. I’m not saying that no one has ever started an entrepreneurial company in their garage or their parent’s basement and gone on to build a wildly successful company – Kevin Plank of Under Armour, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Jobs and Wozniak (who need no introduction) are all proof of that. But for every Steve Jobs there are literally thousands of people who are still living in their parent’s basement after seven or eight tries, unable to earn enough to pay for lunch, let alone that “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” mansion they thought would be theirs within a year or two. It’s possible that the author of this supposed think-piece has actually figured out what he plans to do and how he plans to do it, but I can’t help thinking that it would have been much more interesting to hear about that, rather than some half-baked, derivative philosophy…

And it would have been far more impressive to actually start that wildly successful new venture and then write about how throwing away three or more years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars was actually a brilliant and brave decision…

The Ethics of Admissions

An interesting case came up earlier this week when over 60 Asian-American groups filed a Federal discrimination complaint against Harvard University, claiming that students of Asian ancestry were required to meet higher admission standards that applicants of other racial backgrounds. According to the complaint, the coalition has evidence that all else being equal Asian-American students needed to score 140 points higher than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points higher than African-American applicants on the SAT in order to have the same chance of admission to private universities, including Harvard. This is a troubling claim, especially if the evidence pans out, but the situation becomes even murkier when we consider that Harvard’s current admissions policies have resulted in a student body that is over 21% Asian-American, despite the fact that people of Asian ancestry make up less than 6% of the population of the United States…

I don’t intend to discuss the relative merits of Affirmative Action in this space – mostly because that’s really a political issue and not a business topic, but also because I don’t believe that I have anything particularly profound to say on the subject. The case can certainly be made that some consideration is due to any number of minority groups for the discriminatory practices that they have experienced and in many cases continue to experience – but one can also quite reasonably argue that any policy that does harm to any person who has never themselves done anything wrong is not just, and solving injustice by creating additional injustice makes no bloody sense. And the whole situation becomes more complex as the number of groups seeking to gain a competitive advantage for themselves rises…

In this specific case, it does not seem reasonable to require one specific group of applicants to have much higher performance in order to receive the same consideration, especially if you consider the popular image of Asian students as quiet, studious, incredibly hard-working and single-minded to be a damaging stereotype (as some advocates clearly do). But, at the same time, it is difficult to explain why being represented in the student body at nearly 400% of your relative representation in the general population is discriminatory. Certainly, there are other minority groups that do not enjoy anything like this level of disproportional admissions, and one could easily imagine any or all of them filing complaints about the preference that is apparently being given to their Asian-American counterparts…

The University has responded to the allegations by stating that their admissions process is based on a holistic reading of all of the applicant’s scores, grades, activities, abilities, writing skills, academic skills, and so on, including whether or not it believes that a given applicant would be a good fit for their program. This is actually very common among elite schools, and may be the only reasonable way to choose between the literally hundreds of applicants for every position in the incoming class. Unfortunately, this doesn’t address the specific complaint the coalition is making; it also doesn’t answer the conflict at the heart of the matter. Is it more important to have a diverse student body (or work force, for that matter), or to provide a completely level playing field for the students who are competing for admission to that school?

On the one hand, no one wants to have to tell any specific applicant group that they will need scores 140 points higher (let alone 450 points higher) than another specific group to be considered for admission. But by the same token, no one wants to tell members of any specific applicant group that none of them are going to be admitted because the incoming class is now made up almost entirely of people from one or two other groups. This is the specific injustice that the Affirmative Action programs were intended to fight in the first place, but now we seem to have reached a situation where we can’t correct the injustice being done to one applicant group without inflicting an equivalent (or even worse) injustice on another. How can we possibly reconcile the desire to have a diverse student body with the need to offer every applicant an equal chance at admission? Or, for that matter, how can we correct the current inequity without making things even worse?

It’s worth thinking about…

Financial Aid Starts Early

You may have heard the jokes – they go all of the way back to the Murphy Brown television series in the early 1990s – about how competitive preschools are, and how choosing the wrong one could start a fall of dominoes that will prevent your child from getting into the right grade school, middle school, high school, college and graduate school. Exactly how many people actually believe in such a sequence is unclear, but there are still news stories every few years about preschool programs that cost as much in tuition as most public universities, and the massive competition that occurs each year to get into the best. An offshoot of these jokes involves parents taking out student loans on behalf of children who are not yet able to dress themselves, or in the case of less wealthy families, seeking financial aid in order to achieve the same results. Unfortunately, this may be less of a joke than you’d think…

According to a story that ran last week in the New York Times, the problem with preschool is that it isn’t affordable for a very large range of families, especially in the case of single parents who also need after-school daycare. The example given is in Chicago, where even the public school system’s Preschool program runs in excess of $13,000 per year – over a thousand dollars per child per month – and private programs range upwards from there. There are low-income programs like Head Start, for families that qualify, but most people living above the poverty line can’t get their children into those programs, which only leaves student loans, personal loans, and the aforementioned financial aid programs. Programs which, it turns out, also leave large numbers of parents and their children out in the cold…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that the Daycare issue isn’t a new concept. For at least the last twenty years, and possibly more like fifty, many working-class families have had to decide between working a second (or third) job in order to pay for daycare, or just having one parent quit their jobs and stay home with the children. Indeed, if your monthly take-home pay is $1,000, and cost for childcare is going to be $1,120 per month, you probably couldn’t afford to go back to work if you wanted to. A single parent does not have that option in the first place, of course, and once we start considering child support and spousal support issues the whole matter of who actually qualifies for financial aid becomes even more complicated. The real question is what to do about it…

Greater funding for financial aid programs would seem to be one obvious approach, except for the fact that all of the existing financial aid systems are overtaxed, not just the ones available to preschool students – and the fact that funding for public education is already in crisis. As appealing as the idea of pumping additional money into local school districts in an attempt to increase the number of places available in public preschool facilities might be, it does not appear that throwing additional resources into traditional methods is going to help. The question that comes to my mind is whether there might be a private-sector approach that would help…

We have already seen examples of companies offering subsidized preschool programs as a benefit for their employees – offering the services at cost makes them effectively resource-neutral on the balance sheet, while at the same time helping to retain valued employees and raising morale. There can even be an operational efficiency improvement, in that employees who have children in daycare in the same building in which they work do not have to leave the premises and travel across town in order to look in on their children. Public support for such programs could be very cost-effective, since every child placed in private or corporate daycare would be one less individual competing for finite resources in public schools or from financial aid programs. But there might be an even more direct approach to the problem…

As of the last time I checked, there was no specific program available to fund new daycare businesses – but there is no reason that the Federal government couldn’t establish one, either through the Small Business Administration (SBA) directly or through the entrepreneurship programs that all of the Federal agencies are required to support. By doing so, they would be able to relieve pressure on both the financial aid system and the public daycare system, not to mention creating jobs for all of the caregivers who would then be employed by the private-sector daycare centers. You would need additional social services personnel to regulate such businesses, and some additional infrastructure to administrate the SBA programs, but you would also be creating profit-making businesses and gainfully-employed citizens, all of who would (in theory) also contribute to the tax base and put additional funds into the local economy…

I’m not saying any of this would be easy. On the contrary, any such program would require a great deal of resources to start and to run, as well as considerable intestinal fortitude on the part of the public officials that launched it. But at least we could get rid of some of these competitive preschool jokes…

How Bad is Your Job?

Regular readers of this space (assuming I have readers) are already aware that over the last couple of decades I have had some of the best and worst jobs in North America, and possibly the industrialized world. I realize that most of the things about which I am complaining are really First-World problems, and that in the grade scheme of things having to work 25 hours straight at a drug store, including having to clean the Incontinent Supplies aisle because the janitor has called in sick for the fifth time this week, does not compare to death by starvation, death by disease, death by wild animals, death by intestinal parasites, death by shooting as the result of political oppression (death by political parasites?), death due to heavy metals exposure, death by exposure to cold, death by exposure to heat, or living in certain parts of New Jersey. But that said, I still think that anyone who has ever been charged $450 for a job reference by the firm where they completed an unpaid internship has a genuine grievance…

If you missed it, you can pick up the original story on the Guardian UK website here if you want. The basic story is fairly simple, though; a UK-based think-tank called Civitatis International has reportedly been charging its “junior associates” as much as £300 (about $450 USD) for each time they want a job reference. The company insists that the “junior associates” aren’t really unpaid interns, and there does appear to be some evidence in support of that statement; apparently, the “junior associates” were paying on the order of £1,600 (about $2,400 USD) for the privilege of fetching coffee and doing general menial work. There was also a charge for becoming “fellows” of the firm, a further expense offered to “successful” graduates of the “junior associates” program, although apparently all you got for the $600 to $900 additional dollars was the opportunity to put the title of “Fellow” on your resume…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that the use of unpaid internships has been on the rise for a number of years now, and an increasing number of companies are promising college students and recent graduates valuable job experience and eventual assistance in getting a paying job in exchange for unpaid labor. Reports of unpaid internships that turn out to offer no training or experience in anything other than unpaid scuttwork and are basically the company exploiting their so-called interns for free labor are also becoming increasingly common. However, this is the first example I can recall seeing of a company that is not merely offering to allow people to work for it for free but also asking them to pay for the privilege – and for the recommendations that are one of the jobs only remaining benefits…

It isn’t clear from the original article whether working for Civitatis International has ever helped anyone to get a high-level (or at least high-paying) job – or, indeed, to find employment at all. It is possible that spending several thousand dollars for this experience is as effective to job-seekers as paying a similar amount of money to a for-profit college or training school would be. It’s certainly no more outlandish than some of the employee/job-seeker funded executive search organizations I’ve run across in my travels, and those seem to remain popular despite all reason or logic to the contrary. The company certainly claims to be getting all of its “graduates” policy jobs in the $36,000 to $50,000 range, although they backed down under a reporter’s direct challenge and admitted that they have not actually had a 100% placement rate. Unfortunately, that very claim undermines the entire logic for this outrage…

If Civitatis International is really placing 100% of its “graduates” then why would they need assistance finding work, let alone letters of recommendation? And if their “junior associate” program is charging $3,000 or more and producing nothing in return, why are they then demanding more money instead of offering apologies (and possibly refunds) when their “graduates” have to scramble to get a job? Both of these claims can’t be true, which leads to the very real possibility that neither one of them is true; that in fact Civitatis International is nothing more than the UK version of Trump University and similar high-end scam offerings…

So tell me: what demeaning, exploitive, fraudulent things has your employer done recently? Because whatever it is, there’s a good chance that there are some folks in the UK who can top it…

Would You Believe…?

We’ve been talking in this space for some time now about the ongoing debate surrounding for-profit colleges, and specifically if the service they provide is worth the tuition they charge. There are some people who will insist that the entire industry is a scam; a carnival game that promises riches but will never give you any real value for your money – and in particularly egregious cases, like the “Trump University” scam, they are undoubtedly correct. There are also people who will insist that for most general education subjects the relative rigor of the school is less important than the fact that you took those classes in the first place, and there appears to be some support for that position as well. However, there is a new study out that adds an interesting spin on the debate…

You can pick up the original story from the Inside Higher Ed website if you want to, but what they’re talking about is a research project done by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), where the researchers sent out a little under 9,000 simulated applications for entry-level jobs, half of which depicted community college graduates and certificate holders, and half of which represented people with equivalent credentials obtained from for-profit schools. In all cases, the fake applicants were presented as young people, with 2010 high school graduation dates and with a consistent level of work experience, training, skills and abilities. And what the researchers discovered was that the response to the two different applicant pools was virtually identical – roughly the same percentage of people in each group received positive replies from employers and requests for interviews…

Now, there’s definitely a temptation to see this study as deflating the claims of the for-profit industry, and in fairness it’s hard to blame anyone for wanting to do that. Even leaving the outright charlatans out of it, we have all seen a lot of advertising over the past decade claiming that the for-profit schools can get you a better education on your own schedule, without having to deal with any of the aggravation associated with traditional institutions of higher education (like qualifying for admission, one imagines). But Academia in general has been rising to the bait in recent years, lumping for-profit schools that actually do provide value with programs that are really just multi-day advertising programs for someone’s personal writings (I’m looking at you again, Trump University) and claiming that the whole industry is fraudulent. And this study would appear to debunk those claims right along with the ones made by the for-profit schools…

Granted that paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a class that you can get at a local community college for under fifty is not necessarily a good value for the money, saying that such a program has no value would seem both unkind and inaccurate. If a given student can get the same results from either school, then the for-profits may be over-priced, but that doesn’t make them useless. And in cases where a local community college does not offer on-line classes, or sections that meet on weekends and evenings, the private sector could be the only practical option available for some students. We should probably also note that there is more to getting an education (at any level) than just how much it is going to help you find work. If students who are already employed are able to gain knowledge and skills – or even just self-confidence – that will assist them in their careers through any form of education, then it becomes increasingly difficult to conclude that their chosen program is not giving them good value…

As an educator, and a taxpayer, I can honestly say that I really don’t care how people go about learning more things, so long as they do. As a business analyst and a management consultant, I can very definitely say that if people are willing to pay extra for convenience (e.g. for classes held where and when they can easily attend) there’s nothing wrong with someone providing such a service. Of rather greater concern to me was the fact that both groups combined received responses from barely 20% of all of the companies to which they “applied”, and interview requests from just over 10%. If something like 90% of job applicants with two-year degrees or equivalent certificates can’t get as far as a job interview, we may have a bigger problem than where to spend our education money…

How Stuff Works: Stakeholders

I’ve mentioned the Stakeholder concept a few times before in this space, but it’s one of those evergreen topics that always seems to come up in the news – and occasionally in movies, novels, or real life – and I thought it might be a good idea to review the concept. Everyone knows that a corporation is governed by three groups – the shareholders, who actually own the company, the Board of Directors, who are elected by the shareholders and hire the senior management team, and the senior managers themselves, who in turn hire and manage everyone else who works for the company. But have you ever considered who else might have an interest (or stake) in how well the company performs, and whether or not it prospers?

Clearly, the employees who work for the company do. Although most of them probably don’t fall into any of those three groups (unless the company has an employee stock-purchase scheme as part of its compensation package), in many cases the employees will literally live and die right along with the company. But what about the other businesses from which our company purchases goods, services, or raw materials? If our company is their major customer, purchasing the bulk of their products, their survival may be just as dependent on the success of our company as our employees or shareholders are. And since those other companies have their own employees, stockholders and suppliers, they also have an interest in our success. But it doesn’t stop there…

Suppose there is a company whose business depends on some product that we make in order to stay in operation. Unless they can find another source for that product, the failure of our company will take them down, too, and throw all of their employees out of work (and potentially bankrupt their shareholders). Even if there isn’t, all of the companies that sell things to our employees will be negatively impacted by the loss of our revenue, and this could set up another chain reaction of companies failing and jobs being lost. But just within our own community, the local government depends on the tax revenue paid by our company and all of its employees to fund community services like police and fire protection, education, health, social services, and a host of other financial needs. If we go under, we could easily drag the entire community down with us, as well…

Now, it’s probably worth pointing out that even if our company is a publicly-held corporation, we have no fiduciary responsibility to any of these groups except our shareholders. In theory, the owners of our company could decide to take any number of actions that would benefit their financial interests in the short term at the expense of everyone else; one of the primary reasons the Board of Directors exists is to prevent that from happening (because no one would be willing to work for the company if that was going to be a regular event). But just because we aren’t financially responsible for the community in which we operate or the larger political unit (state or country) in which it is located, that doesn’t mean that our actions will not have consequences far beyond the scope of our annual report…

The truth is that even before the Industrial Revolution, the success or failure of one citizen would have a wider effect on his or her community than just that one person’s fortunes. As time has gone on, all of us have become increasingly interconnected, until today, when the failure of a company on the other side of the world (and of which you have never heard) could cost you your job, or even destroy your entire community. I’ve often said that it doesn’t really matter if you believe in the global economy; the global economy believes in you. The stakeholder effect is one of the more concrete examples of how that works…

It Finally Happened

For some years now I’ve been trying to deal with a reputation for not liking children, which I feel is completely undeserved. Part of it stems from the fact that I was single for all of those years, while the majority of my friends married, had children, and succumbed (to one extent or another) into the obsession the late George Carlin called “The Cult of the Child” – the belief that the world revolves around children in general, and their particular child most of all. I can understand why parents feel that way – and I imagine that doing so is probably an evolutionary survival trait. But like anything else, it causes problems if taken to extremes, as in the case of parents who can’t understand why the rest of us don’t enjoy listening to their child shrieking as much as they do. So, for the record, and hopefully for the last time, I have no issue whatsoever with children; I just don’t like badly behaved ones. It makes me want to slap their parents…

In the case of one young boy from New York, it would appear that law enforcement has already done some of that for me. You can pick up the story from the local CBS affiliate station if you’d like, but what they are reporting is that a woman in East Garden City, New York, has been arrested for leaving her seven-year-old son unattended at the Lego store in their local mall while she went shopping. After 90 minutes or so the child became frightened, and the store manager called security, who in turn called the police. Persons familiar with the case are quoted as saying that the mother thought there were store employees who looked after children playing in the store, despite the fact that Lego stores do not offer that service, there is no designated play area, no release forms to sign, no one to take responsibility for the children, or indeed, any reason to believe that anyone would be watching out for a child left alone…

Now, I’m fairly sure that some people reading this blog (assuming anyone reads this blog) are going to have trouble with my comparing a parent abandoning a child in order to go shopping at the mall to parents who follow their children around constantly but refuse to discipline them for any reason. After all, one of these behaviors is considered neglect, while the other is considered over-protective or obsessive, depending on your point of view. But in addition to spending decades as a childless bachelor, I’ve also spent a number of years now as a college instructor, and I am telling you that neither of these parental behaviors are doing the children any favors. Although, to be fair, anybody who has had to deal with teenagers, college students, or entry-level employees in the last decade or so could tell you the same thing…

As usual, I’m going to leave the moralizing about this topic to people who are better qualified, and just point out that both ends of the spectrum are problematic from a business standpoint. Nobody wants to deal with entitled employees who believe that they should be given lavish rewards for doing exactly what they please – because that’s what their parents always did. At the same time, no one wants to deal with parents using our place of business as a free daycare center because they can’t be bothered to take care of their own children. And since we can’t influence how people raise their children, we will have to work on this from the other end – by establishing clear and explicit performance standards, writing company policies that require accountability as well as performance, teaching business classes that encourage discipline and teamwork, and rewarding employees who live up to those standards…

And when absolutely necessary, calling the police and having the courage to risk legal action, criticism from Monday-morning quarterbacks, and reprimand from higher management ranks when we report some idiot for leaving innocent children in dangerous situations…

The Ethics of Expectations

Some time ago I wrote in this space about how people were spending tens of thousands of dollars – frequently money they had borrowed under student loan programs – on culinary programs in the mistaken belief that such a credential could immediately land them a $60,000 a year job on graduation. At the time I was rather harsh on the students, noting that entry-level jobs in that field range from $8 to $12 per hour, and pointing out that there are any number of free resources online that would allow anyone to verify that statistic if they bother to look. But we should also acknowledge that sometimes these students are actively deceived by unscrupulous education companies, who promise to provide special instruction that would allow their own students to bypass those entry-level jobs and move directly into high paying positions – or, at least, that’s what a class action lawsuit filed in Federal Court this week is claiming…

You can pick up the story off the Courthouse News site if you want to, but the story is simple enough. Members of the class are claiming that they were given false and unrealistic promises by the culinary school they attended, and are now stuck with $45,000 or more of student debt they can’t possible pay off and completely useless training – or, at least, nothing that would get them better than the aforementioned $8 to $12 per hour jobs. Suits of this kind are popping up more and more often, and I don’t intend to comment on the ethics of lying to your students, or any other customer, about the relative value and utility of the services you provide; I don’t feel there is any other side to the discussion. Preying upon the hopes and dreams (and naivety) of the customer in this fashion is fraud, and I hope the person or persons responsible are charged with criminal offenses and sued repeated in civil court as well. But this does raise the question of how far a company should be required to go in order to discourage potential customers…

Consider, if you will, that all service-based companies make money by providing some kind of (hopefully useful) service to their customers. Expecting an educational institution of any kind to turn away prospective students with money in hand isn’t reasonable, any more than expecting any other kind of service business to reject a customer would be, provided that the student can afford the course of study and has a reasonable chance of obtaining the credentials promised and getting the results he or she desires. But what about the case where one or more of these conditions do not clearly apply?

Suppose, for example, that there are high-paying jobs in the field in question, but only a few of them each year for thousands of applicants – can we still expect the school to refuse this student? What if there are jobs in the field, but the student in question is unlikely to complete the program or obtain sufficiently impressive credentials to get any of them? What if there are jobs available, and the student can qualify to get them, but the student loans they will need to complete the course of study will destroy their economic future and eliminate any chance of their buying a house or saving for retirement? How bad do someone’s chances of completing the ambition that brought them to the school have to be before we can reasonably expect the institution to send them away?

Which leads me to the question: do we, as managers, have an ethical responsibility to our customers to refuse them service if we believe that they have no chance of receiving the full benefit they want from our company? Does our answer change if we have provided the customer with a complete breakdown of the field, the service and the odds of success, but they persist anyway? No reasonable person is going to suggest that a qualified customer who can afford service should be denied it, or that a customer with a completely unrealistic expectation should be served. But at what point do someone’s odds of success become so bad that we must tell them to give up on our services and look for some other approach?

It’s worth thinking about…

Closer to Home

In my last post I described the extraordinary story of a request I received from one of my students, that I give him my blessing to appropriate some of the materials from our class and post them to a supposedly free website that might or might not compensate him for doing so. It may be that the world has changed even more than I realize, but when I was a student I would certainly not have run the risk of being expelled from the University, let alone sued or charged with a criminal offense, in return for a vague possibility of some future compensation. In fact, there is no way I would have risked angering my instructors – not all of whom were as even-tempered as I am – by asking such a question in the first place. But to me, this is only the beginning of the mystery…

Almost as puzzling, as far as I am concerned, is how does this website make any money? It is possible that they don’t actually give out any gift cards (e.g. everyone who “enters” one of their “drawings” is told that he or she didn’t win), but even if their web hosting and bandwidth are also free, how do they make any revenue on this service if the people downloading the class materials aren’t paying anything for them? It is possible to make money by hosting web ads, but people who come to your site looking for class materials for free are not likely to click on ads offering products for sale – and even less likely to make any purchase if they do. It’s also possible that there is a “premium” version of the site, offering even better stolen material (old test questions, perhaps?) in return for modest subscription fees. But this would make it much easier to catch the people running the site if you wanted to charge them with a crime – and much more likely that someone would be motivated to do that…

It is possible that the people behind this site – whoever and wherever they are – are planning to sell the materials to someone else, possibly other college instructors. A colleague of mine once told me that he had gotten a call from a professor at a university somewhere in Southeast Asia who was using his class materials to teach her school’s equivalent of his class, and who wanted to know if he would send her copies of his last few midterm exams so she could use the questions from them. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be willing to pay for my slides and materials when they could just make their own, or obtain similar resources from colleagues, departmental archives or publishers, all of whom are potentially sources of free teaching materials that do not involve copyright violations. It’s even harder to imagine when you consider that I’d probably make those materials available to anyone who asked politely…

When I was an undergraduate there was a note-taking service available on our campus that sent a professional note-taker to each class and then typed up that person’s notes and printed copies for anybody who wanted to purchase them. Ostensibly intended to give people the chance to focus on the class without needing to stop and take notes, it was more commonly used by students who were not attending the lecture on a given day to find out what had been covered. I don’t know if the professors whose classes were covered by the service were compensated or not, but they clearly knew these notes were being taken, since there was a published list of classes for which printed notes were available posted each week in the Student Union building. And I must admit that I don’t really care if my students take their own notes, copy a classmate’s notes, or purchase them from a service, so long as they actually study those notes at some point. So if the people who are running this website were to make contact with me directly about listing notes for my class, I would certainly discuss it with them…

They’d have to come up with better compensation than a vague chance in a drawing for a gift card that may or may not actually exist, however…

Close to Home

After rereading my last two posts I realized that I probably sound like I’m taking the whole matter much too lightly; as if I don’t consider the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to be a crime, or at least not a serious one. Let me assure my readers (assuming I have readers) that this is absolutely not the case. While I have never published any fiction, music or video, I have written several hundred of these short essays on a variety of topics, and I would be quite annoyed if anyone decided to steal my work – especially since I’m not charging to view it. But as I am one of 100,000,000 or so bloggers in the world, with only two followers and a few hundred visits a month, it has never really come up. It had never occurred to me that the issue might turn up in my day job instead…

A few weeks ago, one of my students emailed me requesting permission to post lecture materials and PowerPoint slides onto a website where other students would be able to download them. He mentioned that in return for these postings the owners of the site would offer him some small compensation, possibly in the form of gift cards, or at least chances in a drawing to win a gift card, although he did not seem to be clear on how that worked or why it would be worth his time, let alone worth the potential consequences of unauthorized use (theft, really) of intellectual property and the attendant possibilities of being arrested, sued, or thrown out of the University (any such action would be an Honor Code violation at MSU). Even more bizarre, at least from my perspective, was the argument he offered as to why I should give him my blessing to do this…

Somebody, my student argued, would steal my lecture materials eventually, since they are available to every member of every one of my classes each semester. If this was the case, wouldn’t I prefer that the credit (and theoretical compensation) go to someone who was at least polite enough to ask my permission first, as opposed to someone who would just steal it without any additional discussion?

This is the first time anyone has ever told me that the theft of my property (in this case, intellectual property) was inevitable, and suggested that I might as well just go along with it. In point of fact, I’m not at all certain this is the case, since my class materials are of no use to anyone who isn’t enrolled in one of my classes – all of whom can download them for free from our class homepage. There’s also the reality that most people are not that eager to be sued, charged with a crime, or thrown out of the University, or for that matter willing to risk all of those outcomes in return for – I really cannot stress this enough – vague promises of compensation later. The least unpleasant of these outcomes would effectively cost you thousands of dollars, and possibly your entire career – why would you risk that for one chance in a thousand at $20 worth of free merchandise?

Of course, none of this even addresses the truly eccentric aspects of the situation, such as why would you suggest to one of your instructors, who has the ability to give you a failing grade and prevent you from graduating (I teach a required class), that you are going to steal his work and there is nothing he can do about it? Or, for that matter, why would such a website exist in the first place? If there is no charge for using the site, how do the people running it make any money?

But that, alas, is a question for another day…

Always Suspected

There’s a surprisingly common belief in this country that major universities – and especially those with highly successful sports teams – maintain phantom courses on their schedule; classes that are recorded and graded as if they were normal academic subjects but which never meet and for which no work is ever required. It’s part of the stereotype of all college athletes being dumb jocks who are only there to play their particular sport, and of college athletics as hopelessly corrupt – effectively professional sports in everything but name. Like most generalizations, this one is at least partly hogwash. I have had a number of student-athletes in my classes at Michigan State, and I can confirm that all of them sat for their own exams and did their own in-class work, often brilliantly. I’ve actually had fewer attendance problems with the athletes in my classes than I have with the general population, and I’ve never heard of any of these “phantom” classes, at least in the Business School. According to a story that popped up last month, however, this may not be the case at North Carolina…

You can pick up the original story on the New York TimesSports page online if you want to, but what they’re talking about is an internationally-known professor and long-serving chairman of the African and Afro-American studies department at UNC Chapel Hill being indicted for having received payment for teaching classes that never happened – and which mainly enrolled athletes from North Carolina’s more popular and lucrative varsity teams. In many universities this sort of thing would be detected quickly, since it is unusual for the chair of a department to teach classes at all, and typical oversight would have noticed something fishy, but apparently the African and Afro-American studies department and related disciplines at UNC are highly Balkanized, and very little scrutiny is given to anything. The first, and frequently only, defense against this kind of shenanigans is the supervision of the department chair – which will not help much when he or she is the one committing the fraud…

Now, it’s possible that this is an isolated case, and the rest of the classes taken by student-athletes at North Carolina are completely legitimate. It’s even possible that this whole story is a misunderstanding, a witch hunt, or just really bad record-keeping, and that none of these allegations will prove to be true – there has been no court decision yet, and until there is we must assume that the professor in our story is innocent. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that every one of these accusations is correct, or even that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I’m calling it to your attention mostly because of the breakdown this represents in the university system – and the fact that any of these events are taking place is enough to prove that the breakdown, at least, is very real…

In almost any business enterprise, the individual who spends the money and the individual who authorizes the expenses should not be the same person. In the case of publically-held corporations, third-party audits are a Federal requirement, and in most government organizations (including state universities) the fiscal officer who reviews expenditures (including salary) can’t be the same person who is authorizing those expenditures. Unfortunately, such protocols are often ignored or circumvented as cumbersome, slow, or wasteful, since “everyone knows” that their company or agency would never hire anyone who would falsify financial records in the first place. In extreme cases this leads to scandals like the Enron and Global Crossing situations, but in academia it can lead to a well-respected institution granting college credit for classes that never actually existed…

In the long run I strongly suspect that the UNC case will prove to be a rare aberration in an otherwise honorable profession. Whether that will come about because no one is actually perpetrating such frauds, or because everyone else in America who is guilty of such malfeasance takes the hint from this case and starts looking for other ways to game the system remains to be seen, of course…

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…

The Ethics of Profit

We were discussing the subject of for-profit colleges the other day when the question came up about whether these enterprises have any functional utility. We’ve all seen the stories about crooked for-profit schools taking advantage of students by charging outrageous tuition fees, encouraging students to take out student loans they have no hope of ever paying back, or even accepting large cohorts of students, collecting non-refundable fees, and then flunking out the entire class for academic deficiency before the end of their first semester. But clearly not all of the companies in this industry are corrupt or fraudulent; many of them operate honestly enough, taking on students who are unable or unwilling to find suitable education in conventional channels and providing useful instruction at a reasonable price. The real question would appear to be not so much why the fraudulent organizations are tolerated, but under what conditions a useful for-profit college can be operated…

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…

Some versus All

Every semester when I begin the first day of my class, I like to tell my students that before the term is over I’m going to learn things from them, and I will do my best to teach them at least as many things. This is actually the case for any teacher, given that it’s not possible to teach anyone anything without learning more about the subject yourself in the process, but it’s probably even more correct in the case of business teachers. As I like to point out, I probably know more about business, or at least management, than any one member of the class – I’ve had twenty years of experience and two Master’s degrees; I would hope I know a few things about my subject. But there is no way I know more about business than the entire class put together; even allowing for just a few years of work and consumer experience for each person, the 40 of them have several times more years of business experience than I’ve been alive…

This makes cases where the people who run school systems assume that they are smarter, cleverer and more knowledgeable than all of their students combined seem all the more preposterous. Collectively, your students possess an amazing amount of knowledge, and a frightening mutual ability to solve problems, work out puzzles and generally outthink you. In the case of a security protocol or a lockout code, you are essentially betting that you (or whoever wrote the code) are smarter than the collective intelligence of hundreds or thousands of bright, curious, imaginative people – and that’s just counting the smart kids. Which makes the fact that students in Los Angeles required only a matter of days to hack the iPads they were issued by the school district an event so obvious it’s hard to imagine why nobody saw it coming from the beginning…

You can read the NPR story about it here if you want to, but the facts seem clear enough. The Los Angeles Unified School District signed a $30 million deal with Apple to provide iPads to all of their students for use in a variety of digital and distance learning applications, and then equipped the devices with software to both allow the schools to track the location of each iPad and also to restrict what web sites each unit could access. Less than a week later over 200 units had been “hacked” to get around the restrictions, and unless the software patches introduced this week are better than the original programming, there is reason to believe that all of the rest of them will be before much longer. As a teacher myself, I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how obvious these events are. A much better question, at least from a management standpoint, is what are we going to do about it?

Keeping our students off of restricted web sites isn’t really possible. If the government would allow us to jam all wireless transmissions into and out of the classroom we might be able to keep our students from updating their Facebook page while we’re actually talking to them, but the FCC won’t even consider such an action, and just asking nicely (or threatening to lower grades) does not appear to be of much use. And, as the linked story makes very clear, if we take away the official iPads our students will just turn to smart phones, tablets and other devices they already have. It’s possible that if the District were to invest enough money in encryption software they might be able to make the restriction stick, but I can’t help thinking that’s just throwing good money after bad…

In a broader context, of course, this whole situation mirrors the conflict between all managers (who want to see more work getting done) and all workers (who want to get paid as much money for as little work as possible). The District can’t compel the students to spend all of their time, or even the time they are supposed to be spending, in approved fashion, any more than a manager can. What they can do is borrow the same standard most line managers use, which is simply that if you work is completed (correctly) in the time required, then I don’t care what else you’re doing or how you are spending your remaining time. It may not be the authoritarian method of which the District seems so fond, and it certainly won’t help them to establish or maintain discipline. But it’s probably more effective in the long run than just giving all of the pads back to Apple…

The Ethics of Exceptions

This week I had a number of students ask me for exceptions to existing class policy for a variety of reasons. Some of them had real-world commitments that will interfere with scheduled events (including at least one case where it's a job interview conflicting with an exam), while others had managed to screw something up and were asking for clemency - or at least an extension of deadline. This isn't my first class at MSU, and accordingly I've made provision for most of these questions in the syllabus, including instructions for how and when it is acceptable to ask for an exception to our usual rules, but that hasn't kept some of my students from ignoring instructions, blowing off deadlines, or just doing what they want to do (instead of what I told them to do) and then requesting a special exception for them alone. In other words, it's a typical week in the life of pretty much every classroom teacher, ever. But it did get me thinking about the larger ethical question as it applies to life away from the classroom...

Let's consider, for example, the case of a line manager and an employee who wants permission to do something that isn't normally permitted under company regulations. In some cases, of course, this may involve violations of Federal law, state law, local ordinances, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the laws of business, the laws of physics, the laws of economics, or may simply involve complete fiduciary misconduct, in which case the line manager can just point out that such an exception will get both the manager and the employee fired, sent to Federal prison, or in extreme cases, killed (either by offended stockholders, offended customers, offended physicists, or by the aforementioned laws of physics). But sometimes you will get a request that isn't illegal or counter to company policy, but is outside the scope of normal operations. How do we evaluate such a request?

First off, we need to consider how granting such a request will impact our regular operations. Giving someone an hour off of work because a close relative needs them to donate a pint of blood for a critical operation isn't a circumstance that will happen often, nor should missing one hour out of a 40-hour (or possibly 50-hour or 60-hour) work week make a lot of difference to the productivity of the unit as a whole. And even if multiple members of the team are called upon to do this, the overall impact on work accomplished shouldn't amount to much, especially when compared to the negative effect that denying such a request would have. Making that exception for anything less critical, however, will almost certainly have consequences...

Once we have made even the most minor exception for even the most benign reason, the issue can always be raised that we did so in another case, but are not willing to do so in this case. In practice, this means that if we allow a twenty-year veteran of our department to leave work an hour early on a Friday when everything is done for the week and no rush projects are expected we will almost certainly have to deal with the department’s resident troublemaker demanding time off during the middle of the work day in the midst of a major crisis on the grounds that we made an exception for the other guy. And heaven help us if the troublemaker is able to claim that favoritism was extended to the other employee or that discrimination is being practiced against them…

No one wants to be the sort of by-the-book douche-nozzle who insists that everyone clock in and out on the dot of starting/ending time every day. But by the same token, no one wants to be having to explain why an exception was made that one time but can’t be this time, either. Ultimately, the reason companies have rules is so that everyone does get treated the same way, and the reason some managers are so dogmatic about obeying them is simply because of the consequences if they don’t. So I have to ask: is it worth the cost to morale to have set rules and consistently enforce them, even when the “kindly” thing to do would mean making exceptions? Is it worth having everyone break the rules whenever they want to (or claim unfair preferences were made whenever they can’t) in return for showing compassion when you want to? Where do you draw that line, and who gets to draw it?

It’s worth thinking about…