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Plain old-fashioned academic cheating, unlike for-profit school cheating. (photo: Mr_Stein via Flickr)
One of the ways that jobless workers have kept off the streets while upgrading their potential has been by going back to school for more training. Inevitably, that admirable tactic has attracted those looking for someone to cheat out of their money.
While there has been some benefit in training and self-improvement by the for-profit academies, a growing abuse of students, and funds intended for education, has been showing up in their aggressive selling programs and financing for their programs. The education department has instituted a program with matching aggression to cut off the abuse of finances that were intended for educational benefits.
For-profit colleges that pay recruiters on the basis of the number of students they sign up may lose access to U.S. government student aid, which provided the colleges with $26.5 billion last year and can account for as much as 90 percent of company revenue.
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The Department of Education, seeking to strengthen oversight of the for-profit college sector, is considering boosting fines and disqualifying colleges from participating in federal-aid programs when they give bonuses to admissions officers for enrolling more students, said James Kvaal, deputy undersecretary of education, in a telephone interview.
For-profit colleges got about 23 percent of all federal student grants and loans that went to U.S. universities in 2008-09, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, while educating about 12 percent of all students.
The Education Department has never made a college ineligible for financial aid programs for incentive-compensation violations and stopped considering the penalty in 2002 under the Bush administration. Mr. Kvaal declined to say when officials would decide whether to restore the enforcement measure….For-profit colleges are permitted to get up to 90 percent of their revenue from U.S. student grants and loans.
Desperate for work, faced with endless unanswered applications, jobseekers have proved especially vulnerable by marketing that presents an improved prospect for students with shiny new degrees. The profits generated for the for-profit institutions bear no relation directly to the employability of the students that the institutions market.
There is a particularly egregious sheen to the shilling of education that the for-profit institutions exercise. When it cheats the educational system out of badly needed funding while taking advantage of potential workers, it is a crime.
The elimination of cheating would go a long way toward increasing funds available for actual students, at actual academic facilities.
70 Comments
I have been shocked and awed by this. This is not just robbing taxpayers and students. This is subsidizing the neo-con ideology to destroy public education. Democratic Ratfucker Lanny Davis is leading the neo-lib campaign. A great article by Kay Steiger summarizes this Dee Cee Bagman and Corporate hired gun.
http://campusprogress.org/articles/the_fixer_lanny_davis_represents_union_busters_dictators_and_now_for-p/
Lanny has a new partner, government watch puppy Melanie Sloan.
Hollowing out education funding, even more than by administrative costs in legitimate facilities, definitely is increasing the destruction of our already low standing in the world, and in ability to attract high tech jobs.
Aargh! The fraud is everywhere! First, we give tax dollars to build and support the colleges, then we allow them to funnel even more thru hidden gems. Who loses, the students and the taxpayers. This country needs a complete overhaul!
Agree. A good beginning would be and IG (Inspector General) with real powers in every department in the government. Anywhere there are federal dollars with no real oversight, there will be crooks inventing ways to defraud the public.
I wonder how many of these for-profit colleges are advertising with slogans like ‘change you can believe in’. (Don’t laugh, I’ve seen that one. On buses.)
Another facet of this phenomenon is that for profit colleges and trade schools are placing false jobs ads. You apply to a “job” and soon start getting unsolicited phones calls about “expressing and interest in continuing your education” and that’s when you realize, you’ve just wasted your time and allowed somebody to add you to their database of potential marks. After a while, you start avoiding all ads that mention “training available” or “career building” whether they are legitimate or not because there’s no way to tell which is which. These are loathsome people who use loathsome tactics and don’t deserve to breathe the same air that i do.
Another reason, besides its incompetent chief, to shut down the Department of Education. There is no good reason that the federal government should be involved in education. NCLB, Race to the Top, all failures.
Arne Duncan: “As we look to shut down and turn around the 5,000 lowest performing schools around the country, about 200 of those happen to be charter schools, and that to me is absolutely unacceptable.” (The unacceptable part refers to the charter schools.)
http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/remarks-secretary-arne-duncan-national-alliance-public-charter-schools
IOW: ‘Hello, parents and children, I’m from Washington and I’m here to shut down your school.’ Shut down the DOE, I say.
Now we have to protect people from buying one commercial product (education) while forcing them to buy another (med insurance)? Let’s make government even larger and more pervasive, because people aren’t smart enough to do the right thing?
I wish that was the worst that they did. Recruiters get bounties for more students signed, whether qualified or not. Many of the programs are uncredited and lack sufficient resources. The tuition is also usually outrageous and students end up in debt, without job skills.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-05/stripper-s-college-degree-profitable-for-goldman-finds-70-000-was-wasted.html
What is funny is that Goldman Sachs was inflating the For-Profit Education bubble. But the bubble popped before GS could pop it. GS is facing the loss of billion. HA HA HA.
Actually they don’t breathe the same air. You breathe the good air. They suck the bad.
It would be nasty business anyway, but when so many people have become desperate, it’s especially evil. And, maybe too, it’s especially ironic that the more naive and less critical thinking folks are likely to be caught in their webs of deceit.
i always counsel my students to avoid the for-profit school option, and that was before this story came out. i guess i’m just an educational snob, but any school with the money of TV ads? probably not really “educational.” it’s always been obvious to me, but i guess all these years of advertising has worked, and i have come to realize just how little most americans know about what higher education once was, should mean, and sadly, is today.
Thanks for this report, Ruth. I was going to say you are a writing fool, but that just sounds wrong. You are a writing wiz.
Are you a high school teacher? Cool. Lucky students.
That is ridiculous. I think Ronbo Reagan already catapulted that meme, to destroy public education. Now Lanny Davis has lots of Goldman Sachs money to defeat the pointy headed intellectuals. It is true that those non-profit colleges got lots of lefty lib professors who brainwash their students to become anti-establishment.
Some For-Profit colleges are necessary. Many of the worst of these for-profit outfits are totally subsidized by problematic Federal student loans.
I’ve often thought of that too. And those people who are desperate enough to agree to launder money for Asians. I’ve already been offered several “positions” in which the job description was “working from home”, collecting and cashing checks, using MY bank account and then converting them into money orders and forwarding them. For that reason, I’ve started avoiding anonymous ads. There’s a reason they don’t want their names out there and it’s almost never a good one.
Thanks, and it’s always good to get feedback that’s worth something, you know. What you said above, too about the less discerning being the likely victims is the sad truth.
The tactic of paying to enlist victims was part of the mortgage scandal, also. When agents are paid to bring in business of any sort, it’s inevitable that needed standards are going to be another ‘victim’.
I’ve had the same experience, all these people want is a potential pocket to pick, and what they offer often sounds like a great opportunity. What a coincidence, and what a tragedy that they do take in the most gullible and least capable of taking care of themselves.
Good for you, Chidyke, I’ve seen these schools go from an actual opportunity for a diploma for kids (like my nephew who couldn’t make it in an actual academic discipline, but now can actually handle bookkeeping) to nothing more than a scam that takes advantage of those who often can’t even fill out the application form.
I’ve seen those ads too, and decided not to apply. See? a little critical thinking, and, voila, it’s clear.
There was another company that was web based and had to do with placing ads for their products. They wanted their candidates to show them five (5)!!!!! sample recruitment letters for specific blogs/websites as a trial. Way to get free free free work done. I declined to spend any time with them either. Grrrrrrr.
It’s easy to see who of us at this site have spent time looking for work online, huh?
And what a tragedy that kind of thing is even LEGAL in the United States. But like title loan(sharks) and payday loan(sharks), regulating it wouldn’t be bipartisany.
Yep demi, I’ve seen ads soliciting artwork for very specific product ads to “determine if you’re the candidate (they’re) looking for”. Of course one must sign a release that relinquishes all rights to your work to the company. That one made me simultaneously laugh and choke.
i am an educational consultant and admissions counselor. i help kids get into colleges and find money in the form of scholarships, and write educational policy for various think tank types etc
My jobhunting days are thankfully over, but I replied to one ad that, as I recall, purported to be for an accounts manager, and immediately proposed when I applied that I would work from home and use my bank account. I did complain to the newspaper that carried the ad, but don’t think the Dallas Morning News cares where it gets its funds.
Do either you, Ruth or Margaret knew if that is actually legal? ‘Cause, if it’s not, Margaret, you and I could start our own business. Turn these guys over to the DOJ for prosecution. Oh, that’s right. Nevermind.
It’s DOE that’s destroying education, which until recently and ought to be a local affair.
Some of the experiences Margaret, demi and I have had answering seeming job ads might be good to pass on, as well. Do you find good info for placing students with institutions that actually place them in jobs after the education?
Apparently it is legal because I’ve complained to the Statesman, the Express News, hotjobs and monster.com but the ads are still up afterwards.
Hooray for you! Not only employed, but helping people.
Bowing to you, my dear.
Fraud is illegal, of course, but the standards for conviction now require you prove intent as well as a crime. I can well imagine the fraudulent educational institutions can insist that they offered an education that met their advertising standard, and it was the student that failed to get it.
Great piece and comments. Thanks.
Yep Ruth. I’m sure the domestic ones at least have attorneys on retainer writing the ads for them and the offshore ones just don’t care.
DOE is not so new, and that’s funny, the debate topic my Sr. year in HS was federal funding for education, in 1962.
Ruth, you know how hard it is these days. there’s less money for scholarships, student loans are a worse and worse deal, tuition is up. there are more students applying than ever, more non-traditional applicants competing with regular HS and college grads for the same slots, and “dumbing down” is rampant at soooo many formerly “good” schools, esp public universities. it’s hard for me to put a good face on it, talking to middle class and poor kids who don’t really understand how badly they’ve been screwed.
whenever possible, i counsel kids to shoot for the stars, and go for those elite schools in which those who will be successful in our benighted future will graduate. i was lucky; i got the best in (scholarship funded) elite private education, but it makes me so sad to know that many like me when i was that age? they won’t, no matter what they do.
Margaret; ‘the domestic ones at least have attorneys on retainer writing the ads ‘
Probably ran ads asking for five legal opinions on it. /s
Thank you, hope some one learns from it.
LMAO!
Sad, indeed. The expectation that hard work and good character would insure some one’s place in a secure working environment has turned into a pipe dream worse than some of the ads we’ve been encountering. I don’t know how to tell straightforward, hopeful, kids that they’ve been screwed.
As promoted by NPR ( http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131109016 ) Walmart recently started offering degrees through work-experience and enrollment in American Public University ( which is private: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Public_University_System … aka American Military University ) Ain’t that nice?
My Asperhers son is in 11th grade and has finally started pulling good grades (4 A’s and 2 B’s) after struggling to overcome some of his challenges. I’m now starting to look at possible scholarships and am continuing to challenge him to bring home those A’s!
Privatizing education is a not-so-secret agenda of NPR, since much of their underwriting comes from Kaplan, Capella, etc. But this just makes sick all over again. These days, the previous layer of vomit has no time to dry before a fresh layer is added.
Walmart relies on its local community to subsidize employees health care as well. Working for the corporate welfare business isn’t a good plan for anyone, and the few I’ve known who did learned very early on that ‘working off the clock’ was basic necessity just to keep a job there. No wonder that that welfare addict will cop onto another way to pick our pockets.
How long before we find one of them combining privatizing prisons with that agenda. “Walmart Boystown and College 4 U.”, coming soon to a suburb near you.
I was briefly associated with one of these outfits, as part of an “industry advisory council” that was supposedly formed to tell the school what high-tech companies were looking for in new hires and what students should be studying.
I was contacted by a long-time colleague in both academe and industry who was working with a tiny faction at the school in question. This faction wanted to round out the course offerings and pursue legitimate, college accreditation. Except for my friend, they were purely business types who thought hat they could make a private college into an actual, money-making or at least self-supporting business. I was around colleges and universities for enough of my life to be sceptical. But it was worth a try if someone was putting up the money.
My former colleague was sincere and persuasive, so the council ended up with a pretty representative slice of the high-tech industry. There were mid-level folks from a number of the largest industry players and CEOs from a number of small firms and start-ups. The school management asked one question: what should they be offering to best suit the needs of the industry today?
To a man, everyone of us said the same thing. Teach them to write well. Give them plenty of humanities–especially history, philosophy, and literature–so that they learn critical thinking. Give them plenty of advanced math.
This created visible consternation among the school’s management. The president’s response was essentially, “No, no. We meant what programming languages should we teach? what hardware? what are the exciting new technologies htat we should list in our brochures?”
The most outspoken of the participants, the CEO of a small,engineering startup was blunt. He wanted to teach his new hires how to program his company’s way and he’d supply state-of-the-art hardware when he hired them. Technology was changing all the time. He wanted people who could teach themselves, continuously, for the rest of their careers. Everyone at the table agreed. There was no support–zero–for the technical-school, paint-by-numbers approach to training. It might work when teaching how to drive a semi. But it wouldn’t work for anything that we did.
We had one or two more meetings. But the school’s management rapidly lost interest. It was clear that they considered the liberal arts curriculum that the IT industry wanted to be too expensive, too unprofitable, at least in the short term, and, above all, too hard to use in their TV advertising. They were selling the mirage of quick and easy fixes to unemployment, not a difficult, real-world approach to real-world problems. They mostly wanted to use our company affiliations to endorse their programs and perhaps to get free equipment–nothing that most of us were authorized to provide had we wanted to. The school managers were prepared to let some of their faculty toy with the idea of offering a real education only as long as it brought prestige or increased mearketability. They were not prepared to spend money on actually doing it.
My colleague soon resigned from the school, along with most of the others who had real credentials. The school went on as it had and became an early objec of scrutiny in the current scandals.
The bottom line is that trade-school management knows nothing about academics and cares even less. Perhaps more surprisingly, it also knows nothing about the needs of the industries it supposedly prepares people for–and cares not at all. Preparing/retraining workers of industry is just a story thes schools tell in order to separate students and the government from their money.
So banning recruitment bonuses is, I suppose, worthwhile. But the real solution is ban these ongoing frauds from participating in financial-aid programs altogether. Only real, accredited community colleges, colleges, and universities should be eligible.
My hyperactive son barely made it thru HS, then took a year off – and it turned him into an honors student in college. Sometimes things work out, past all hope.
Melanie Sloan has not left CREW yet. But she is already in a scandal with a timeline. Thank you Salon.
http://www.salon.com/news/washington_dc/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/11/22/ethics_watchdog_sloan_joins_davis
ut the real solution is ban these ongoing frauds from participating in financial-aid programs altogether. Only real, accredited community colleges, colleges, and universities should be eligible.
yes. yes. YES!
lobby your representatives for this, please, all of you. you can’t begin to appreciate how important this could be.
My quick and dirty solution would be to separate the For-Profit Student Loans, making it a separate program.
Thanks for trying, although that’s really inadequate and trite. I have a friend whose son works for a campus of Phoenix, and worry about what moral hazard that entails. How do you live with selling a fraud to people desperate for the reality you’re playing off of – and know they’re getting into a debt they’ll never be able to pay off? Just hoping no one has to learn that art, even with a full scholarship.
I personally know a “PA” who got his certification from a for profit, unaccredited diploma mill. When the VA found out about it, it was all quietly swept under the rug and he kept his job and supervisory position. Meanwhile, I can’t even work for the VA because I got thrown out of the Navy for being lgbt before DADT came into effect. With policies like this in place, I see very little hope of changing things. I mean why is anybody who cares more about personal traits than qualifications going to want to change anything.
Thanks for the good work you do though.
Who won the debate, do you recall?
margaret! my sister! /hugs/
fellow “ex” Marine here, similarly tossed. and i was top of my class at Quantico. the f*ckerz.
Bill Egnor has a fresh cross-post available: Washington Post’s Gerson Hacks Up Another Fur Ball Into National Debate
donbacon, a debate team takes both sides, presents each one – neither side won, and I don’t recall the final teams. Mine won from each side at one time or another.
I graduated top of my class at Millington and got accelerated advancement out of basic training. Didn’t matter having teh gay though..
Hugs back sweet lady.
And a good post it is. Recommended.
Many of those degree factories have little to do with manufacturing degrees; they manufacture student loans. Students are cash cows, like top college athletes. It doesn’t matter whether they study, graduate, get a job or improve their prospects of doing so. It matters that they sign on the dotted line and that those loan funds pour into their for-profit coffers. It’s one more abuse of the middle and working classes the government subsidies with little care about the abuse and the waste of taxpayer funds.
Government-subsidized, that is, taxpayer subsidized student loans are an essential feature in today’s high-cost education market. But student loan factories produce little but debt. The market encourages rather than restrains their excesses. They are an elegant example of an industry that cries out for responsible regulation.
The faculties at these places are really the other victims of our corrupt system of academic finance.
In my experience, most of the instructors have postgraduate degrees but cannot find employmnet at real universities. Why? It’simple: universities now use graduate students to teach most of their undergraduates. These graduate instructors get paid next to nothing, typically have no health insurance, and almost never enjoy the pension plans or other benefits reserved for “real” faculty. Often teaching loads stretch out their studies to at least twice the norm in their parents’ day. Often they ahve student loans themselves.
People often think that the public schools provide an alternative, but they don’t. To teach your subject at a public or parochial school, you have to go back, attend, and pay for teachers’ college so that you can obtain an “education” degree. You cannot get the required state certificaation or join the teachers’ union without it–even though your degree qualifies you to teach your subject at an advanced level.
So, for the last 20-30 years, a person with a Masters or Doctorate in English, Math, or History has had two choices: stay an academic of sorts by doing underpaid, subpar work in a for-profit diploma mill or a community college (which is often no better, paywise or academically) or do what I did: talk your way into an industry that still has room for generalists and perpetual students. Now, the economic downturn is threatening the latter path for many.
Ultimately, the problem comes down to what we value. We need more well-educated people who can solve problems in dispassionate, well-considered ways. We do not need more circuit-board assemblers. So we need to adequately fund both education and educators.
I, for one, oppose student loans as a funding mechanism for education, because they impose undue burdens on those it is in society’s interest to educate. Follow Europe’s example. Anyone who demonstrates their ability in the free public secondary schools should receive free, public higher education at a real college or university. Cover the cost on the back end, in thform of higher productivity, greater national prosperity, and, perhaps, even wiser governance.
This helps explain why I get so many annoying pop-up ads from “Classes USA”.
You like the locally-controlled version where no one learns anything that the local businesses don’t want?
I got going and failed to answer the question I started in on: how to answer the young man in the moral quandary?
I think it is fairly easy to answer: he just shouldn’t sell fraud. He should provide the real thing, to the extent that he is able. If he is ever forced into a position where would have to act dishinestly, he should resign. Otherwise, he shouldn’t worry.
It really is that simple. There’s a balance in all things. True, we have no job security now. But the converse is that no job has any real hold over us. An employer that demands dishonesty today is that much more likely to let us go tomorrow. So write that tersely professional, painfully polite letter of resignation, and screw him. Walk to the next job.
Exactly. Faculty members at these places can do what they want–teach, not teach, whatever. The one thing they cannot do is give failing grades.
Nothing will get an instructor on the administration’s bad-actor list faster. The instructor will be told flat out to change the grade (verbally of course). It he does not, he will not have a job at the end of the semesters, and an adminsitrator will quietly replace the failing grade with an Incomplete.
The problem with failing grades is that the government–or at least the VA–may not pay for failed classes. D’s are OK. Incompletes are even better, though–they insure that the student will be around for another term’s worth of payments.
There are crooks angling to dip into federal money even with real oversight. Best thing is to just eliminate that pool of federal dollars and let the taxpayers keep them to spend as they see fit.
Thanks, I have heard actually that those ‘adjunct’ professors have proved to be inadequate for teaching the massive freshman classes that specialize in prepping a student to do college level work. The failure to establish a top-notch professorial level staff would also seem to be threatened by this short-term profit approach as well. It’s sad that anyone who’s pursued an education, and his/her interests, could wind up in the position of being asked either to sell it short or wind up on the streets. That quitting and walking away isn’t such an easy thing to do.
including coopting said IGs.
No, we need something from the late 1700s.
A slight twist on that scenario is fake job ads that really want to co-opt you into the “job” of selling the supposed education over the phone to other unemployed unfortunates. I gave someone an earful over the phone when it was proposed to me. Also, at most of the on-line job boards you have to click through a page offering “educational opportunities” on your way to a legitimate job ad.
Sorry, I mis-spoke. It was the darn locally-controlled education that only prepared me to pick apples (the local business) that led me to say who instead of which.
I should have asked which side of the debate prevailed.
I thought immediately, when I first heard of it, that the Bill and Melinda Gates advocacy on behalf of ‘community colleges’ was part of this whole picture. Turns out, Melinda was on the board of edu-whore Kaplan, until she stepped down in the face of the mini-scandal surrounding it. I think that the for profit ‘college’ boom is part of a coordinated assault on the middle class.
1. Educate people in a narrow technical sense that insulates them from a liberal education that could equip them with critical thinking skills.
2. Leave them deeply in debt in order to confine them to the lowest levels of the work force and make them docile.
3. Rob the treasury to provide subsidies for the edu-whores and
inflate the deficit, the better to provide a rationale for gutting social security, medicare and medicaid.
4. Reduce upward mobility & extinguish the formerly universal middle class asperation toward college degrees, graduate and professional schools.
5. Make higher education available only the elites and freeze the already top heavy soci-economic order in place.
Nice trick, hey?
Nice trick, hey?
The previous administration already tried that, also without cutting services such as military and roads, which is why we’re in the present disaster.
Responsible public servants?
Or to paraphrase the Deleware phantom who has already been flushed most of the way down my memory hole: “Walmart Я U.”