Imagine constantly being enticed by commercials for a fine dining restaurant, offering a scrumptious five-course meal at an incredible price. The prices seems like a steal and the delighted customers in the ads clearly loved the food, so you decided to give it a try.
But midway through the appetizer, you realize the food has no flavor, uses cheap ingredients and isn’t the least bit filling. Then, when the check arrives, it’s triple the advertised price and your coupon isn’t accepted due to some complicated loophole. You speak with your waiter, the manager and the owner, but no one offers an apology and they still demand that you pay the full price.
Congratulations; your frustrating dining experience was akin to the disheartening experience of millions of students enrolled at for-profit colleges. These students — typically veterans or adults with children and/or full-time jobs — spend hours of time and thousands of dollars to receive a subpar academic experience from an institution that cares far more about their wallets than their learning, eventually awarding the minority of students who manage to graduate with astounding debt and a degree that’s rarely taken seriously by employers.
It’s time to outlaw — or, at least, seriously modify beyond recognition — the practices of these immoral companies. And yes, I believe that “companies” is the most fitting term; they aren’t worthy of the word “college” or “university.”
Unlike nonprofit institutions, such as NSU — which are designed to focus on students’ needs and interests to develop intelligent learners and successful professionals, for-profits are designed to focus on money, developing large paychecks for owners and shareholders. Whereas nonprofits operate independently of an ownership structure, for-profits must create high financial returns for their shareholders. Traditional colleges are led by a board of trustees and often make decisions from student surveys and initiatives; for-profits answer to — you guessed it — their shareholders.
Unsurprisingly, these collegiate cash cows have low graduation rates and massive federal loan problems, and learning, which is marketed as the company’s product, is rarely achieved.
In a November 2011 article in “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” appropriately titled, “How For-Profit Colleges Fail Their Graduate Students,” freelance writer Yvonne Cnachola recalled reviewing the dissertation of a for-profit student who, Cnachola claims, “did not know how to paraphrase, how to quote, how to cite correctly in American Psychological Association style, how to write a transition from one paragraph to the next, or how to balance sources with her own commentary.” The author wonders, as do I, how the student could possibly have ever set foot — physically or virtually — inside a classroom. And the student wasn’t fresh out of high school; she was in a doctoral program. Clearly, she was ill-prepared for the work force.
Yet, it seems that most for-profits are equally ill-prepared to graduate their students. A 2008 report by the Education Trust found that only 22 percent of first-time, full-time bachelor’s degree students at for-profit colleges graduate within six years. In comparison, the study found that 55 percent of such students graduate from public institutions and 65 percent from private nonprofit schools. Federal data from 2010 suggests that the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit university with campuses in over 40 states, graduates only 9 percent of such students.
Going back to the fine dining analogy, imagine over 90 percent of customers fleeing their tables before finishing their meals, perhaps even gifted with food poising. As phrased in a July 13 article published online in The Economist, “The inference is that for-profit universities recruit anyone who is eligible for federal funds but care little about what happens to them afterwards.”
Many for-profit “schools” — truly, I hate using that term for them — aren’t even accredited, though admissions counselors are experts at slickly deceiving their students into believing otherwise. The America Dietetic Association, the parent organization of the Commission on Accreditation for Dietetics Education, notes on its website, eatright.org, that many universities — including for-profit giants Kaplan University, the University of Phoenix and American Intercontinental University — are not accredited and, therefore, students are not eligible to take the exam needed to become a registered dietitian or dietetic technician. Yet, a March 2011 article in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” exposed that many students in Kaplan’s program weren’t informed of that, until after they’d spent or borrowed thousands of dollars to enroll.
Commercials for these academic leeches play ad nauseam, complete with inspirational music, smiling students and slogans like “earn your degree today,” making obtaining an education seem as easy as ordering a new outfit online. Academics are portrayed as something that can be bought, never mind needing to work hard and challenge yourself. And, it turns out, money often won’t even do the trick, as schools aren’t properly accredited and the programs don’t provide students with any support outside the classroom. Just as the United States Department of Agriculture would ban an ad for a candy that claims to be fat-free if it has eight grams of fat, these deceiving ads need to be banished from the ears and eyes of susceptible viewers. It’s time for for-profit college owners, like Donald Trump — owner of bogus “college” the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative — to hear “You’re fired.”
Be grateful to be a NSU Shark, not chum for the connniving sharks who own for-profits. NSU may not be entirely free of business-motivated decisions, but from its student surveys to town hall meetings to student government associations and even the existence of The Current, it’s clear that NSU cares about its students as unique, intelligent people, not walking, talking wallets.
