Tag Archives: for-profits

Chopping It Up on Twitter With Joe Biden

7 Apr

I roll like that now.

So, this is a real thing that happened. Trapped between teaching my class and going to my next class I see a planned chat with the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, starting on twitter.

Lo and behold he wants to talk about college affordability.

Well, I wrote a song about that. Like to hear it? Well, you know the rest.

I’ve participated in Twitter chats like this before and have found a definite bias against responding to lay policy wonks, academics, or anyone asking very specific, pointed policy questions. So, I never expected Joe to respond to this:

In fact, I said as much immediately after tweeting that:

So imagine my surprise when Joe answered!

It’s an interesting statement.

I doubt that the VP’s position on for-profits differs from the White House’s position. It’s only 140 characters but I’ve parsed less. Let’s go for it:

- State funding crisis of public colleges is being positioned as strictly a state issue.

- For-profits, minus a few bad actors, are seen as a net positive.

- There’s some implied neo-liberal educational theory happening here: profit is good, competition is good, the strong will survive, individuals should shoulder cost of education since they reap the benefit. (“profits plowed back into student opportunities”)

I, of course, take serious issue with profits being plowed into student opportunities. If that was the case for-profits would be not-for-profits — legally prohibited by the tax code from spending profits on anything but that which benefits students. The very definition of for-profit is that profits are EXTRACTED from the institutional entity and paid to owners/shareholders. I’m not sure how that equals ‘plowing” profit back into student opportunities.

Something’s being plowed alright but that’s neither the form nor the direction of the plowing.

It’s an unfortunate response from the White House but not a surprising one. We seem to have decided that the book is closed on education as a public social good. I wish it had, at least, been a bloody battle. Alas, the lamb seems to have been slaughtered with n’ary a peep.

The only possible “do-gooder” spin I can imagine is that the federal government is encouraging the investment of federal student loan money in for-profits to continue as a “stick” to prod states to re-invigorate public universities. It’s still a competitive model but maybe a little…kinder?

The only other alternative? The for-profit lobby invested wisely.

Either, or. It does explain why, despite the negative press and political challenges to the legitimacy of for-profit colleges, analysts remain relatively bullish about their stock.

Regardless, it was a cool moment on twitter. Rivaled only by the time Star Jones saw my Payless Shoe joke tweet, responded, and totally got the joke.

But, then, the stakes were way lower with Star Jones.

Project Rose: What Language Says About Legitimacy

20 Mar

You may or may not know that my own research is concerned with the legitimacy of for-profit higher education, particularly what that legitimacy means for outcomes and structural opportunity. So maybe you can imagine that the Chronicle article this week about “Project Rose” is one of my favoritest things in recent memory.

Public Domain

The piece, by Goldie Blumenstyk, reveals an internal memo that circulated the sector’s professional organization the ACPSCU. The memo was a guide to member institutions about how to talk about the sector in language that would convey a greater sense of organizational legitimacy. The article says:

Would that which we call a “parent company” seem worthier if it were a “university system?” Would it impress Congress if student “re­cruiters” were called by any other name? “Coun­selors,” perhaps?

It seems so—at least to those in the for-profit-college industry’s main trade association. For at least a year, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities quietly pursued a campaign, called “Project Rose,” whose goal was to change the vernacular of the sector to de-emphasize its retail-grade jargon.

There is much here that is fascinating but I keep getting stuck on this part:

The intent, it says, was to ensure that when representatives of for-profit institutions speak, the words they use to describe their institutions, education, and students “command respect and reflect professionalism.” The document goes on to list a series of “problematic” advertising tactics and statements made during calls with investors that fostered negative images of the industry, such as “Rise in Student Aid Entitlements = Automatic Revenue Bump.”

That’s interesting because of the implied audience. The sector’s re-tooling campaign is not aimed at potential students as much as it is aimed at regulators, politicians, and the general public. I find that fascinating because it suggests the sector is aware of its compromised institutional legitimacy.

Many have a lingering, nagging perception of for-profits as not “real” college. But instead of tackling that perception through the building of social networks, say, among alumni or faculty it proposes to tackle the perception of politicians and journalists. That supports something I suggest: the sector is far more concerned with its political legitimacy (it’s legal right to operate) than it is it’s cultural or cognitive legitimacy (the general acceptance of the institution in the public imagination).

I think that’s a wrong move for a sector that is likely at a crossroads.

There is now entirely too much money (about $50 billion according to some estimates) for the sector to lose it’s legal right to confer degrees or accept federal financial aid. That ship sailed long ago with a crew of lobbyists at the helm. But the cultural legitimacy of the sector is the biggest concern. It not only threatens the expansion of the sector but it undermines the value of the degrees of the students from the sector. That’s a recipe for continued failure.

Again, very, very interesting. Now, who do I have to pay to get my hands on that Project Rose report? Goldie? You like good coffee and gold coins, don’t you Goldie?

The Devil You Don’t Know…

10 Mar

NOTE: This is previously published. I continue to migrate former content to the site. I still stand by this one even as I work to figure out how to address these questions.

It is no secret that I come from a colorful, Southern people. Among those folks there’s a saying that the Devil you know is better than the Devil you don’t know.

It’s a charming colloquialism that pretty much sums up my feelings about for-profits, particularly my feelings about for-profits and students of color.

The academic literature about for-profits is sparse and heavily weighted towards economic discussions of valuation, markets, globalization, and competition. All worthy discussions those but college in the U.S. has never been a purely rational ROI decision.

Education, in general, has been the avenue through which federal battles of citizenship, equity, equality, and justice have been waged. No other social institution has represented the core principles of American-ness as has the American School. It is no accident that that civil rights organizations like SNCC were founded on the campuses of historically black colleges or that the battle for an inclusive Africana curriculum on prestigious white campuses like Cornell were waged by black students. Despite the literature about a black oppositional culture to educational achievement there is a long history of black Americans who fought and died for the right to an education.

We get that education matters.

And in an increasingly competitive free market education came to mean college.

Going to college is not just a matter of economic progress for those who were historically shut out of attending. It represents social capital, access, and respectability. A college degree is not unlike the “American dream” of owning a home in that the ultimate end isn’t the product but the product’s symbolic meaning in a culture that conflates home ownership, a car, and a college degree with being a good person.

So, for-profits aren’t just selling a means to an end. They are not just providing a credential anymore than Sallie Mae was just selling home loans. For-profits are well aware, as judged by the language in their commercials, that they are selling a dream of American respectability.

Yet, what we know about for-profits’ ability to deliver on that promise is woefully inadequate. Researchers and for-profit lobbyists alike mistakenly conflate the income potential of a college graduate of a traditional college with that of a for-profit graduate. Maybe being a graduate of ITT Technical Institute will lead one to earn over $1 million more in his or her lifetime than a high school graduate.* The point is not that for-profits are being dishonest about the value of their degrees. The point is that we do not know if they are lying about the value of their degrees.

What we don’t know about for-profits significantly exceeds what we know about them by anyone’s metric.

Maybe for-profits do a better job of remediating and graduating black and brown students who are too often products of under-served, failing public K-12 systems. Maybe for-profits are charging a fair tuition that is justified by the lifetime return-on-investment. Maybe choosing a for-profit over a traditional college makes sense by every decision-making metric for low-income black and brown students. Maybe, maybe, maybe…but we don’t know. The Department of Education hasn’t moved to collect the kind of institutional data about for-profits that has long been standard at traditional colleges. So, researchers — we few who are inclined to care — are left to piece together quantitative data that does not match the current reality where for-profits are dominating in the enrollment of black, low income students.

The result is that anyone can say damn near anything about for-profits without outright lying. To lie there has to be a definitive truth and right now we are short on truths when it comes to for-profits. So they can tell students with college aspirations and an honest desire for the American dream who don’t have the social capital in equal quantities that a for-profit can get them to the promised land. On the other side detractors can claim that for-profits are predatory and absent of any redeeming social value.

Neither party is lying and neither is telling the truth.

It’s a devil of a problem. And I’m inclined to trust the devil I know over the devil I don’t.

* A statistic used in almost every promotional material of for-profit colleges is the US DOE statistic about lifetime earnings of college grads over high school grads. See here , here, and here.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie Cottom

Tressie McMillan

Tressie McMillan-Cottom

Mitt Romney and For-profits

15 Jan

Today the Huffington Post features a story on Mitt Romney’s praising for-profit colleges for their affordability (Mitt Romney’s Rationale On For-Profit Colleges At Odds With Reality). Politics aside for a moment a commenter asked an interesting question:

For profit colleges are so great that how many of Mitt’s many kids went to one? Oh, they’re just for lower class people who can easily afford all that debt? How many for profit schools are in the top 100 of anything? Mitt seems like all sorts of ideas that take money from the lower half of the population and inject it into his people’s wallets. — ncsteeler

It’s a question that I had posed, rhetorically, many times. Last semester I tried to tackle a similar, answerable question (kids are not only off-limits but methodologically impossible) : How many for-profit colleges are led by graduates of for-profit colleges?

I found that of the 8 largest for-profit colleges only ONE is lead by someone who possesses a for-profit college degree. An excerpt from that paper:

Of the eight for-profits analyzed only three colleges are lead by presidents possessing a PhD. It is notable that two of those three for-profits are also the largest in the sector: University of Phoenix and Strayer University.  The third, Argosy, is one of the few for-profits to confer PhDs. Two of the for-profit presidents do not have a degree higher than a bachelor’s degree and one has an MBA. Also notable is that the biography of the president of ITT Technical Institute could not be located and the president of the eighth entry, Corinthian College is currently without a president having chosen not to replace the leader who resigned in October 2011 under contentious circumstances resulting from a federal investigation. Of the eight for-profit presidents only one possesses a degree from a for-profit college: Craig D. Swenson of Argosy University who earned a PhD from for-profit Walden University.

This could offer some interesting fodder for how much the for-profit industry values their own degrees. For-profits aren’t just schools, they’re major employers. Do they hire their own graduates?

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