Monday, October 29, 2012

Education: News From the Front

"As consumers wise up about education spending, for-profit colleges are getting schooled. Institutions such as Apollo Group Inc.'s University of Phoenix, DeVry Inc. and Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan — who only a few years ago reported double-digit student gains on a regular basis and posted hundreds of millions in profits — now are hemorrhaging students." [WSJ]

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"'Our classes are basically completely filled, they're 100% full. And it's maddening for us because we pride ourselves on access,' says [Santa Monica College] president Chui Tsang. Desperate to widen access, last spring he came up with a programme he called Advance Your Dreams. Tsang's plan would enable students to pay up to 400% more for a guaranteed seat in a class, and the money generated would have allowed extra classes to be arranged." [BBC]

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"What is more surprising — because no one else has looked at this question lately anywhere in the country — is that the laid-off people around Janesville who went to Blackhawk [Technical College] are faring worse than their laid-off neighbors who did not. We discovered this striking fact by comparing the dislocated workers who retrained with a larger group of about 28,000 residents, from the two counties where most Blackhawk students live, who had collected unemployment benefits recently and not gone to the college. For one thing, the people who didn’t retrain are working more. About half of them had wages every season of the year, compared with about one in three who went to Blackhawk. An even bigger gap exists in how much those who have jobs are earning. Before the recession, we found, the two groups – the dislocated workers who went to school and the ones who didn’t – were, on average, getting paid about the same. Afterwards, the ones who didn’t retrain are earning more. Their pay has fallen by just 8 percent – about one-fourth the size of the pay drop among the people who went to school." [Amy Goldstein, ProPublica]


How to interpret?  Sounds like the market is working its magic, and fraudulent for-profit schools are getting what they deserve.  It just makes sense to charge more for new access, and people who doubt that care more about fairness than they care about people.  And the only thing that Obama and Romney agree on, is wrong.  Happy Monday!

Nod to Kevin Lewis

1 comment:

Tom said...

"And the only thing that Obama and Romney agree on, is wrong." I knew that, but it's nice to have details.

Lucky for me, I had a chance to vote against both of them.