More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

[flintlock]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

How many "education for profit" degrees go out to those youngsters vs older workers looking to boost/change careers?

The value of an advanced education has been diluted. When it's made available to everyone regardless of qualifications other than ability to pay, it becomes like High School. There is a reason many of these folks didn't get into "real" schools. They weren't qualified. The fact they failed to see they were being scammed could be seen as an "F" on the final exam of the "School of the real world". I can't blame them for trying. They know they may need this paper to punch their ticket someday. But the fact someone will lend you money on a degree that may not be worth the cost should not be ignored. When I heard they made school loans full recourse it made me sick. The fact our government is in cahoots with these people is all the proof I need to know they are not worth a damn.

[don]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

How many "education for profit" degrees go out to those youngsters vs older workers looking to boost/change careers?

The value of an advanced education has been diluted. When it's made available to everyone regardless of qualifications other than ability to pay, it becomes like High School. There is a reason many of these folks didn't get into "real" schools. They weren't qualified. The fact they failed to see they were being scammed could be seen as an "F" on the final exam of the "School of the real world". I can't blame them for trying. They know they may need this paper to punch their ticket someday. But the fact someone will lend you money on a degree that may not be worth the cost should not be ignored. When I heard they made school loans full recourse it made me sick. The fact our government is in cahoots with these people is all the proof I need to know they are not worth a damn.

Flint, now dig this. My son, in his mid-30s, way beyond listening to me in any real sense, drank the Kool-Aid and went to a cyber-school to get a BA he felt he might need, since many of his co-workers had these useless sheepskins on their cubicle walls.(He works for Northrop Grumman) When we visted him mid-way through his "studies" he excused himself and went down to his basement to take 3 course lessons. In 15 minutes he was back- all done! My son has never been an academic wunderkind. Well, he has his "BA" and a big fat student loan debt. What are you gonna do .... but soldier on. And remember, pal, FIRE steers the GOV where the water lies .... not the other way around.

[oddlots]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Hey Don,

I missed out on this. Any other pics?

[housingcrashsurvivor]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

How many "education for profit" degrees go out to those youngsters vs older workers looking to boost/change careers?

The value of an advanced education has been diluted. When it's made available to everyone regardless of qualifications other than ability to pay, it becomes like High School. There is a reason many of these folks didn't get into "real" schools. They weren't qualified....

Just to comment here that even otherwise well-qualified students can not get into some programs of traditional not-for-profit universities because of space constraints. It isn't just the ability to pay. Sometimes not even a good GPA gets you in.

I'm currently considering a new career late in life in a helping field. I would like to have taken a nursing class but can not even take a class as a non degree seeking student because they only allow those accepted into that college. Enter competition in education.

Similarly, in social work, most classes (particularly at the undergrad level) are only accessible to students accepted into the program and acceptance is not just based on GPA. You can have a higher GPA than someone who was accepted yet be rejected. As well, that curriculum is structured such that you must start at a certain time so that if you miss acceptance, you have to wait another entire year to reapply, done purposely to discourage.

Meanwhile:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix
"The average age of a University of Phoenix student is between 33 (undergraduate) and 36 (graduate)"

http://blog.edvisors.com/online-educ...n-the-upswing/
"At both Harvard and Notre Dame the average age is now 27. The University of Phoenix, which offers both online and traditional degree programs, has an average student age of 35-37. On a larger scale thirty-eight percent of all college students are now 25 or older, according to a recent U.S Census Bureau report"

http://talent.kaplan.edu/Assets/PDF/kaplanhistory.pdf
"The average age of a KU online student is 34."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYU_Stern
"The average age of executive MBA degree candidates is 38"

And I'm not sure but I think this next one is reporting a 13 year old and a 91 year old. I fall somewhere inbetween.

http://uwf.edu/ir/past/factbk/avgage.htm

Headcount for Fall 2005
Division	Headcount	Average Age	Minimum Age	Maximum Age
Lower	3,675	22.92	17	65
Upper	4,106	26.17	17	72
Total Undergraduate	7,781	24.64	17	72
Beginning Graduate	967	32.34	20	64
Advanced Graduate	271	44.30	25	80
Total Graduate	1,238	34.96	20	80
Unclassified	636	37.54	13	91
Total Enrollment	9,655	26.81	13	91

[bpr]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Just to comment here that even otherwise well-qualified students can not get into some programs of traditional not-for-profit universities because of space constraints. It isn't just the ability to pay. Sometimes not even a good GPA gets you in.

I'm currently considering a new career late in life in a helping field. I would like to have taken a nursing class but can not even take a class as a non degree seeking student because they only allow those accepted into that college. Enter competition in education.

I've experienced this, too, at a community college. Not with nursing classes, but with prerequisite biology classes, which are reserved for degree-program students at the CC.

In a class last fall that was mostly future nursing students two of them were discussing the requirements for formal acceptance into the nursing program and one mentioned that you need a 3.5 GPA in your prerequisite coursework. The teacher interjected, saying, "You really need a 4.0." They just don't have the teachers to meet the increased number of students going into health-related fields.

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Of course you don't see individual responsibility as any kind of factor to be considered. The modern view is that everyone is a child, no matter how old. Back in a time when merit and responsibility mattered, it used to be that 20-somethings represented people in state legislatures and were promoted all the way to Brigadier General to lead entire armies into combat, meanwhile the teenagers provided the backbone and entrepreneurial spirit to most of the labor force. Nowadays, man-children and woman-children roam around, clueless. It's a self-fulfilling cycle--men and women are expected to mature later and later, so they do, so the expectation is raised each generation. The myth of "marrying too young" is pretty squarely set at an absurdly high age, for example. While I don't think marrying the instant you hit puberty is good, people should be allowed to grab hold of their own lives from time to time without being ostracized.

With respect to adults being children, that's not a modern view, that's reality. What these groups REALLY target are low-IQ groups who simply aren't intelligent enough to consider the consequences of their actions. Probably 90% of their students have IQ below the national mean. In the past, these people were at best yeoman farmers or peasants of some kind. Otherwise however, all you're points are correct. I would say that a healthy society requires teenage girls to have children. Since civilization began, 15 was the age where a girl was expected to start looking for a husband. After age 25, fertility and beauty declines, and multiple sexual partners reduces her ability to bond with her husband.

[don]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Hey Don,

I missed out on this. Any other pics?

First I hid them from my wife.

Now I can't remember where.

[flintlock]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Flint, now dig this. My son, in his mid-30s, way beyond listening to me in any real sense, drank the Kool-Aid and went to a cyber-school to get a BA he felt he might need, since many of his co-workers had these useless sheepskins on their cubicle walls.(He works for Northrop Grumman) When we visted him mid-way through his "studies" he excused himself and went down to his basement to take 3 course lessons. In 15 minutes he was back- all done! My son has never been an academic wunderkind. Well, he has his "BA" and a big fat student loan debt. What are you gonna do .... but soldier on. And remember, pal, FIRE steers the GOV where the water lies .... not the other way around.

I remember finishing up the final 5 hours of credit I needed for my BBA with an online course offered through my University. I found it about as challenging as your son did. (This was 20 years ago!)

Recently I was considering getting my Masters in history from one of these for profits, but from what I've since learned, probably not worth the money. It really does show you how easy it is to throw around titles like MBA or PhD. You almost have to ask "from where?".

[flintlock]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Your information confirms what I suspected. This is older folks appying for the most part at for profit schools. Not naive little kids. But I can see why it is tempting to buy yourself a degree and maybe that used to fool people. I think the word is out these days and its not so easy to bluff your way through.

I know education seems to be in short supply these days. It can be ridiculous trying to get into a good school vs in my day. I know I would not be able to get into my alma mater if applying today. Of course there has also been some grade inflation since then.

Why the shortage? Does population growth account for it all or is there more to it? Perhaps the fact that more jobs require a degree it than used to? Less good blue collar jobs means more of us competing for the white collar stuff. I suspect the EZ financing of recent times helped with the shortage as well. College used to be for either the well to do or the VERY smart. Now Joe Average goes to college with no money down. A lot of smart kids that used to go to community college out of financial necessity can now borrow the money to get into the better universities. So probably more competition at the better schools for that reason alone.

As for the nursing schools, I don't get it. Either they are purposefully restricting the number of graduates or perhaps there are too many barriers to entry for starting new nursing schools. I remember a good friend of my wife's who couldn't pass her nursing classes due to a deficiency in Algebra of all things. She would have been great at it.

I'm often asked where I learned my trade( electrical). All my training was on the job and self taught . People seem surprised when I tell them there really is not much available in terms of trade schools in my area. The Unions are supposed to have good schools but outside of that there isn't much. The few classes I tried to take were a joke. Taught by engineers with no real world experience. The lack of any technical training is very apparent when you see the quality of work in Atlanta.

[housingcrashsurvivor]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

"it used to be that 20-somethings represented people in state legislatures"

With a life expectancy of 50 when my grandfather was born, by age 20-something, you'd be having your mid-life crisis.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

Meanwhile:

http://www.ncsl.org/?tabid=14850
"The (recent) average age of a state legislator is 56 and has increased slightly in recent years as the number of retired legislators has risen"

http://adambrown.info/p/research/legislators/age
"As of fall 2009, the youngest state legislator is 23 years old; the oldest is almost 90. Not surprisingly, though, most legislators are in their 50s and 60s."

How much has all that changed since the founding of the USA?

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/o...tution/bio.htm

"LIKE THE 55 delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention, the 39 signers as a whole were a distinguished body of men who represented an excellent cross section of 18th-century American leadership...Most of them were in the prime of their lives during the Convention, and as a whole they were relatively youthful. The average age was about 45 years."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQe2Pq8lvc
grumps? bonk-bonk

[housingcrashsurvivor]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Your information confirms what I suspected. This is older folks appying for the most part at for profit schools. Not naive little kids. But I can see why it is tempting to buy yourself a degree and maybe that used to fool people. I think the word is out these days and its not so easy to bluff your way through....

I don't know about the age thing. Looks to me like maybe a bit older overall but pretty close at the graduate level. For instance (showing university/age): profit Phoenix/36; traditional NYU/38; traditional WFla/32-44. I think you are spot on about selling education, however, which is why I showed all the marketing positions available at the for-profit schools. It is the commoditization of education with off-the-rack degrees.

On buying degrees, I recall scandal a few years back I think in Broward County or Miami-Dade FL about bogus Phoenix masters used to hike teacher salaries but could not find the articles now online.

I think you are also correct about grade inflation. I'm current taking courses at a Tier 1 university yet I call it McCollege. I have stars on my classnotes from when the instructor tells us what will be on the test. This is my third time back in school. Each time gets easier. Though some of that is because I'm less distracted, much of that is the catering done for today's helicoptered kids.

Some of the competition is caused by a lack of resources. As BPR mentioned, teachers can be in short supply as well as all the other resources that go into teaching each student. Tuition alone does not pay all costs (state funding - endowments - etc) so more careful allocation & therefore selectivity comes into play. At a for-profit, I presume tuition pays the costs and then some, thus the profit.

[don]

Re: More FIRE tales: for profit "universities"

Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen

By TAMAR LEWIN

The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened.

Campus counselors say the survey results are the latest evidence of what they see every day in their offices — students who are depressed, under stress and using psychiatric medication, prescribed even before they came to college.

The economy has only added to the stress, not just because of financial pressures on their parents but also because the students are worried about their own college debt and job prospects when they graduate.

“This fits with what we’re all seeing,” said Brian Van Brunt, director of counseling at Western Kentucky University and president of the American College Counseling Association. “More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.”

The annual survey of freshmen is considered the most comprehensive because of its size and longevity. At the same time, the question asking students to rate their own emotional health compared with that of others is hard to assess, since it requires them to come up with their own definition of emotional health, and to make judgments of how they compare with their peers.

“Most people probably think emotional health means, ‘Am I happy most of the time, and do I feel good about myself?’ so it probably correlates with mental health,” said Dr. Mark Reed, the psychiatrist who directs Dartmouth College’s counseling office.
“I don’t think students have an accurate sense of other people’s mental health,” he added. “There’s a lot of pressure to put on a perfect face, and people often think they’re the only ones having trouble.”

To some extent, students’ decline in emotional health may result from pressures they put on themselves.

While first-year students’ assessments of their emotional health were declining, their ratings of their own drive to achieve, and academic ability, have been going up, and reached a record high in 2010, with about three-quarters saying they were above average.

“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”

Other findings in the survey underscore the degree to which the economy is weighing on college students.

“Paternal unemployment is at the highest level since we started measuring,” said John Pryor, director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at U.C.L.A.’s Higher Education Research Institute, which does the annual freshman survey. “More students are taking out loans. And we’re seeing the impact of not being able to get a summer job, and the importance of financial aid in choosing which college they’re going to attend.”

“We don’t know exactly why students’ emotional health is declining,” he said. “But it seems the economy could be a lot of it.”

For many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.

The gender gap on that question was even larger than on emotional health, with 18 percent of the men saying they had been frequently overwhelmed, compared with 39 percent of the women.

There is also a gender gap, studies have shown, in the students who seek out college mental health services, with women making up 60 percent or more of the clients.

“Boys are socialized not to talk about their feelings or express stress, while girls are more likely to say they’re having a tough time,” said Perry C. Francis, coordinator for counseling services at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. “Guys might go out and do something destructive, or stupid, that might include property damage. Girls act out differently.”

Linda Sax, a professor of education at U.C.L.A. and former director of the freshman study who uses the data in research about college gender gaps, said the gap between men and women on emotional well-being was one of the largest in the survey.

“One aspect of it is how women and men spent their leisure time,” she said. “Men tend to find more time for leisure and activities that relieve stress, like exercise and sports, while women tend to take on more responsibilities, like volunteer work and helping out with their family, that don’t relieve stress.”

In addition, Professor Sax has explored the role of the faculty in college students’ emotional health, and found that interactions with faculty members were particularly salient for women. Negative interactions had a greater impact on their mental health.

“Women’s sense of emotional well-being was more closely tied to how they felt the faculty treated them,” she said. “It wasn’t so much the level of contact as whether they felt they were being taken seriously by the professor. If not, it was more detrimental to women than to men.”

She added: “And while men who challenged their professor’s ideas in class had a decline in stress, for women it was associated with a decline in well-being.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/ed...ef=todayspaper