“It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.” — Juvenal
Currently on the forum there's a discussion about whether there's a big difference between for-profit and non-profit schools. A link was posted to this article in the Washington Monthly that takes for-profit schools to task, essentially calling them predatory and that they have conspired with evil Republicans to exploit unsophisticated prospective students in order to enrich themselves while leaving those students with unmanageable debt that recent legislative changes have made almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Whew!
And you know what? There isn't zero truth to this. Many schools are far more expensive than they need to be to break even, or even make a reasonable profit. Consider your typical online course. Let's say it costs you a thousand bucks. (I know, some are even more, but it makes the math easy.) And let's say there are twenty students in the course. Adjunct instructors don't usually get paid more than two thousand dollars to teach a university level course, so that's where two of the students' tuition is going. What about the the rest of the eighteen grand? Sure, there's overhead, you need to have support staff, and office space and computers and supplies for that staff. Preparing reports for the accreditors takes a lot of time, and you need people to help with that, okay. But does all that really cost nine times as much as the person who actually does the lion's share of work by teaching the students? Color me skeptical, but I say there's a heck of a lot of profit in there.
But before you start to think that I agree with the Washington Monthly that the profit motive is eeeeevil, let me add a few other ingredients into this witch's cauldron of debt creation.
First, non-profit schools often cost just as much as the most expensive of the the for-profit schools. In fact the most expensive ones cost even more: Check out the list of the 100 schools with the highest annual tuition rate. For a bunch of schools that are supposedly non-profit, don't those rates seem kind of steep?
Second, much of the blame lies with the federal student loan system. The left-of-center Washington Monthly blamed the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans, but there's no one in Washington with clean hands when it comes to this broken system. It was, after all, Democrats who sent the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act to Bush's desk last year. And while that reauthorization did include a few baby steps toward making things easier for students, they did nothing to address the systemic problem that making it artificially easy to access student loans means that tuition rates will inevitably rise to soak up all that extra money that's become available. I guess they were too busy trying to protect their buddies in the entertainment industry, and I do use that term loosely.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, if for-profit schools are works of the devil, then why is it that they're also standing up to be part of the solution? As I've remarked before, companies like Straighter Line and for-profit schools like Penn Foster College and Andrew Jackson University are leading the way when it comes to providing solutions for students that are extremely low cost. In other words, the profit motive has more than one side — it leads some schools to charge as much as they can, yes, but it also leaves them vulnerable to other schools that come in and undercut them to attract their students away.
So no, there's nothing inherently wrong with for-profit schools. Some of them charge a lot, aided and abetted by Uncle Sam, and others of them see that situation as an opportunity to attract students by charging less.
Next up, I protest the imprisonment of fellow blogger Kareem Amer.