Pacific Progressive

For-Profit Colleges Face Consumer Backlash, Dwindling Profits

This material was created by Campus Progress.

 by Jen Kalaidis

It seems the for-profit industry—expensive colleges offering low-quality education and employing corrupt recruiting techniques—may finally be meeting its demise.

More aggressive regulations by the federal government and a growing campaign against predatory practices have resulted in steep plunges in student enrollment numbers for the multi-billion dollar industry, with many for-profit institutions seeing numbers drop by more than 45 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Campus Progress has been a driving force in advocating for reform in the for-profit industry, bringing to light many of the troubling practices occurring at for-profit colleges around the country. Most disturbing is the number of students who report leaving such institutions with mounds of debt and few, if any, job prospects.

(Infographic: An Education in For-Profit Education)

Wave of Lawsuits Targets 15 More Law Schools for Inflating Job Placement Rates

by Jon Christian

This material was created by Campus Progress.

Two lawyers have announced that they will file class action lawsuits against 15 law schools in seven states for misreporting postgraduate job placement rates.

The cases will be represented by the Law Offices of David Anziska and Strauss Law PLLC. Anziska and Strauss have previously filed similar suits against Thomas M. Cooley Law School and New York Law School. The lawyers allege that the schools named in the complaints have inflated advertised job placement rates by including part-time positions and jobs that do not require law degrees.

Among the targets of this month’s suits are Pace University School of Law, John Marshall School of Law, and Albany Law School, according to a press release by the two firms.

“The numbers reported by the schools just don’t comport with the reality of the legal job market,” Anziska wrote in a press release. “We hope that litigation, combined with pressure from regulators, applicants, students and alumni changes the way legal education is marketed and provides compensation to those who may have been mislead in the past.”

Four Facts You Should Know About the California DREAM Act

This material was created by Campus Progress.

by Eddie Garcia

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the second half of the state’s DREAM Act, just days before the end of the legislative session. The law, AB 131, will allow qualified, immigrant students to apply for state-based financial aid through the Cal Grant program. 

The legislation is a huge victory for youth organizers, education leaders, and immigrant rights advocates working in California to expand access to higher education for undocumented youth. Prior attempts to pass the bill were vetoed multiple times by the state’s former governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, despite overwhelming support in the state legislature. 

"The Dream Act benefits us all by giving top students a chance to improve their lives and the lives of all of us," Brown said in a statement. 

Concerns over the bill’s projected fiscal impact created a divisive narrative in the media that nearly prevented it from becoming law.

What exactly will the new law accomplish? Here’s what you need to know:

1. AB 131 allows for undocumented students at public colleges and universities to apply for and receive Cal Grants, the state’s financial aid program. While these awards would still be distributed with priority to U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, undocumented youth would be offered aid after those requests are met. The law also opens access to California’s Board of Governor’s fee waiver program, designed to help low-income students pay for school, to undocumented youth. 

Student Loan Default Rate Soars at For-Profit Schools

This material was created by Campus Progress.

 by Brian Stewart

More people are defaulting on student loan payments than in the past decade—with the largest spike in default rates coming in the high-cost, low-benefit for-profit education industry.

According to new data released today by the Department of Education, 8.8 percent of all student loan borrowers in fiscal 2009 defaulted on their loans, an increase from just 7 percent of borrowers in fiscal 2008. The figures are for those whose initial loan repayments were due between October 2008 and September 2009 and had defaulted by this September 2010.

What’s most troubling is the impact of for-profit colleges on the national student loan default rate. A whopping 15 percent of student borrowers at for-profit institutions—or one in six—failed to repay their loans, up from 11.6 percent. At some for-profit schools, default rates exceeded 20 percent.

In hard numbers: Out of about 3.6 million students who entered repayment during the window, 320,000 defaulted after two years—81,000 more than in fiscal 2008, with more than half from for-profits.

Teen: My Principal Assaulted Me For Wanting to Form Gay-Straight Alliance Club

by Brian Stewart

This material was created by Campus Progress.

A Tennessee high school student says his principal verbally and physically harassed him because of the T-shirt he was wearing—a homemade shirt showing support for stalled efforts to create a Gay-Straight Alliance at the school.

For months, Chris Sigler—a straight, 17-year-old student at Sequoyah High School whose sister is bisexual and has been subject to bullying—and others have tried to create GSA club but have been blocked by the seemingly discriminatory Principal Maurice Moser, who told the blog Talk About Equality that discussions about forming the club were “disrupting the educational environment.”

Then earlier this month, Sigler wore a T-shirt to school that read: “GSA: We’ve got your back.” Here’s how the ensuing scene reportedly transpired, according to ABC News:

Last Tuesday, a teacher told Sigler to cover up the shirt, but he resisted and wore it again on Friday. Moser ordered all the students out of the classroom, according to the Siglers, except for his sister Jessica, who refused to leave her brother.

Both students allege that Moser then grabbed Sigler’s arm, shoved him and chest-bumped him repeatedly while asking “Who’s the big man now?”

Teen: My Principal Assaulted Me For Wanting to Form Gay-Straight Alliance Club

 by Brian Stewart

This material was created by Campus Progress.

A Tennessee high school student says his principal verbally and physically harassed him because of the T-shirt he was wearing—a homemade shirt showing support for stalled efforts to create a Gay-Straight Alliance at the school.

For months, Chris Sigler—a straight, 17-year-old student at Sequoyah High School whose sister is bisexual and has been subject to bullying—and others have tried to create GSA club but have been blocked by the seemingly discriminatory Principal Maurice Moser, who told the blog Talk About Equality that discussions about forming the club were “disrupting the educational environment.”

Then earlier this month, Sigler wore a T-shirt to school that read: “GSA: We’ve got your back.” Here’s how the ensuing scene reportedly transpired, according to ABC News:

Last Tuesday, a teacher told Sigler to cover up the shirt, but he resisted and wore it again on Friday. Moser ordered all the students out of the classroom, according to the Siglers, except for his sister Jessica, who refused to leave her brother.

Both students allege that Moser then grabbed Sigler’s arm, shoved him and chest-bumped him repeatedly while asking “Who’s the big man now?”

Report: Race, Gender Still Barriers to High Earnings, Education Best Factor

This material was created by Campus Progress.

 by Yana Kunichoff

Despite rising youth unemployment, a recent study indicates that hitting the books is still the best way to predict future earning power. But future economic achievement is also heavily dependent on race and gender.

Women continue to make less at every level of education than men, according to the authors of “The College Pay-Off,” a study by the Georgetown University Center of Education and the Workforce. And minorities follow a similar pattern with fewer earnings.

Even weighing gaps in wages and the availability of full-time work for different demographics, Anthony Carnevale, the center’s director and co-author of the report,argues that education remains the best bet for securing future earning power.

The earnings gap between an individual with a bachelor’s degree and an individual with only a high school education has continued to increase, jumping from a 75 percent difference in 1999 to 84 percent today, according to the study. In dollar terms, that’s an average of $2.3 million in median lifetime earnings for those with bachelor’s degrees compared to about $1.3 million for Americans with high school diplomas.

Voluntary Standards for For-Profit Colleges Don’t Measure Up - Standards Must Address Serious Issues at For-Profit Schools

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Julie Margetta Morgan 

Léalo en español

The Coalition for Educational Success, an advocacy group representing several for-profit colleges, released a set of voluntary standards for responsible conduct to govern for-profit colleges. The standards require ethical recruitment practices and transparency on key pieces of information such as graduation rates, employment outcomes, and financial aid procedures.

Self-regulation is an admirable goal but it only works if the scope of the standards matches the scale of the problem they seek to address. In this case, the coalition’s standards do no more than tinker around the edges of the deep dysfunctions evident at some for-profit colleges.

The following chart reflects the percentage of students who enrolled at a four-year for-profit college in 2003 that had achieved any type of postsecondary credential within six years, by selected racial and ethnic groups.

No-Cost Birth Control Under Attack for Some Students

by Emily Crockett 

This material was created by Campus Progress.

For students at Catholic universities nationwide, the right to no-cost birth control is under attack.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced last monththat, starting next year, all new health insurance plans will be required to cover contraception and preventative women’s health care—without charging co-pays.

The announcement was a huge victory for public health and women’s rights, and has been received as a tremendously popular policy. According to a recent Reuters-National Public Radio poll, 77 percent of Americans want private insurance to cover birth control.

But a growing number of conservative groups are pushing to expand the Department of Health and Human Services’ “conscience clause,” which provides an exemption to the contraception coverage mandate for “religious employers.”

A religious employer is defined as one that:

(1) has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose; (2) primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets; (3) primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets; and (4) is a non-profit organization.

Too Many Crooks in the Kitchen—Spoiled the Broth

This material was created by Campus Progress.

by Jon Christian

A number of culinary school students who filed a class-action suit against the San Francisco-based California Culinary Academy may have caught a break against the for-profit college charged with misleading tuition-paying students.

The students alleged that they were misled by the for-profit institution, which advertised a 97 percent job placement rate despite the fact that many graduates were working as waiters and baristas at Starbucks. And in some cases, the suit claims, the college invented culinary positions which graduates never held, according to California Watch, a nonpartisan investigative reporting outlet.

In a pending $40 million settlement, school officials have agreed to offer rebates of up to $20,000 to 8,500 former students.

The story of misleading information is not a new one in the world of for-profit education.

The California Culinary Academy, owned by for-profit education company Career Education Corp., is just one of a number of California for-profit educators offering culinary degrees being investigated for dishonest recruiting. Students often feel pressured into enrolling in programs without access to sufficient employment information, according to critics of the schools.

Rhee's StudentsFirst Hires Republican Lobbyist to Push Pennsylvania School Privatization Bill

Laura ClawsonFollowforDaily Kos Labor

The Pennsylvania legislature is working on a "school choice" bill—meaning school vouchers and expanded charter schools. Rachel Tabachnik has detailed the network of Betsy DeVos-funded think tanks and PACs that are pushing privatization. But no move to undermine public education that works for all kids would be complete without Michelle Rhee, and Karoli at Crooks and Liars details how Rhee's StudentsFirst has been involved. After a string of Rhee appearances with voucher supporters and at DeVos-funded events, StudentsFirst has hired a lobbyist with some hardcore Republican credentials:

With the Pennsylvania school choice bill still stuck in the ever-grinding gears of legislative activity, Rhee has decided she needs a lobbyist to give it a jumpstart, and that lobbyist is a Republican strategist by the name ofRay Zaborney, former campaign manager for Lynn Swann's gubernatorial bid. Zaborney is also currently advising Republican Tim Burns' bid to unseat Senator Bob Casey in 2012.

[...]

It appears that Zaborney is keeping a low profile on whatever education activities he is undertaking on behalf of  Michelle Rhee. But his prior public statements are anything but ambivalent: He is a full supporter of vouchers, ending teacher tenure and other hot-button issues Rhee advocates.  

Sometimes Rhee likes to pretend her policy agenda is a genuinely bipartisan one. But when the chips are down and you need to get a bill passed that fulfills some of the deepest-seated Republican goals there are, like privatizing public education and letting companies profit off it, best to go with an experienced Republican lobbyist.

 

It’s Official: Students in Maine Weren’t Committing Voter Fraud, Despite GOP’s Allegations

by Brian Stewart

This material was created by Campus Progress.

Remember when the chair of the Maine Republican Party waved a list of 206 college students’ names in the air, claiming each of them had committed voter fraud despite having no hard evidence?

Well, it turns out the hoopla was just that—inaccurate rhetoric intended to suppress young people’s desire for civic engagement.

Maine Secretary of State Charlie Summers spent two months investigating the students and found that none had committed voter fraud, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Of the 206 students on Webster’s list, 77 had registered in their home state and then again in Maine, but none cast more than one ballot in a single election.

(Read More: GOP Official Tries to Suppress Student Voters—Despite No Evidence of Fraud)

Webster seemed to be a wild goose chase for potentially evil, malicious student voters, as more than a third of the 206 students he claimed were registered in two states simply weren’t.

By law, voters are not required to unregister in one state when registering in another. In fact, being registered in more than one place is common for many Americans, not just students.

Part-Time College Students Face Abysmal Graduation Rates

Laura ClawsonFollowforDaily Kos Labor

You've heard the expression about treating dandruff by decapitation? A new report on college completion argues for the opposite, identifying the graduation rate equivalent of a gaping wound filled with bits of shattered bone, and suggesting Band-Aids as a treatment.

"Time is the Enemy," the report from Complete College America, points to extremely low completion rates among part-time students, and to the fact that it's difficult to even track completion rates for the vast majority of college students today. These are serious problems: 40 percent of public college students are part-time and only 25 percent are full-time, residential students whose tuition is paid by their parents, yet policy and data collection are structured as if it was the norm to enter college as a full-time student and go straight through to graduation. As Tamar Lewin writes in the New York Times:

The numbers are stark: In Texas, for example, of every 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 79 started at a community college, and only 2 of them earned a two-year degree on time; even after four years, only 7 of them graduated. Of the 21 of those 100 who enrolled at a four-year college, 5 graduated on time; after eight years, only 13 had earned a degree.

But the Complete College report doesn't even make a halfhearted gesture toward addressing the deep economic issues that produce such results. The full report is 246 pages focused on the problem of part-time students struggling with obligations like supporting their families and themselves, yet a search for "financial aid" yields one result. "Tuition" comes up twice." Pell grants are used as a data point, but are not the subject of any policy discussion.

The report's suggestions, like "embed[ding] remediation into the regular college
curriculum so students don’t waste time before they start earning credits" and making scheduling changes so that course times are more predictable, allowing students to plan their lives ahead of time, may well be worthwhile and help raise graduation rates. But when students who have borrowed to finance their education face an average of $24,000 in debt after graduation and public college tuitions are skyrocketing, the problem of graduation rates requires us to think bigger. Yes, if students took less time to graduate, they would accumulate less debt. But they would take less time to graduate if they did not have to work so many hours; tinkering with scheduling is not going to suddenly make people able to afford high tuition, especially when people in their 20s face 14.1 percent unemployment and increasingly cannot afford to live outside their parents' homes.

So, yes. Fix remedial education. Fix course scheduling. But don't try to pretend that economic factors aren't affecting college completion rates. This is something that policy can and should address right alongside course schedules.

(h/t Hamilton Nolan)

 

National Education Association Advertising in Support of Obama's Jobs Bill

Laura ClawsonFollowforDaily Kos Labor

The Hill reports that the National Education Association will run this ad in support of President Obama's jobs plan in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, at a total cost of around $350,000.

When Obama's plan was announced, the NEA's president said in a statement that "Our members are behind this initiative and will raise their voices in support to Congress, who will hopefully put politics aside and make passing this its priority." With this ad, the NEA reaches out not only to its own members to encourage their support but to the general public, and emphasizes that this jobs plan will also have a positive impact on kids' experiences in school.

 

Keeping Pell Grant, Other Aid Funding Steady is Vital

This material was created by Campus Progress.

by Angela Peoples

A Senate Appropriations subcommittee recently approved a fiscal 2012 education budget that would maintain the maximum Pell Grant award of $5,500. The move is an important step for sustaining student aid programs—so long as it doesn’t cause students to incur other costs.

The bill, passed 10-8 along party lines by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education and Related Agencies, would keep the discretionary portion of the maximum Pell Grant award level at $4,860 and the mandatory funding at $640 for the 2012-2013 school year. It would likely also keep funding steady for federal work-study programs and direct $100 million to the Workforce Innovation Fund to boost job-training programs, according to Inside Higher Ed,

The Pell Grant program, considered the cornerstone of federal financial aid, assists an estimated 9.4 million low- and middle-income students in paying for their college education. Campus Progress previously reported that, as part of the deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, Congress would take steps to fill a nearly $20 billion shortfall in the Pell funding over the next two years.

Protecting the Pell Grant and maintaining the maximum award of $5,550 dollars is an absolute imperative for investing in Americans’ education and Campus Progress is pleased to see that some members of Congress and the Obama administration continue to prioritize Pell in the face of sweeping budget cuts and spending caps.