For-profit universities thrive on unemployment

With unemployment at the highest level since the Great Depression, millions of workers have sought to improve their job prospects by continuing their education. Since public universities have drastically slashed admissions, the main beneficiary of this process has been the for-profit college industry, which provides degrees to students at rates far higher than that of standard colleges.

These so-called “career colleges”—primarily online institutions like the University of Phoenix, Capella, DeVry, and Kaplan University—hold out the false promise of a secure future, telling students that a college degree will enable them to find work.

Since 2000, enrollment in for-profit colleges has tripled, growing from 673,000 students to over 2.6 million in 2010. The University of Phoenix, the most prominent of these colleges, is now the second-largest higher education institution in America, after the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Its enrollment of nearly half a million students is larger than all Big Ten campuses combined, but its “instructional costs and services”—the total employee compensation—is $400 million, less than that of the University of Iowa, the smallest of the Big Ten’s public universities.

This growth has been largely a result of predatory recruitment and lending practices, in which these colleges seek to extract profit from the desperation of the poor and unemployed. Many of the programs are shot through with fraud and corruption, and rely on systematically misleading statements to dragoon potential students to sign up.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/univ-j21.shtml

But are now saddled with loans to repay?

which means taxpayers ultimately pay.

complete waste of funds. credits mostly non-transferable to regular institutions, degrees often count for less than an AA from a CC or CC trade program (credits from which will count toward a 4-year degree if person ever wants to go back to school), cost much higher, & higher default rates.

what a scam.

oh brave new privatized world.

when the budget hawks decide to go after all that waste 'n' fraud in the student loan program, which makes no distinction between nonprofit and for-profit institutions.

It's cheaper to go to a CC, plus the credits most of the time can transfer. People want to get degrees in the least amount of time and don't realize that money can't buy one.

This may seem obvious, but Americans have been so brainwashed to think education is the answer to any social problem.

Just because displaced older workers retrain for new fields does not guarantee that employers will be receptive to hiring older candidates for entry level jobs, especially when there are so many younger candidates available!

America wouldn't have an economy without it......

Weren't you going to put some resources behind community colleges, so that they could enroll more of these types of students -- for a fraction of the cost?? :shrug: