Has The Education Industry Gotten Greedy? YES!

Wrong Answer for Dropouts

Post-secondary education today has gotten greedy, focusing not on the value of a liberal study of the arts and sciences for the purposes of improving the individual, the community, the world and commerce, but only focusing on generating revenues--and in the case of technology and vocational training, PROFIT.

Having worked for two such technology/vocational chains, I have seen the drive for profit and revenue allow students that had no genuine ability to grasp the training to enroll and incur THOUSANDS of dollars of debt in student loans, only to fail because of being academically, financially or socially unprepared. While many of the instructors of these programs offer a quality training approach in the classroom, these faculty members are hampered by administrative and business practices that force students that have been dropped for poor academic achievement--including not showing up for school because of various challenges in their lives--back into these classes. Certainly these "schools" have their procedures and methods of making it appear as if they are being generous and supportive, but everyone working in the industry knows it is all about putting the student in a seat so that the monthly allocation of the student loan can be rung up on the profit and loss statement.

The accrediation process for many of these schools is a joke. The process used by the most commonly employed accreditation service, Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), is more focused on the administration and financial stability of the school than the quality of education occurring in the classroom and the treatment of students experiencing challenges. These private technology and vocational training schools are mostly not required to provide academic counseling, assessments, aptitude or traditional guidance services. The major focus in on job placement assistance... and the standards for measuring the success of these services are so lax and unethical that they might as well not exist.

The New York Regeants are putting these schools under the gun and other states are beginning to catch that same buzz... but it appears that even the big guns in post-secondary education are involved in similar practices.

The tuition aid programs that have historically helped tens of millions of poor and working-class Americans through college are now underfinanced and falling far short of the national need. This makes it important for the states — and the colleges they oversee — to be sure that the tuition aid dollars intended for needy students are being wisely spent. And that in turn means making sure that students who are accepted at college have a realistic chance of graduating.

All this should be common sense. But as Karen W. Arenson of The Times reported recently, colleges and their profit-making cousins are accepting students who have not graduated from high school or earned equivalency degrees. In New York, the main offenders are profit-making colleges, one of which was recently cited by state officials for a student body in which more than 90 percent of the enrollment consisted of nongraduates.

Profit-making colleges have become notorious for sweeping the streets for any warm bodies they can find, simply to get access to the rich flow of state and federal tuition aid. Traditional colleges accept far fewer students from this category. But the evidence suggests that even some traditional colleges may be turning to students that have not graduated for the same reasons as their profit-making counterparts — to fill empty seats and get access to aid that they would otherwise not receive.

With one of the most generous tuition assistance programs in the country, New York State is especially vulnerable to abuse in this department. Gov. George Pataki was rebuffed by the Legislature recently when he tried to place limits on how aid could be used by colleges that accept students who have not graduated from high school. But the State Board of Regents, which has broad powers to oversee educational institutions, recently voted to increase supervision, not just of profit-making colleges, but of traditional colleges that accept students without high school diplomas or G.E.D.'s.

The new rules are yet to be completed. But they should require colleges to revamp their admissions from the ground up so that they take in only students who are capable of succeeding. That certainly does not mean shunning any student who has a less-than-perfect academic background. But colleges that take at-risk students must develop support services, modeled on successful programs elsewhere, to give them a better chance at succeeding.

There is no virtue attached to raising the expectations of unprepared young people and encouraging them to tackle education programs that they have little or no chance of successfully finishing. At the very minimum, students should have either a high school diploma or its equivalent — as well as grades and basic skills test results that show them capable of performing college-level work. Without the basics, those hopeful young people will almost inevitably end up back on the streets with their student aid allotments exhausted and their lives unimproved.