I will let you decide after you read this Bloomberg article.
Obama Cracks Down on For-Profit Colleges, Links Loans to Income
U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan. Photographer: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg
The Obama administration released a proposal that would tighten for-profit colleges’ access to federal student aid, threatening growth in the industry that received $26.5 billion in U.S. funds last year.
The proposed rules released today by the U.S. Department of Education would link U.S. student aid eligibility at Apollo Group Inc., ITT Educational Services Inc., Career Education Corp. and other education companies to former students’ salaries and debt repayment rates. The rules may cut off access to federal student grants and loans at about 5 percent of all for- profit education programs, Secretary Arne Duncan said in a telephone call with reporters yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »
I ran across a decent article today on online learning and time management. In fact, this is one of my mantras that I preach to the students who I instruct online. Here is an excerpt: Read the rest of this entry »
The latest scrutiny in the for-profit education space comes from one of the regional accreditation bodies and their attention directed toward ”accreditation shopping.”
With the ongoing pressure from the Department of Education, coupled with a recent disclosure by noted investor, Steve Eisman, that he is shorting private education stocks and that for-profit education is the new sub-prime, the sector as a whole has taken a serious hit. For example, Apollo is trading at a 52 week low and other stocks are trading well below their moving averages.
This volitility will continue for the foreseeable future and a deep plunge for some education companies is a distinct possibility. This uncertainty will continue until the industry, and specifically some of the “bad apples” within the space, come to grips with aggressive recruiting tactics, sub-par academic protocol, and burdensome debt load of their students.
There is no argument that earning a degree increases what a person will earn over his or her lifetime. However, with increased scrutiny from the Department of Education and regulatory bodies on whether or not a specific degree from a specific institution provides the opportunity for the recipient of that degree to be “gainfully” employed, we have to ask ourselves if the paradigm is skewed. Is education slowly falling into the trap of promoting consumption rather than measuring if that education prepared a person to “do well?” What would it do to our existing paradigms and assessments if we based our model on this — “neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own.”