Act Now to Protect Students and Taxpayers! The U.S. Department of Education proposed new rules to protect students and taxpayers from rip-off career education programs.  But the rules need to be stronger. USA Today praised the Obama Administration for recognizing the problem, but called the proposal "feeble" and "too accommodating." Tell the Obama Administration that the proposed "gainful employment" rules are a welcome start, but need to be strengthened! The for-profit college industry and its highly paid lobbyists are fighting hard to weaken the proposed rules so exploitative schools can keep profiting off federal student aid.  That's why the Obama Administration needs to hear from you! Visit www.protectstudentsandtaxpayers.org to call for stronger rules, and please help spread the word! The time allowed for commenting is short, and early comments have the most impact, so please send in your comments today!

It's been a summer of stunning revelations about the for-profit education industry. Thanks to the series of hearings Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is holding as chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, taxpayers are learning about the sinister side of large corporate chains like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, the Art Institutes, Corinthian Colleges and others.

At Harkin's request, the U.S. Government Accountability Office conducted an underground, "secret shopper" investigation and exposed instances of fraud at four institutions and deceptive practices at all 15 institutions it investigated. The GAO found that students are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to attend these schools, and that the promises the colleges to them are making are hollow.

As we've reported on this blog all summer, the for-profit college mission is not first and foremost about education, it's about generating profits for shareholders.

As a result of these profit-driven practices, the U.S. Department of Education has proposed new regulations to ensure that students are getting their money's worth when they borrow large amounts to pay for programs that are supposed to lead to "gainful employment."

Some AFT affiliates are having firsthand experience with the incursion of corporate for-profit colleges in their regions. Michael Rosen, president of Milwaukee Area Technical College's Local 212, the AFT faculty union at the college, has been sounding the alarm in his city about the rapid installation of Everest College, a for-profit that has moved in just blocks from MATC.

Everest is part of Corinthian Colleges Inc., which appears to have some serious issues with its students being able repay their student loans.

Rosen's work caught the attention of Harriet Callier, a medical billing and records instructor at a school called High-Tech Institute, now renamed Anthem College by its corporate owner. She contacted him to express concerns about what she saw happening to the students she teaches. The current issue of AFT On Campus  tells Callier's story-and also provides insight into how state agencies are responding to the need to monitor this booming industry.

It's a changing terrain, notes Wisconsin Educational Approval Board (EAB) school administration consultant Patrick Sweeney. He pointed On Campus to some of the public record correspondence between the EAB and Callier's employer, High-Tech Institute. Sweeney describes a visit to the school by EAB representatives as "frustrating and disappointing" because it "revealed a multitude of institutional problems consistent with all of High-Tech's past problems, as documented in many student complaints to the EAB."

He also shared letters that illuminate the curriculum model used by the University of Phoenix and other for-profit chains, which is designed to keep new students enrolling and taking courses, but is significantly less concerned with student success. As Sweeney notes in his letter: 

In the Phoenix business model few adults who start their programs will survive through graduation. ... But, it's okay. ... In [this] model, the large number of enrollment counselors with strictly measured metrics for calls per day, new enrollments, and retention into the second week of the second course secures a steady stream of new enrollees."

In short, it's a model that works well to keep federal financial aid dollars and private loans fueling the bottom line of the business, but not one that works so well for the faculty and students.

Read the Wisconsin Educational Approval Board's letters to High Tech Institute and University of Phoenix: EAB to High Tech Institute / May 5, 2010 EAB to High Tech Institute / July 30, 2010 EAB to University of Phoenix / October 19, 2009

The AFT is part of a coalition of student, faculty, civil and consumer rights groups that have written to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to express support for strengthening regulations intended to address fraud and abuse in the for-profit sector. You can join in that effort by telling the Department of Education and your members of Congress that you support regulations that will protect students and taxpayers from rip-off career education programs.

Shortly after the California State Senate passed ACR 138 last week, the State Assembly reaffirmed its earlier vote necessary for the bill's final passage. The resolution, which expresses the intent of the California Legislature that part-time faculty at California's community colleges are provided with equitable pay and benefits and that the state's community colleges have 75% of their faculty on the tenure track, was sent to the Secretary of State for distribution to the state's community college districts.

We want to congratulate all of the activists who were instrumental in making academic staffing a legislative priority in California, and we hope that this resolution will serve as a catalyst for community college administrators and faculty working together to implement a long-term strategy for implementing an equitable and sustainable staffing structure to serve the needs of California's students.

Ah, late August, where summer begins to fade into autumn and our minds turn to... the latest round of college rankings. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a special report this week on educational quality at institutions of higher education, and as part of it, they include this nifty interactive graphic that allows you to see what criteria six of the most well-known college ranking guides use as their rubric for evaluation.

Scanning through the 30 criteria that are listed, it's striking how little attention is paid to faculty and teaching as a factor. Only two of the ranking systems (USN&WR and Kiplinger) attempt to show the gradations within the faculty rank (and only factor in the number of faculty working "full-time," a measure which we've seen is suspect and doesn't fully capture the differences between tenure-line and NTT faculty). One (USN&WR) examines faculty compensation, again without reference to the differences in pay for adjuncts. And USN&WR is alone in including instructional spending per student.

Now, I suppose that picking apart the annual college ranking guides is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it seems odd to me that these ranking guides wouldn't focus on what undergraduates are expecting in college: high quality instruction from faculty. Given that more and more research is showing that faculty (be they tenure-line or adjunct) engagement with their institution is linked with better student outcomes, wouldn't it make sense to include the state of an institution's faculty in any assessment of a college?
   

Just a quick update to let you all know that a bit of good news has emerged today. California's community colleges have just decided to end their controversial deal with Kaplan University that would have allowed students who could not access introductory courses at their local community colleges to instead take Kaplan's courses for—get this—ten times the price.

Earlier this year, Kaplan swooped in to ink the deal with California when they realized that its 112 community college system was severely overcrowded thanks to the economic recession and years of disinvestment on the part of the state. Students who were not able to get into required intro courses necessary for completing their programs were now able to access the equivalent course at one of Kaplan's schools for $216 per credit hour—just a little pricier than the $26 per credit hour they were used to paying at the community college.

Thanks to the fact that transfer agreements between Kaplan and many of the community colleges never materialized and the bad press that for-profit education has gotten in the past several months, California made the decision to nix the deal. For-profit education has one less avenue through which to exploit the students who need the most.

There's big news on academic staffing from the Golden State today. Yesterday, the California State Senate passed Assembly Concurrent Resolution 138 by a vote of 23-11. ACR 138, you may recall, expresses the intent of the California Legislature that part-time faculty in the California Community Colleges receive pay and benefits equal and proportionate to that of tenured and tenure-track faculty and that the state's community colleges increase their percentage of their faculties that are tenure-line to 75%. Due to a technicality, the resolution needs to be re-approved by the State Assembly, which previously passed it in June of this year.

Yesterday's vote came after an emotional presentation by Senator Joe Simitian, who related an anecdote of meeting a harried waiter who was waiting tables so that he could afford to engage in his real passion - teaching philosophy at three of California's community colleges.

We'll keep you updated as ACR 138 makes its way towards its final passage, and congratulations to the activists in California who are working so hard to bring the inequities plaguing the academic staffing structure to light and are pushing their legislature into action!