Sun Sentinel Attacks For-Profit Colleges

The Sun Sentinel tool a pot shot at the for-profit college sector over the weekend. I'll refute some of the claims made:

Career colleges make it easy for students to enroll with little or no money up front. Financial aid representatives help students line up loans. Even candidates with a bad credit history are not discouraged.

Students attending any type of college are able to obtain loans to finance their education with bad credit. Andrew Gillen relates this easy credit to the housing bubble that recently popped, terming it the tuition bubble.

The greatest risk, though, is not for the schools, since they receive their money up front, but to the students taking out the loans and ultimately, to taxpayers. Unpaid loans follow former students through life, can ruin their credit and lead to serious consequences, including the federal government garnishing their wages and withholding their tax refunds. Even declaring personal bankruptcy is not an option to shed student loan debt, except in rare cases.

"You want to be very careful as a consumer taking on a huge amount of debt based on the assumption that you're going to have a great job that will make it manageable to pay off,'' Asher said.

Again, this same argument applies to public and not-for-profit private colleges. The root of the problem is that the government is offering easy, non-collateralized credit to kids, many of who have never had a job and have blurred expectations of their future careers.

"Some of the schools to me, just from experience, are diploma mills,'' Rosenberg said. "They're into the dollars more than the education.''

He said he considers a degree from a for-profit school a "weeding-out factor.''

"If all things are equal with a candidate, I will go with somebody that graduated from a traditional college,'' Rosenberg said.

In an address to the 28th National Conference on Higher Education in 1973, Jack Jones suggested that the public image of proprietary institutions is based largely on the lowest common denominator, implying that the entire sector is identified according to the misdeeds of a few bad apples that are part of a much larger and healthy orchard. In a 1974 paper, David A. Trivett likened this personification to “basing the image of all colleges and universities on knowledge about Harvard or Oxford. Sure, some of these schools are bad apples, but not all of them. There are also some scumbag public and not-for-profit schools out there. How about we judge a school by its merits, rather than its association or ownership status.