60 Minutes had an excellent report on for-profit degree mills. Apparently, they’re under investigation for a range of shady practices, including false advertising, nonexistent job placement, and treating “admissions” staff as a sales force. The real scandal, of course, is that much of the money flowing through these for-profit colleges and trade programs are federal dollars and federal-guaranteed loans, yet the feds provide almost no oversight for accredation or quality.
But beyond the ethics transgressions of the for-profits, we should ask whether a policy of treating tenuous trade education on the same level as other higher education makes sense. We hear the false populism of the for-profit college lobbyist, who chides critics:
Glakas says career colleges are a passport into the middle class for millions of people, a gateway to the American dream.
“Twenty-five percent of our students are working adults. Fifty percent are minority. Seventy percent are the first in their family to go to college. This is an extraordinary success story,” says Glakas.
This is the shell game that’s going on. Because one is offering working class kids and returning-ed adults “college” credentials, doesn’t make those credentials the passport into the middle class. In other words, besides the experience of higher ed itself (something which doesn’t seem so hot in the 60 Minutes piece), what’s valuable is not the college credential, but the increased prestige and/or earning power it offers. That’s what people pay for, and that’s what makes higher education a gateway into the middle class. If for-profit Potemkin colleges are disproportionately working class and minority, that’s a sign that we’re ill serving working class and minority students - or at least that higher education is reproducing class divisions.
By the way, this short-circuiting of higher education standards takes place at some not-for-profit colleges as well, and is every bit as shameful.
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