ThinkProgress reports:
In their television ads, for-profit colleges promise to deliver credentials that will jump-start students' careers. The people lured in by that marketing end up deeper in debt than community college students but fare no better with hiring managers, according to a new study. In fact, for-profit graduates don't even gain a job hunting advantage over applicants with no college experience at all.
The study results(PDF) are based on a simple experiment that the authors believe is the first of its kind performed on for-profit schools. Researchers sent nearly 9,000 fake resumes in response to job postings in six different categories of work and compared the response rates their fake applicants got to see if a for-profit college degree would be worth more in the job market than an equivalent community college certification. Some of the fictional resumes listed no education beyond high school in order to evaluate the claim from for-profit supporters that the industry "draws some students into postsecondary schooling who otherwise would not have attended college at all" and should therefore be viewed as a useful bridge to economic mobility.
The experiment produced no evidence that for-profit degrees help job applicants relative to community college degrees. Fake resumes with community college listed got callbacks slightly more often than than those with for-profit degrees, but the difference was too small to conclude that a for-profit degree is outright damaging to a person's job hunt. For-profit resumes got a response 11.3 percent of the time and an interview request 4.7 percent of the time, compared to 11.6 percent and 5.3 percent respectively for community college degrees.
"We also find little evidence of a benefit to listing a for-profit college relative to no college at all," the authors write. That means that someone who spent $35,000 on a two-year associates degree -- the average cost for-profit schools charge -- has the same odds of getting a call back from a job they wanted as someone who spent zero dollars on college. (The same 2012 report on for-profit costs found that the equivalent community college degree would cost $8,300 on average, and the trade association for for-profit schools did not challenge those numbers.)
Related Stories
ProPublica reports
The Education Department announced [September 22] [1] that it is stripping the powers of one of the nation's largest accreditors of for-profit schools.
The Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS, has been under scrutiny for continuing to accredit colleges whose students had strikingly poor outcomes.
As ProPublica has reported, schools accredited by the agency on average have the lowest graduation rates in the country and their students have the lowest loan repayment rates.
Accreditors are supposed to ensure college quality, and their seal of approval gives schools access to billions of federal student aid dollars.
As we have also reported, two-thirds of ACICS commissioners--who make the ultimate decisions about accreditation for schools--were executives at for-profit colleges. Many of the commissioners worked at colleges that were under investigation.
[1] Content hidden behind scripts, and then the text is displayed as images.
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A Degree from a For-Profit College is the Same as No College when Seeking a Job
(Score: 2, Funny) by pert.boioioing on Thursday August 21 2014, @09:35AM
Now I don't feel so bad about dropping out of the correspondence program from DeVry.. :-)
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Thursday August 21 2014, @12:08PM
Yeah, they definitely needed to control for name recognition, also the reputation for the school in the industry --- somehow I doubt any of those résumés were for graphic design and had R.I.T. (Rochester Institute of Technology) or S.C.A.D. (Savannah College of Art and Design) on them.
Agree that for any electronics job, DeVry would be a solid plus.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday August 21 2014, @01:34PM
Having graduated with a degree from DeVry or ITT Tech will put you at the front of the line for entry-level technician positions, but no way in hell you're gonna get a professional position with one of those unless you already have management experience.
Where I work we have 2 technical supervisors with B.S. Degrees from ITT. The first already had a degree in history and some supervisory experience. The second started out as a tech and worked his way up at his previous job. There are a few techs here with degrees from ITT, but in my opinion getting those degrees was a waste of money because they already had military experience, which is prized.
Having a degree from DeVry or ITT goes a lot less far in a city like San Diego because of the big pool of skilled and experienced ex-military personnel. It will go farther in a city like L.A. or elsewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @03:29PM
The study is not too surprising.
Most people I know thought of a 2 year degree as just that. No mater how you got it. Either by something like a devry or your local community college. They are vocational degrees. Hiring managers treat them as such.
The real scary ones are the ones who somehow convince you need to start with a 2year then move onto a 4year. Good luck with that. You will find many of your credits no longer apply and you are retaking many classes. My mother figured that one out the hard way. And apparently my wife is hell bent on finding it out as well. That works OK cost wise if you basically goofed off in HS and buffing up the pre-rec classes. That way you can at least test out in the 4 year college.
One other thing to keep in mind for these profit colleges is to make damn sure they are accredited. If it is not accredited the number of courses you can transfer are 0. The number of things they let you test out of is close to that as well.
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Thursday August 21 2014, @05:14PM
The trick is to find a community college with good articulation agreements with area 4-year schools. But that's all part of the due diligence nobody tells you to do before they sell you a bill of goods.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:46PM
As somebody who spent 10 years in community college before getting his A.S. in Computer Science, I can say that does nothing to stop the tacking-on of more bullshit requirements like the "Multicultural" requirement they decided to tack on when I had thought I had met all my requirements. Of course, things like that are less about producing well-rounded students and more about being a cash-cow for the higher-education industrial complex.
It was even worse for my then-girlfriend, who went to 4-year college in Mexico, and they decided to change a significant amount of the program and then mandate all students in it have to comply with the changes, leaving her out of money and unable to finish her education when it was previously within reach. She and all of her friends in the program who got shafted had a "fake graduation party" to celebrate what would have been their graduation.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday August 21 2014, @07:59PM
10 years? At a community college? And you are upset that degree requirements changed in that time?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday August 21 2014, @08:16PM
I was upset because they added that requirement around the time when I first petitioned to graduate (which was recent, in case you can't figure that out), you pompous cocksucker.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday August 21 2014, @11:02PM
Maybe they just didn't like you.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday August 21 2014, @10:23AM
Adult swim. [youtube.com] "I got a job as a digital gardener!"
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday August 21 2014, @11:48AM
I would like to see how it pans out for resumes with "known" university credentials, while controlling for the race and credentials of HR departments. For example, if you want to work in NYC government you almost have to have gone to Fordham University in the Bronx, because hiring managers for the city went there.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @12:05PM
Aren't all colleges "for profit" these days, caring more about collecting as much money as possible rather than educating students?
(Score: 1) by Chillgamesh on Thursday August 21 2014, @01:52PM
For profit businesses pay dividends to shareholders. Public Universities may make exorbinant profit. But it either sits in the university's coffers or is invested into various projects.
Small detail, but incentives are what drives human behavior.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday August 21 2014, @07:21PM
And a lot of it goes to pay the ridiculous salaries of those at the top. San Diego State's President gets $450,000 a year. Some of the UC Regents make millions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @01:06PM
Duh.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday August 21 2014, @03:19PM
I want to know if the job postings were real or not... that would affect the validity of the research. How did they screen the job postings?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @03:58PM
Places like the University of Phoenix, Ashford University and Corinthian are first and foremost a way for wallstreet banks to steal from the government and fuck over the poor in the process. The way it works is that they are primarily funded by federal education loans which are the one and only kind of loan that you can't shed in bankruptcy. They trick people into signing up for college with outright lies, structure their classes in a way that funnels students to failure, but still get paid because it is guaranteed by the federal government. The students drop out with no degree but now they've got a debt load that they will never get out from under.
It is a $32 billion/year scam.
The scam is starting to unwind, the big corporate schools have seen revenue reductions in the last 2-3 years as the word gets out. But the damage they've already done to the economic health of our society is enormous and will outlast them by decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @11:22PM
The Gov't Could Make Public College Free For All Students For Less Than Half Of Current Subsidies [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [popularresistance.org]
-- gewg_