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posted by n1 on Thursday August 21 2014, @08:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the money-onto-the-bonfire dept.

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.)

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @03:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @03:58PM (#83986)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @11:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @11:22PM (#84143)