

College Inc. PBS documentary - budu3
http://video.pbs.org/video/1485280975/

======
kev009
Any other hackers totally disgusted by the state of education?

On one hand, you have "for profit" schools like those documented here. At
best, these are a slippery slope. The fact that they are "for profit" doesn't
scare me so much, but the predatory marketing and questionable value do.
Bottom line, I would never attend one in current form and would take anyone
unable to see through the facade with a heavy grain of salt while hiring.

On the other, you have traditional state and established private schools. The
problems are myriad here as well. Costs continue to rise and most are hurting
for money and have practically become "for profit". The danger of tenure means
that quality can and often is lackluster. From personal experience, many
professors are more interested in themselves and forget that the primary
mission is the development of students. I've found that many college
professors are down right awful at conveying their subject matter to students.
All in all, it's a hundreds of years old bureaucracy with little oversight and
questionable relevance to the 21st century.

I think the real crime is the expectation that everyone in America needs a
college education. There is certainly value in pursuing the standard liberal
arts curriculum; it pushes you to explore a wide area and develop at least
some analytical and argumentative skills. Whether everyone is cut out for this
study is another matter. It is a mistake to assume that the worlds needs such
a large quantity of generalists. My intuition points to quite the opposite.
Technology will continue to push complexity farther and farther into all walks
of life. What is really needed is the ability to quickly assimilate knowledge
and separate wheat from chaff (i.e. throw out the constant stream of bullshit
that society and marketing throw at us). Most coursework focuses on quite the
opposite by requiring rote memorization and prepackaged knowledge from the
professor. There also seems to be a growing trend of disdain for good, honest
work -- the thankless jobs that allow us knowledge workers to exist. It is
deceitful to perpetuate that everyone is capable of everything and just
because they don't have a degree are inferior. Society requires all sorts of
people to thrive.

At least for building software, I can't help but think that apprenticeships
and mentoring would do a lot more for software quality than four years of
expensive daycare that most degree programs are.

Disclaimer: I've just finished my Junior year as a CS major at a small public
military college. All in all, the best thing I gotten are a bunch of really
good friends and networking opportunities. Those that weren't programming on
their own prior to entering the CS program are going to be seriously
disadvantaged in the market place. I'm curious what other startup junkies have
to say.

~~~
Locke1689
_From personal experience, many professors are more interested in themselves
and forget that the primary mission is the development of students._

I've seen this mistake a lot. While you may _believe_ that the primary purpose
of professors is teaching, this is not true at many institutions. In fact, at
heavy research institutions the benchmark for tenure is not teaching
performance, it's grant success and publishing.

~~~
brainid
True, in fact a typical professor at a university devotes roughly 30% of
effort to teaching. The rest is research effort (~ 60%) and service (reviewing
papers, running conferences, etc).

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rubyrescue
I understand this space and can speak to it at a high level.

The current for-profit system exists ONLY because of the broken federal
student loan system. The goal of 95% of these schools is to extract the
federal student loan money from the student as efficiently as possible with a
nominal focus on quality of education.

To prove it, spend a half hour reading online education feeder sites that
provide reviews (do a few google searches). They fall into three buckets - 80%
complain about the aggressive recruiting tactics, poor education and poor
customer service. 15% are sock-puppets paid by the universities to write
reviews. 5% are satisfied students.

But here's the rub - and I wake up daily baffled by this phenomenon, but the
students read the reviews and still attend the schools.

There are by my estimation four reasons for this:

First, you're dealing with, ironically, uneducated, low-income people who
don't understand what they're getting into - they have been lead to believe
that a college degree is worth something, and they'll take 30-40K of
UNFORGIVABLE debt (because it's a federal loan) to make minimum wage.

Second, you're in an environment (higher education) where the very idea of
certifying and grading the quality of education would have been unthinkable in
decades past and the regulatory environment hasn't caught up with the business
realities.

Third, the ease of access to government money won't dry up until major changes
are made at the federal level and there's little likelihood that politicians
would set themselves up as being against education for lower-income students.
Lobbying has ramped up to protect the stream of 20-30 billion dollars of money
flowing into the industry.

Fourth, aggressive recruiting tactics driven by the money at stake are keeping
the doors full and forcing students into school without knowing what they're
getting into.

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FrankBlack
I'm sure real estate, mortgage and contracting corporations hate the heavy
hand of "government bureaucracy" holding them back, but have no trouble taking
whatever help is offered from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, local tax incentives
and the like. Don't worry, the taxpayer will give you some help. It isn't a
handout, it is a hand-up.

I'm sure the banks, insurance industry and the investment houses despise all
those layers and layers of red tape that tie them up and prevent them from
helping Americans reach their God-given right of financial independence. No
worries, you are all too big to fail and we'll just pass the payments on to
the generous citizens of the United States. No, really, it is our pleasure. In
fact, why don't you give yourselves a bonus?

Wal-Mart, America's greatest economic success story, loves America and loves
regular folks. You know, the sort of folks that work at their store for
minimum wage. The sort of folks who, upon becoming employees, are given
paperwork to help apply for government assistance when it comes to medical
care and such. Why would they share a tiny fragment of their distended profits
reaped from cheap foreign-made American flags and "God Bless America" bumper
stickers when they can just help their employees go on public assistance? If
we gave them more money, how would that teach them to pull themselves up by
their own bootstraps? Sheesh, you just don't know business, do you?

GM, fed up with all those unions, OSHA standards, foreign companies who
collude with their governments and incessant regulation decided it was time to
close up shop. Sure, they've been moving jobs out of the nation for years and
years even while they were making record profits, but that is just business,
right? I mean, we need MORE profits, don't we? So, it is a good thing that
TARP money was around to help them back on their feet so they can put more
Americans out of work. But it is an American company, right? Yep, a good old
American company with a few Americans still building cards and getting paid
and paying taxes and buying things in their home town. And, they've even
started paying back that money (with more TARP money... you know... taxpayer
money). You see, capitalism DOES work!

After watching this PBS program, I see the next bubble rising in the distance.
These visionary capitalists are throwing off the dusty shackles of dated
institutions and bringing a new model to the world. If only the government
would step aside and let them realize their dream of educating those who might
not otherwise receive education! Why must the Nanny State always talk about
standards and expectations and accreditation and other big words? Begone, you
scoundrel! Yes, I am talking to you accreditation and regulations and truth-
in-advertising! Just get out of the way Uncle Sam and just keep those student
loan checks coming. Stop obstructing the market, comrade!

Same old shell game. Bang the drums of free market capitalism with one hand
and hold out the other hand for government money. Exploit whomsoever you can
and call it freedom. So glad these forward-thinking capitalists are running
this and not the evil commie-socialist-fascist (or whatever term they are
using this week on Fox News) government. Why won't the government just get off
our backs (and just start sending us checks). No, it isn't all bad, I'm sure,
but I guess I'm just jaded after all these types (and I didn't even start on
the military industrial complex or the medical industry) screaming about
freedom and free markets until they need money or help. Good thing the teat of
liberty is full (just like the Gulf of Mexico is full of oil).

/rant

------
cpg
I saw this and it's a good overview of the fringes of higher education.

How to make people more "productive" by essentially finance them to a small
bump in their qualifications.

Very very predatory (at least for me, coming from a top school)!

------
Bjoern
Does anyone (who went there) have an opinion on the University of Phoenix or
The Open University?

EDIT: Woah, look at this link
[http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/Company/University-Of-
Pho...](http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/Company/University-Of-Phoenix.aspx)
\- so many complaints. I really wonder what is going on here. Is there any
online university that is not a ripoff?

~~~
kev009
<http://www.aduni.org/> \- sadly only lasted one year.

~~~
Bjoern
Sad! Why was this stopped after one year?

~~~
sounddust
You'd have to know the story of ArsDigita to understand why. Here's Philip
Greenspun's side of the story: <http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/>

~~~
Bjoern
Thank you!

------
robertmrangel
Can't watch it, i'm on an iPad

------
greenlblue
This is one of the cool things I think about capitalist systems. Whenever
there is some kind of vacuum huge amounts of capital always flows to it. If
the federal government had some smarter bureaucrats they would use this
mechanism as a gauge and focus their energies on the sectors that are being
heavily invested, e.g. education, because that means state services are not
meeting certain demands. But more often than not they do the exact opposite.
Instead of bringing more innovative thinking to state run schools by stealing
some of the good ideas from for profit educational institutions they just
cling to their old ways and try to strangle the for profits. This is just
backwards because the value state run schools provide to their students is
always more than any for profit school can provide but with money being cut
back and teachers being let go at state schools the students have nowhere else
to go but to greedy for profit institutions.

~~~
Locke1689
I think you're only partially correct here. What we can see through the
success of for-profit schools is that people are interested for-profit
education. This does not mean that they are interested in education in general
--the draw may lie in the promise of higher incomes after graduation.

Now, the question is, what do for-profit institutions do better than non-
profit institutions? The first is enrollment numbers. For-profit schools
enroll many times the number of students that non-profit schools do. The
problem with this is assuming that all students are created equal. That is, is
educating 500 good students worse than educating 10,000 bad students? Even
more concerning, is educating 500 students well worse than educating 10,000
students poorly? If you watch the special you will learn that it is projected
that as many as 50% of for-profit students who take student loans will default
on those loans. This suggests to me that, regardless of the cause, the for-
profit institutions are not educating the students adequately. In this case it
seems that this is not a strength of capitalism--the for-profit institutions
are not making money by providing a useful service, they are essentially
making money by playing snake-oil salesmen.

To my eyes, the only other thing that for-profit institutions are better at
than non-profit institutions is enrolling low income students. I think this
leads back to your claim that capitalism identifies vacuums in the market. I
think the vacuum here is one created by marketing--free money. The for-profit
institutions work by promising education, which they say lead to higher income
jobs. However, we can see from the statistics that there's no direct proof of
that. In fact, the crippling student loans may place students in an even worse
financial situation. While educating low income students is certainly an area
that we could improve upon, I don't see for-profit institutions as having any
revolutionary way of solving this problem.

In essence, I think we see the situation two different ways. I understand you
as seeing it as elucidating the weaknesses in traditional higher education
(which I can't completely disagree with), but I also see it as direct
exploitation of the undereducated due to weak governmental regulation. For-
profit institutions signal a demand for what was promised but I don't see a
solution anywhere in sight, including inside the for-profit universities.
Right now, it's simply exploitation.

~~~
greenlblue
I did watch the video and a few things I noticed that the for-profit
institutions are better at where faster turnaround time on developing new
curriculum, better non-standard class schedules and better management of
online classes to provide as much flexibility for the students as possible.
The state institutions are incredibly bad at all of those things. The online
thing is just beyond me. All you need to do is setup a tiny server farm, hire
some web developers to setup some course management software and you're ready
to go. The curriculum problems I also don't understand but I think it's
because there are way too many bureaucratic layers to get any new kind of
curriculum change approved so people don't even bother.

~~~
Locke1689
_the for-profit institutions are better at where faster turnaround time on
developing new curriculum, better non-standard class schedules and better
management of online classes to provide as much flexibility for the students
as possible. The state institutions are incredibly bad at all of those things.
The online thing is just beyond me. All you need to do is setup a tiny server
farm, hire some web developers to setup some course management software and
you're ready to go._

I think an important issue here is that the for-profits have good _numbers_ in
these areas, but not necessarily good _results_. It's important to note that
we can't objectively say that these things are better from an education
standpoint, only from a monetary standpoint. Perhaps traditional institutions
are more inflexible (don't offer online courses, etc.), but maybe that isn't
an effective teaching method.

