These companies target people who dream of a better life and then convince them to take-out massive loans. Kind of like if payday lenders were being propped-up by the federal government.
It is a pity that many of the not-for-profit colleges are not any better - instead of profit the money goes to keeping an ever increasing number of parasites (sometimes called administrators) in cushy jobs.
For what it's worth, it's 23:30 here, and I'm on my laptop working on making sure that our internal ikiwiki is up-to-date with notes on the labs that I support. I'm going in for surgery on Thursday, and I've got Wednesday off (it's bowel surgery, so I'm doing all the annoying prep the day before). I also need to post on the appropriate Slack channels, so that my co-workers (who will be covering for me) know the docs are up-to-date. I also need to note anything things that might pop up, that don't justify wiki entries (like, tickets of note that are still open).
I'll probably work until Midnight or 00:30, and then pick right up at it tomorrow morning, because _I want the docs to be up-to-date_. I was working on all that today and yesterday, but there was also the regular support load from my labs. Plus, one of my co-workers was stuck in a project to reverse-engineer a binary file format, and I was helping her through using the Python `struct` module for the first time. It would be nice if we had an extra employee to help shoulder the load, but he's out right now (his wife was in labor).
My clients don't want to spend time managing technology. They just want to do the stuff they love, to do their research. But things like broken servers, laws, hackers, and the threat of negative PR, get in the way. I try to deal with all of that for them.
I'm a staffer at a university. I already knew that some portion of the student body thought of us as parasites[1], but I didn't know that the outside world held the same view.
And it's a pretty bizarre interpretation of the linked article to say that the author is implying that sysadmins (as a subset of non-teaching staff) are parasites. Rather, the article's claim is that the relative growth rates of teachers, students, and non-teaching staff imply in the aggregate some inefficiencies in the way the college's functioning has been evolving. The argument may or may not be correct, but it's analysis isn't prima facie ridiculous and its meaning is worlds away from what you're saying.
On top of THAT, even the most uncharitable interpretation of the article (ie, tarring college administrators as mostly parasites) would quite obviously not include the kind of work you're describing, ie support staff for course materials.
I don't think anyone considers IT support staff to be "administrators". They're thinking of Deans, Provosts, Vice Provosts, ____ Coordinators. These positions frequently pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they've multiplied significantly over the last 30 years.
IT project bloat is definitely an issue though. It's just not the support staff that are causing the problem. Plus more admins are brought in either to manage the projects or make them more 'efficient' when the projects fail or are poorly implemented. You start to get coordinators whose job it is to hand key from one system to another so that professors or what not don't have to do it.
I think people are just parroting soundbites they hear like "the number of administrators keep growing and are causing the tuition increases." In reality, what's happening is way too complex to be described in a single or even a few sentences.
The role of universities is expanding. Should universities play a role in the local communities? Should they do research? Should they perform outreach to improve diversity? Should they accommodate all facets of student life? Should they have sports? Should they teach courses to non-students? Should they fundraise? Should they support extracurriculars and provide leadership opportunities? Should they offer financial aid? Should they manage real estate and parking? Should they resolve disputes among faculty and students and departments? Should they invest their endowment? Should they support alumni? Basically, each of these needs a team of people to manage.
The main thing they should do is teach classes and possibly conduct research. That's supposed to be the primary goal.
When they remove all the full-time faculty by replacing everyone who leaves with underpaid and overworked adjuncts, they fail at that mission. Nobody is going to care about any of the other things if they can't actually learn anything there.
It should have been pretty obvious from context that the OP wasn't talking about "system administrators", but rather the more common definition of "administrator".
My post wasn’t aimed at people like you (support staff), but as others have already pointed mentioned all the deans and vice-deans for x that seem to do nothing but make it hard to actually get any teaching and research done.
I recently interviewed a lot of fresh grads to hire on as junior developers. I was taken aback a few times. I had a candidate with a “computer science” degree that didn’t know what a linked list is. The general trend was that basic data structures are abstract concepts, which probably isn’t super unusual with most modern languages as you shouldn’t need to implement a hash table or tree. I guess it was the “computer science” vs “programming” or “software development” in the degree name. Algorithmic complexity was also abstract. Formal verification or algorithmic profs? It was like I asked a question in a foreign language. These are grads from “state universities”
My take away is that a lot of universities are pinched between being vocational schools and “University” The for profit places at least do away with the idea that they aren’t vocational schools, it’s all about a job. It seems like “college” or “university” should maybe be used more sparingly in their names. That might lower the value prop a little but theyre starting to puss in everybody’s soup.
> I recently interviewed a lot of fresh grads to hire on as junior developers. I was taken aback a few times. I had a candidate with a “computer science” degree that didn’t know what a linked list is.
This was something that infuriated me about college. We were taught about linked lists, and how CPU registers work at the physical level, and two or three languages that nobody uses.
And then I went out looking for a job and nobody gives a shit about this. I've been in the industry for decades and I've never had any use for a linked list.
You should never need to write one but I think it is still good to learn it. I for one, have never used a hash table or regex (in 30 years!) but I’m sure some developers use them all the time.
There's a lot of computer science programs that are, quite frankly, very sub par. "You didn't learn this in college?" Is something I've been saying a lot to the new grads I've been mentoring lately. Mostly state schools in my case as well.
Any college can teach a couple basic programming classes and call it a computer science education, I guess. To avoid that I didn't even consider going to a non-ABET accredited school.
In 2018, with trillions in public and not-for-profit money, and modern info-tech... If a poor kid in India, or anywhere, with an internet wanted to study for a world-class education, is there any legitimately ethical reason everyone should not be able to do this freely, and also be able to earn credentials through exams? Perhaps examinations should carry a modest fee, but why isn't more going into not just open courseware, but open degree programs?
Shouldn't the presitigious universities be finding ways to educate, train and credential as many people as possible, rather than maintaining barriers to entry to their educational materials? Or do we need to perpetuate prestige and social strata through these institutions' selective commitees?
Yeah, see that's the whole point of those institutions. It's all just signaling. Harvard could let in twice as many people easily, but then it would stop being the "best school" because acceptance rate affects school ranking.
Instead of focusing on those schools, why don't we as a society try to remove the stigma of going to community college or learning a trade?
Well, and the ratio of faculty to students would be worsened, facilities would get overextended, many students wouldn’t be able to live on campus, etc. I agree with your broader point though and indeed Harvard does have Harvard Extension School and was one of the founders of edX.
Yes, and my wife is currently pursuing a graduate degree through there. It requires 3 on-site classes, and appears to be just a rigorous as a degree program in person.
"Perhaps examinations should carry a modest fee, but why isn't more going into not just open courseware, but open degree programs?"
"Grading" is really the only thing you are paying for, at this point.
Many of the most prestigious institutions have put their lectures and course materials on line for free.
But it doesn't do you much good to go to an employer and say "I went through all of the materials for all of the courses needed to get this MIT degree, and understood all of it, honest! So you should give me equal consideration as an MIT graduate!"
The employer will be much more likely to hire the candidate who they can verify completed all of the degree requirements by just contacting MIT.
"The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan suggests a framing in which this makes sense. He more or less argues, with data and some interesting points, that the barriers to education are not a bug, and not only a feature, but perhaps the primary economic feature of our education system.
A part of his argument is that people who get into elite schools and don't go to an elite school tend to have approximately the same life outcomes as people who go to elite schools, suggesting that the schools are just filtering for people who will be successful anyway and rubber stamping them.
Another part is that, if education's economic value was through adding value to people by exposing them to valuable ideas and skills, then there should be some correlation between how deeply exposed you are to those resources and your life outcomes, but in reality there's really only a binary between whether or not you finish the degree. 7 semesters of college seems to do nothing significant for you if you don't get a piece of paper to show people, which is very strange if college actually adds any substantial value other than as a filter.
There's more too. It's a polarizing book, but I think his framing is at least approximately correct, as it fits better with how the real world is working than any other framing of education I've seen, and if he's right, then the current paradigm of education is just fundamentally not scaleable, and really needs more fundamental restructuring than just giving it to more people.
People who have the opportunity to attend an elite university and decline it would be doing so because their opportunity cost is better.
But the question is still open: why should credentials not be open to fair competition? Shouldn't a poor woman in Africa be able to compete for the same computer science credentials, bar exams, medical exams (this would require further vetting of practical lab skills) as a Harvard student, through the same exams and projects? Of course, Harvard could still give its students its own stamp of approval, but the education and credentials should be open to competition, not behind walled gardens.
Currently taking their graduate math diploma, from the London School of Economics (part of university of London),the whole thing will be around $3000, with the registration and exam fees separate, so you only pay for what you use, in a way
It depends on which credential you're talking about. For some programs, it would be enough to have a book plus a series of lectures, along with the labs to complete and the exams to take. But, there are a few problems that need to be solved, which are not specific to academia.
First is copyright. It's difficult enough to get through the copyright issues to produce printed lab material for a class; publishing online adds an additional layer: Material has to be licensed for unlimited distribution, in a way that is compliant with each country's copyright laws.
Another is communication. This is more important for some programs, particularly the programs where there is heavy discussion involved (instead of just lectures), you need seamless, high-quality, real-time communication between people. And I'm not talking about G.729, or Speex. I'm talking uncompressed wide-band G.722, with low jitter and no packet loss. And at least voice communications is essential, because there is so much information that is lost when communication goes text-only. Ideally the conversation would be video, because there is information lost when you go audio-only.
Both of these issues are things where the for-profit world needs to be leading the way.
Educational institutions will fight for looser copyright restrictions all the time, to the point where the people in charge tune it out. Lobbying is also harder (not impossible, but harder to do), because you can risk the 501(c) status. Having for-profit companies pushing for looser copyright restrictions for education would massively help, by reducing barriers and making people less nervous about distributing material without the threat of copyright claims.
As for communication, the distributed startups have been facing this problem head-on for some time, but I don't think there is a single Body of Knowledge that exists for the way to do one-way (lecture), two-way interactive (Q&A, office hours, etc.) and n-way collaborative (discussion session) most efficiently. It's one thing to talk about theory (we do that really well!), but the people in the startups are living this today. Give us the tried and tested Way To Do It, backed up by your experience.
> It's difficult enough to get through the copyright issues to produce printed lab material for a class; publishing online adds an additional layer: Material has to be licensed for unlimited distribution, in a way that is compliant with each country's copyright laws.
You seem to assume that teaching always requires licensing copyrighted materials from others, like textbooks I guess. In my personal experience, that's not really necessary.
I've experienced higher education in two countries, Germany and China. In Germany, there were no mandatory textbooks. Professors always used materials they created themselves, sometimes just before they were needed, sometimes adapted from previous times the course was taught, sometimes in cooperation with other professors. If you wanted to read more about the topic from a different angle, you were free to read a textbook, but it was completely optional and I never did.
In China, the professors had all been to the US for their PhDs and they used textbooks popular there, always stressing which prestigious universities the book authors were affiliated with. That doesn't mean anyone bought the books. You'd usually get credentials for an FTP server that had all required material.
In neither case any copyrighted works were licensed. In Western countries you'd have to follow the German model, but in countries with less effective copyright enforcement, the Chinese model also works.
> First is copyright. It's difficult enough to get through the copyright issues to produce printed lab material for a class; publishing online adds an additional layer: Material has to be licensed for unlimited distribution, in a way that is compliant with each country's copyright laws.
Most have fair use or fair dealing exemptions covering classroom and exercise use. Can you exemplify a jurisdiction that does not have enough fair use/dealing?
I can't imagine any legal construct anywhere in which classroom use of a textbook that was copyright infringing would fall under fair use. Can you provide some legal reasoning that would support that assertion?
I worked in both research and profit-center sides at a so-called non-profit private university everyone knows by name with a ten figure endowment management company. They wasted $150 million on a campus-wide accounting system that consultants failed to deploy something usable. And, an 8 year old $30 million donated building was torn down to make way for a $120 million complex with underground parking. They have money to burn, even in economic downturns... they do the feigning poverty routine with so-called budget cutbacks that are ostensibly to cut spending but are in fact false signals to game donors into donating more.
Nearly all US universities are so flush with cash that they're constantly rebuilding to attract customers (ie students). The scamming ones must have owners and executives taking the money and running, because there's no way they can go bankrupt unless they're trying hard to do so and/or completely incompetent at managing business survival.
PS: The associate vice provost of a dept I worked for was reimbursed $80-100 from the university for dinner nearly every night,
had a free suite just off campus (worth $3000/month) and seriously requested helicopter rides to work. They were in-charge of the biggest cash-cow besides undergraduate tuition, netting around $200 million annually.
I admit to being an outsider to that industry, but I do have friends who are not, and they tell a different story. Yes, some universities in the US are as you describe. But not "nearly all". Small universities without large endowments are in the process of consolidating into large schools, or shutting down. Small colleges with reasonable endowments are up and running, but nervous, because they can see that they do have a runway to worry about.
In short, there is a spectrum of wealth in the education system just as there is with individuals and families. Anecdata from one of the wealthiest doesn't give a full picture of the entire system.
>* Anecdata from one of the wealthiest doesn't give a full picture of the entire system....*
And in fairness, anecdata from those most poor doesn't give a full picture either. I'd argue that so called "non-profit" universities are indeed better off at the mean than is generally known.
Also, any university with a reasonable endowment, especially if it is small to boot, is not nervous in the least. The "nervous" set of universities would include, in this order, for-profit universities, small privates with small endowments, and large privates with small endowments. (The last category, large private-small endowment, should be all but dead. So if any are still out there they have something else going on. Maybe a good football or basketball team or something?)
I'd also add to this list small publics which have small endowments and are located in states with upcoming, or current, fiscal shortfalls. (Especially states with both, like Kansas, Wisconsin, etc). Though these universities are not so much "nervous" about going away, as they are "nervous" about what will happen when their states merge them together to streamline costs. I doubt most states would get rid of their small universities, even in lean economic times. (I could be wrong about that though? I just doubt it.)
> Small colleges with reasonable endowments are up and running, but nervous, because they can see that they do have a runway to worry about.
But how did they get to a cost structure where they have to be so nervous? If they could keep costs to where they were in real terms 25 years ago they could charge less tuition (thereby making it easier to fill classes) and break even without dipping into the endowment.
Harvard can hire hundreds of overpaid administrators, build ugly buildings, and invest foolishly and it’s “only” a colossal waste of money. When Union College copies Harvard’s poor decision making there’s a lot less margin for error.
Just like in health care, insane cost growth is the whole ballgame.
> But how did they get to a cost structure where they have to be so nervous?
It's not necessarily the university's fault in every case and instead is due to the changing face of higher education in America. Many colleges and universities were able to rest on their laurels for decades as the American economy transitioned from a labor force to a variety of specialized jobs across many new and exciting fields (as well as specialized training in old fields too).
The jobs market is again shifting and has been for many years. College has become increasingly unaffordable due to institutional hubris and from the fact that many colleges have been focusing on the wrong priorities to attract new students (luxury dorms! exotic food! useless majors!). Alternatives to expensive college degrees have sprung up everywhere, and while many universities scoffed at the thought that these new types of education would be embraced by the public, the alarm bells are beginning to ring louder and louder as traditional institutions begin to see declines, not only in general enrollments but also in specific programs that have been popular for decades.
Some places can weather the storm as they have prestigious names or large endowments or illustrious alumni networks or great sports teams. Others have to pivot to embrace the idea that college has become too unaffordable and orient their institutions towards new ideas and programming that will bring in students. The problems higher ed faces does not 100% come down to institutional cost structure, but instead a reimagining of how one can achieve a college-level education without resorting to massive amounts of debt.
I did the math on a local state university and figured their annual revenue is about $1B based on tuition and enrollment. While I think the school is managed well, it certainly doesn't feel or look like it is run as a billion dollar business.
How’s that work? Do they publish income because they are a state institution? (Every student pays something different so I would be hard to judge from just the # of students.) thx.
They probably do have to publish numbers, although I didn't look that up. It's just a very rough estimate based on the 'sticker' price and I figure that any tuition discounts for students are offset by research funding and alumni donations which I left out of my estimate.
UK: Local universities have developed new building syndrome. In some cases a definite enhancement (Birmingham University's new sports centre adds an olympic sized swimming pool and offers community engagement, BCU is moving everything onto one campus as much as possible and financing building by selling land, Aston is upgrading teaching rooms and lab space).
But also some projects not so much clear reason - demolishing functional libraries and replacing them with buildings that have fewer seats &c (although disabled access could have been an issue in one case).
The biggie is large scale speculative development of student residences. That bubble is going to have to burst soon...
> Nearly all US universities are so flush with cash that they're constantly rebuilding to attract customers (ie students).
Isn't it the really old historic buildings that attract people? After all nobody can build an old building. Being able to say your uni is 800 years old is something, no?
If you look at Oxbridge, all the new buildings are the ugly ones.
It's good to have a handful of really old buildings, but in the US what attracts undergrads is modern new dorms, gyms, and dining halls. Students might like walking by the scenic old buildings on campus, but they spend most of their time in what are basically luxury apartment buildings.
Hmmmmm, this is a difficult one to think on. I think there is an implicit contract made, where you put in enough time, effort, and money; and in return you get a corresponding credential, or other record of your work (i.e. a transcript). Each quarter/semester may be thought of as a contract, but that doesn't tell the whole story, because it takes a series of these contracts to get a credential. That's where the implicit part comes in.
As much as people don't like added government regulation, I think the best way to address this may be to have a body similar to the FDIC (and the NCUSIF, for credit unions).
Member educational institutions would provide the actual cost charged to each student, including costs paid in cash and costs paid by loans, and including actual room & board costs (if the institution charges for that). Each institution would also survey the student body to determine average amount spent on supplies, as well as the average cost for room & board for those who live outside.
Through the accrediting agencies, the insuring body would be able to work out about how long students would spent in-school for a particular degree.
The idea would be, should an institution 'fail' (for whatever definition you want), the insuring body would step in and provide some immediate compensation to students, to keep them in housing. Then, assess if they can transfer to another institution. If not, then they are refunded all costs for the time spent at the failed institution.
The body's actuaries can work out the general risk of institutional failures, and figure out how much money each participating institution would have to contribute to fund and maintain the insurance (which would likely be invested in things like Treasury bonds).
>If not, then they are refunded all costs for the time spent at the failed institution.
I'm currently just one semester away from earning my bachelor's degree. To do so, I resigned from a reasonably decent sysadmin job. If I was put into the position of one of the students going to the failed college in the article I would be out 3 years of my life. For me the difference in salary alone, even if I was compensated for every dime spent on education from tuition, rent, utilities, books, gas, everything would still be over $100,000.
Just covering costs is a drop in the bucket compared to the value of literally years of someone's life. If my college closed their doors the day after the start of next semester I would be apoplectic. For profit colleges should absolutely be required to have enough funds in reserve to make sure that they could continue operation long enough to let all currently enrolled students finish at a full time enrollment schedule.
Students are left with student loans that are basically impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Student loan forgiveness programs like the one for public service almost never actually pay out. Even if you die and your assets aren't enough to cover the loan, debt collectors will often go after immediate family members even though they are under no obligation to pay the debt in an effort to trick them into assuming responsibility for it. The whole point of making student loans unable to be discharged under basically any circumstances is to let creditors loan money for education without collateral.
Why shouldn't we require similar protections to keep for-profit colleges from defaulting on their obligations? I don't think what you're suggesting goes far enough to protect students and even if it did, it would need some teeth to it to meaningfully enforce it. We already have regulations to discharge student loans when an institution goes under but because of parasites like Betsy DeVos in the majority of cases those loans are still being collected on today.
I think the main thing here is that if an institution has "failed" then the government has already failed. Regulations should be structured in such a way that if an institution wants to close then it's cheaper to stop accepting new students and let the current ones finish rather than default and immediately close.
Is it realistically possible to structure things so that an organization cannot fail within some time window? I'm skeptical. If there's some wind-down (or refund) money held in escrow, it's reasonable to expect that maybe a semester window might be realistically possible. A couple years probably isn't. It would be a lousy situation especially to the degree credits weren't easily or fully transferable but it's not clear to me how much power the government has to do something about it.
I'm not saying make it literally impossible for an institution to fail, I'm just saying we should mitigate the risk by making sure there's some funds in reserve to act as collateral and mitigate cash flow problems while they're winding down. In addition pass some of that liability off onto the directors. Just making it clear that they have a fiduciary duty to students would go a long way.
Right now if a for-profit college is going under there's no incentive at all to try and minimize the impact to students. If you know that a degree program is getting the axe in 6 months it's pretty scummy to still be accepting freshmen into it. From a business standpoint not doing that means passing up hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition while still incurring the same costs in terms of facilities and faculty.
UK: further education colleges are state funded, I can't think of any purely private ones off the top of my head. The funding organisations would act to 'protect provision' if a college did fail - the funders can require mergers &c.
The fees they are charging tend to suggest that the University is not claiming skills funding agency money for this foundation course. In the UK further education colleges work at a level below universities and what we call 'level 3' qualifications (e.g. A levels, BTEC National Diploma &c) are needed to enter most university courses. Universities can offer their own foundation courses - a foundation year is common in the fine art field.
I like that I can trust the food in the supermarket. I like that my water is drinkable.
I don't like the straight, clear highway with no exits that drops from 70 mph to 55mph for the sole purpose of generating revenue for the police department. I don't like that books written by authors who died years ago, and are no longer in print, may be lost forever because no one one can legally make a new copy until a very long time in the future.
There are good regulations and bad ones. The generalized "regulation is good/bad" debate is a waste of time. And FYI, there are plenty of wealthy people abusing regulations to get richer, see the patent system for more info.
> Students who are unable or unwilling to transfer their credits and continue their studies elsewhere can apply to the Education Department to have their federal loans forgiven through the department’s closed school discharge program. A recent rule change requires the department to automatically forgive the loans of some eligible borrowers.
But there, it's the US government that's paying. And I doubt that the late college chain has anything recoverable.
Do you lose your transcripts if you have your loans forgiven? What if a few years later a student enrolls in a different university and applies to have these old courses counted?
I wonder if splitting the responsibility for education and awarding credentials would be a better idea. It would open up some real competition in education and weaken the stranglehold the elite establishments have.
Medicine and Law have separate credentialing systems, but the requirements to become eligible to take the tests usually require you to go to an accredited organization and the med school orgs are notoriously fickle about expansion.
I thought my college education was fantastic, I know chem engineering and became very good at math.
However, due to my college being lazy and never getting ABET accredited in my Chem engineering degree, I cant become a P.E. despite passing the PE and FE tests. Stupid college I suppose. I make tons of money as a degreed engineer though...
Although I generally err on the side of less regulation, I applaud the shutdown of these schools that prey upon unsuspecting students who think they are getting something of value but aren't. I have read so many negative stories about these schools. Students take on a ton of debt for useless certificates.
While I think most for-profit colleges are predatory, I also believe the ones that provide a technical skill such as nursing or dental hygienist can be beneficial to the students and society.
> 2. buy insurance. You get a payout of your tuition if the college fails.
This is madness. Should you have to buy individual insurance in case your bank fails? Your city goes bankrupt? Your police department goes on strike? Regulating and maintaining institutions is the job of the government, not an expense to be passed on to private citizens.
People buy insurance to mitigate financial risk all the time. There's nothing offensive about it.
And a private business is fundamentally not a police department or a city government. We don't pay taxes to a private business, for example, and a private business doesn't make laws we have to follow.
> 2. buy insurance. You get a payout of your tuition if the college fails.
I believe we're going to start seeing this is the education bubble doesnt pop soon. Not only for bankrupt colleges but for parents who are worried their kid will drop out after paying XXX in loans.
Not all these people can even get into a state school, and some of the degrees they are getting are sub standard.
You don't need 50K+ in loans to become a nursing assistant or culinary arts, and based on your job prospects you will have a great deal of difficulty generating enough income to pay off the loan.
Many of these private schools are scams specifically designed to exploit the higher education financial aid system.
This is really horrible for those students who are left with unfinished courses! I know first hand how hard it is to find self-funding for education. I hope those enterprising folks find ways to prosper despite this
:(
Funding ie loans, isn't the problem the students have with this. It is the transfer of current credits to another school that will allow them to continue education. In my previous years, I went to a for profit college catering to US armed forces members. I did not graduate with a degree, but a total of 52 credits. I still have a ton of student loan debt for this. Currently I am 1 semester away from completing my BS at a different school. More loans. Exactly 0 credits transferred from my first attempt to the current college.
> a for profit college catering to US armed forces members
The government expects army candidates to cover military education experience by themselves, did I read correctly? Or, is this aimed for active service members?
When I say catering to, I mean they college advertises heavily to the active duty armed forces and works with a deployment schedule a lot better than some other traditional colleges. There are certain use cases where using GI Bill or Post 9/11 bill makes since WHILE on active duty, but generally you would use those after discharge. I did not use either.
https://failstatemovie.com
These companies target people who dream of a better life and then convince them to take-out massive loans. Kind of like if payday lenders were being propped-up by the federal government.