For-profits have every incentive to put as many students in their courses. The question should be can they effective service those students, all of those students, that they let in. This is really where the dialog should focus: a schools ability to service the students it admits. There should be established benchmarks in place to measure a school's effectiveness around completion, satisfactory academic progress and the potential for gainful employment. When the school demonstrated they are incompetent or incapable of delivering satisfactory results, they should be restricted from growing until they can demonstrate this capability. Continued failure to meet established success standards should result in the school's accreditation being revoked.
At the end of the day, the for-profits are always going to try to get as many students in the door (ie, revenue) that they can. Great. Go crazy with this. But if you are going to tap in to federal dollars for this, you better be able to show acceptable progress on all of those students in terms of completion and the potential for a job that is at least in line with the cost of a student's educational attainment.
Colt
Here's the article from the Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Senate-Grilling-of/25036
June 23, 2010
Senate Grilling of For-Profits: Join the Conversation Online
By Marc Parry
All eyes will be on the for-profit-education industry Thursday as the U.S. Senate convenes the first in a series of hearings examining federal spending on proprietary colleges. If you care about online education, it's worth paying attention because for-profits are gobbling up a growing share of the e-learning market.
Here's how you can follow along and join in the conversation online:
The hearing kicks off at 10 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, and will be Webcast here. I'll be reporting live from the event on Twitter (@marcparry). If you're on Twitter, you can contribute to our coverage by using the hashtag "#4profit." All tweets with that tag will be published in a box on The Chronicle's home page.
A key witness testifying will be Steven Eisman, a hedge-fund manager who predicted the housing bubble and is now issuing similar warnings about for-profit higher education. He played a part in Michael Lewis's best-selling book, "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine."
For more on the issues at play Thursday, check out this morning's story by Chronicle reporter Paul Basken: "New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education." And come back our Web site later Thursday for a full report on the hearing.
