Admissions Scandal Reminds Us Again of the College Caste System

From CNN:

. . . .The separation of young people into this two-track system matters so much because the outcomes vary so much for students at the most and least selective institutions. Among black and Latino students with above-average SAT scores, 81% at selective public institutions complete their degrees, compared with just 46% at the less selective public schools, the Center on Education and the Workforce found in "Our Separate & Unequal Public Colleges," a comprehensive study released last fall. 

The disparity isn't difficult to explain: The selective public institutions can afford to spend about three times as much on their students as the least selective institutions. Amid sustained cuts in taxpayer funding for public higher education, that spending gap is now about one-fourth larger than it was a decade ago. It's one reason why the gap in college completion is also widening between whites on the one hand and African-Americans and Latinos on the other, even though the latter groups have significantly increased their share of the total postsecondary population.. . . .

The College Disadvantage for the Disadvantaged

Those who seek to rationalize the bare-knuckled kind of apartheid schooling found in the corporate charter reform schools like KIPP often point to the test prep chain gangs' laser focus on getting black and brown children into and through college. 

If these kids get to college, the thought disorder goes, then all the dehumanizing treatment and abuse of disadvantaged minority children by charter operators must be worth the price. 

Even so, we have known for years that black and brown college graduates have less opportunity compared to their white counterparts.  

A new study now shows how much minority college graduates are shortchanged in terms of opportunity, while at the same time acquiring massive and disproportionate debt.  

From 1992 to 2013, the median net worth of blacks who finished college dropped nearly 56 percent (adjusted for inflation). By comparison, the median net worth of whites with college degrees rose about 86 percent over the same period, which included three recessions — including the severe downturn of 2007 through 2009, with its devastating effect on home prices in many parts of the country. Asian graduates did even better, gaining nearly 90 percent. 

Will these findings alter the Gates and Lumina fixation on college degrees of any kind as the solution to inequity and inequality?  Don't hold your breath.

Charts from the New York Times:

Jeb Bush and Randy Best Team to Promote College Caste System

Randy Best and the Bush Family have a long and profitable history to celebrate during this Holiday Season.  Best has been a longtime supporter of the Bush political dynasty in Texas, and the Bushes have been generous in sharing insider knowledge with Randy on education initiatives that Best then exploited to get fabulously wealthy.  In turn, Best became a Bush Pioneer (the $100,000 Club), connections became even more solidified, and today Randy appears poised to become Jeb Bush's enabler in the rush to push college for the non-privileged online.   

In an extravagant display of chutzpah yesterday, Bush and Best published an op-ed in Bloomberg immodestly entitled, "Online Classes Mean No Dorm, Gym, or Debt."  On full display is the thinking of the 21st Century efficiency zealots aimed to do less for more, while protecting the privileges of those who already have them.  Randy and Jeb would push all the students who must work or borrow to go to college online, a marginalized and isolated virtual learning world "well-suited to the needs of an increasing number of learners, extending access and allowing students to both work and study."

Bush and Best refer vaguely to the entirely dubious conclusion that learning measures for online have "matched or exceeded" face to face learning.  No such consensus exists outside of Bush's and Best's overheated ambitions.  The one meta-analysis that did find small advantages for blended learning over face to face admitted that the difference could be attributed to factors other than the online format.  This meta-study was commissioned by ED late in Bush II's second term, and it was done by SRI's Center for Technology in Learning, hardly the most academically independent entity.  The study included a handful of experimental and quasi-experimental studies focused largely on medical education and other technical learning environments, and some of the studies were never peer-reviewed.  No qualitative studies were allowed, and the study, itself, was never published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The bottom line for Bush and Best is, of course, the bottom line.  These modern day social efficiency engineers see huge savings for the already cash-starved budgets of state colleges and universities, up to "a 30 percent to 50 percent cost savings for the Web-based approach."  Read their lips: no new taxes.  

The other aspect of the bottom line is the one that feels more solid in Randy's and Jeb's wallets:  there are dollars more numerous than the leaves of the Amazon in the online schooling business, they have concluded.  And those who collect those billions will keep alive the real knowledge factories like Wellesley and Harvard, where real knowledge is created and transmitted in real, rather than simulated, ways.

See below Randy, Jeb, and an anonymous robot interviewer in Pt. 1 of their recent multi-segment infomercial on the "unlimited opportunities."



Below is a piece I posted in 2009, which provides some background on Bush's Best booster, as well as other  familiar names like Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings and Rod Paige.  Context, context, context.

Arne Duncan, Randy Best, and the Profitizing of Teacher Education

“ If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education.” — Reid Lyon, Chief, Child Development and Behavior Branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, speaking at a major policy forum held November 18, 2002 by the Council for EXCELLENCE in Government, titled “Evidence-based Education Forum with Secretary Page.

Before Reid Lyon could carry out his higher ed demolition mission for the Bushies, however, he became embroiled in the Reading First corruption scandal, where the OIG's report pointed to Lyon as mentor to the young, attractive thug and Director of Reading First, Chris Doherty, who was eventually canned for forcing states into the Lyon and Carnine approved reading programs, which were authored by the same folks who put together the guidelines for Reading First. Think of the oil companies making energy policy, and you get the picture.

As ED's own Inspector General's reports have shown, states that applied for Reading First grants were manhandled into choosing reading programs aligned with the Lyon and Carnine back-to-brutality phonics orthodoxy. And if grantees ended up off the direct instruction reservation, Reid Lyon's Reading First Director, Chris Doherty, could simply pull the plug, as he did in Rockford, Illinois:

Mr. Doherty then directed the state to freeze the district’s funding, and ultimately to withdraw the grant. Those actions prompted another e-mail from Mr. Lyon: “wow – Talk about a guy with smarts, integrity AND balls,” he wrote. “I am talking about you Chris.

Doherty was fired and Lyon slunk back to Texas, where his mission to blow up colleges of education took on a new form. He became Executive Vice President of a new for-profit edu-venture for teacher preparation, the American College of Education (ACE). ACE was owned by the infamous Randy Best, who had become fabulously wealthy by selling off one of those companies, Voyager, in 2005 for $350 million. Voyager had gotten very fat, of course, from the aforementioned corruption. From Mother Jones, September 2, 2008:

. . . . Voyager was Best's first foray into the business of education. After three decades of making money the old-fashioned way, the serial entrepreneur says he caught the philanthropy bug. He launched Voyager as a nonprofit that offered after-school programs as a way to keep latchkey kids engaged in learning. Yet after two years of sluggish growth, he switched to a for-profit model and hired school superintendents from Dallas and a nearby suburb to pitch the program to their former colleagues. Business picked up, and Best became a believer in a market-driven approach to social problems. "If you become a for-profit, then every single person in the organization is incentivized to do what you are trying to do," he explains. "Their rational self-interest is at stake; it is not just always trying to do something for the greater good."

Voyager enjoyed an enviably cozy relationship with its customers. After Texas' education commissioner intervened to help the company dodge child care regulations, competitors complained that it had cashed in on its connections. In 1998, Best and his investors donated more than $45,000 to Bush's gubernatorial reelection campaign. (Best says they supported Bush "because he was billing himself as the education governor," not because they expected anything in return.) That August, Bush dropped in on a Houston elementary school and spoke in front of a Voyager banner. Touting the benefits of for-profit after-school programs, he called for $25 million to fund them across the state.

Voyager's friends in high places were not enough to make it profitable. But by staying close to Bush and his allies, Best learned of new, bigger opportunities. In the mid-'90s, Charles Miller, a Voyager investor and Bush campaign donor, worked with the governor's office to design a new state reading program, the Texas Reading Initiative. Miller's team—"this small little mafia," as he puts it—included Bush's adviser Margaret Spellings and several others who would go on to occupy key positions in Bush's Department of Education in Washington. By 1998, Best had reinvented Voyager as a reading program, hiring researchers who'd worked on the Texas Reading Initiative or had ties to its designers.

Best says the idea for the new direction came from his own experience as a dyslexic and his interest in cutting-edge literacy research. "I think Voyager copied from a lot of the things we did with our reading initiative," Miller says. "Voyager saw that and just got in the draft, so to speak."

In 2000, Best and Miller signed up as Bush Pioneers, pledging to raise at least $100,000 for the governor's presidential run. When Bush entered the Oval Office, his education team included several people with connections to Voyager—and some who went on to work for Best. They set out to implement a revolutionary new policy that, despite the talk of smaller government, essentially put Washington in charge of setting state education standards. Miller helped select former Houston schools superintendent Rod Paige, a longtime Voyager booster, as secretary of education. Bush made G. Reid Lyon, a reading researcher who had consulted on the Texas Reading Initiative, his unofficial reading czar. Lyon cowrote the section of No Child Left Behind that created Reading First, a $6 billion program to fund state literacy curricula that drew upon "scientifically based reading research"—exactly what Voyager had been selling back in Texas. . . .

. . . . Best's education company became, in his words, "a selling juggernaut," earning roughly $25 million a year from Reading First alone. (See "Best Practices", for more on Voyager's success in landing education contracts.) According to Best, Voyager benefited from "really good timing." . . .

Best and Lyon were joined at the new venture, the American College of Education (ACE), by Rod Paige, who now sits on the Board of Directors and serves a chief commencement speaker. ACE is designed to 1) make money, 2) counter the "liberal agenda" of real teacher education programs, and 2) indoctrinate ed students in the crackpot science of Engelmann and Carnine's direct instruction scripted phonics approach to literacy, which has now been supplemented by reading codebreaker, Reid Lyon. You see, Lyon's junk science begins with the proper programming of the proper code at the neuronal level, which then will control children's behaviors. The following quote is from a promotional video that Lyon did for ACE, which has since been scrubbed from the site.

What I learned at NIH and what guides our course development at American College of Education is that children's brains can literally be molded, changed, by the teaching they receive. Our goal now is to close the gap between our science tells us about learning and what our teachers apply in the classroom. A graduate degree from American College of Education means that teachers know the science behind how children learn . . .

Just as the Latin grammar school masters of 19th Century New England saw Horace Mann's new-fangled import, the whole word approach to reading, as a challenge to their tyrannical pedagogy and iron-fisted classroom control, so now does Lyon and his cabal view the balanced approach to literacy as particularly unfit for the poor, who require the behavioral brainwashing that goes hand in glove with his brand of code-breaking phonics on steroids. (See KIPP). Ironically, it was one of those balanced approaches that he detests,Reading Recovery, that received the highest marks for effectiveness by Spellings' own research shop.

Legitimacy for ACE came when Best and Co. were able to close a deal to buy Barat College from DePaul University in November 2005, along with Barat's regional accreditation and library holdings. Instrumental in that deal was DePaul's Executive Vice President and former board member of Randy Best's Higher Ed Holdings, LLC. , Scott Scarborough.

This is where our Secretary, Call-me-Arne Duncan, becomes important in the ACE story. Early in 2006, Duncan made a deal with ACE to drum up business for the Lyon-inspired Masters degrees in both C&I and Ed Leadership. CPS would pay a portion of CPS teacher tuition for the programs, while offering classroom space to run the classes. Thus, Chicago teachers, hungry for a raise and professional development, would become the guinea pigs in experiment to replace teacher education with the methodological fundamentalism and social conservatism of the Texas ed gang. From the Dallas Morning News 5/29/06:

. . . .Most colleges of education get their students the traditional way: Students hear about their programs and decide to enroll. ACE plans to get most of its business by contracting directly with school districts, which would supply the students and pay a portion of their tuition.

Wave of retirements

Arne Duncan, Chicago's superintendent, said the coming wave of baby-boomer retirements would require the district to train dozens of new principals. "Obviously we're early on, but I'm hopeful it will work out well," he said of the district's deal with ACE. "The feedback I've gotten from our aspiring principals has been very positive so far."
Mr. Duncan said he was introduced to ACE by Dr. Paige. "We talked once or twice" after he left office, Mr. Duncan said, "then he started to put this team together. He was getting something going very interesting."
About half of the program's course content is taught in spare Chicago school classrooms, after the regular school day. The other half is delivered online, through documents and discussions that students access at home.
Danusia Gerlach is a math specialist in Chicago schools and one of the students in ACE's inaugural class. She said she was initially hesitant about taking education classes from a company based in Texas, known in some circles for a test-heavy approach to education. "I don't have a real positive view of Texas," she said.
But she said she has been happy with her experiences. "I really enjoy the classes, actually," she said. "The instructors share their experiences and really tie things into practice. It's very well-presented." The online component has been good for collaboration and getting feedback from classmates and instructors, she said.
Ruby Everage, a math and science specialist, said she liked the convenience ACE's classes offered. The first course in the master's program, taught by former Woodrow Wilson High School principal Judy Zimny, was outstanding, she said – but a more recent course was lackluster.
"It's a great bargain," she said. "I do plan to continue, and I am satisfied."
Since ACE has only been in operation since October – and on a very small scale – it's too early to judge its quality. There's not enough data, Dr. Lyon said, and "we're all about analyzing data."
ACE is only one player in a competitive teacher-education market in Chicago, with several established universities offering similar master's degree programs. But ACE's tuition, at $1,000 a course, is slightly below most in the market, and the idea of a new approach to training educators appeals to many districts.
"Like most districts across the country, we are aware that the master's degree programs for administrators need to be revised," said Nancy Laho, who leads Chicago's principal-training programs. "There has to be some connection made between the theory and what it looks like when you're standing there in that role."

Making money

ACE believes it can do that, and at a profit – even though it plans to offer cut-rate tuition.
Teacher training programs are traditionally moneymakers for colleges. At the same conference where he made his famous comments about colleges of education, Dr. Lyon noted their profitability. "We talk to deans and presidents all the time, and of course they have a business situation with colleges of education," he said.
"Those colleges of education generate a heck of a lot of credit-hour production, tuition dollars. Those tuition dollars pay the physics professors where you don't have a lot of money going in there, studentwise."
Master's degree programs, in particular, are known as cash generators for colleges of education. That's because school districts generally pay their teachers more if they have a master's. (In DISD, the annual pay bump ranges from $1,000 to around $6,000, depending on a teacher's experience.) Some districts even require teachers to pursue a master's.
ACE's own budget projections, filed with Illinois regulators, reflect the company's optimism. It expects to be generating $4.6 million in revenues annually by 2009. And it expects a profit margin of around 21 percent.
But Mr. Best said that even the relatively low tuition ACE currently charges in Chicago would be cut severely when the company expands. Because ACE will use public-school classrooms instead of a traditional campus – and because it plans to rely heavily on online learning – he expects tuition to be around 20 percent to 25 percent of what other colleges charge. ACE plans to make up the difference in volume.
"Our dream is to be truly the first national college of education," Mr. Best said. ACE officials expect to have operations in Texas this fall and are in talks with districts in at least three other states.
When ACE officials met with Texas regulators last fall, they produced a document titled "The Big 'To Do' List." It outlines the company's plans to expand, including offering a full bachelor's degree program.

Then comes an expansion "in all 50 states" and a broadening of ACE into other subjects, from engineering to law. The final step on "The Big 'To Do' List," the only item in bold print: "Expand everything internationally."

In addition, ACE has hired two lobbyists from the Dallas law firm Locke Liddell & Sapp to work on its behalf in Washington, particularly on the Higher Education Reauthorization Act. The version of that bill passed by the House in March includes $300 million in federal grants for teacher training programs – many of which ACE could be eligible for in partnership with states and school districts.. . .

In January 2009, 450 Chicago teachers were granted Masters Degrees from ACE. Rod Paige spoke, of coure, and he took the opportunity to read a congratulatory letter from Arne Duncan.

Now Randy Best has his eye on a new target, this time a public university: the University of Toledo. Making the task of buying a big chunk of a public university would be more difficult, no doubt, without a "market-driven" university president and a new University of Toledo CFO by the name of Scott Scarborough (remember the DePaul deal?). The story (so far) from Inside Higher Ed:

February 26, 2009

Tension is mounting at the University of Toledo, where administrators are exploring a partnership with a private company known for churning out quick and inexpensive degrees.
Toledo officials are considering a deal with Higher Ed Holdings, a Texas-based company that would help deliver online masters-level education courses to students in exchange for a share of tuition revenues. The company, founded by Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best, already has a similar arrangement with Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

The potential partnership with a for-profit company comes at a time when faculty in the Judith Herb College of Education are increasingly skittish about the administration’s apparent affection for the private sector. Those concerns were stoked in part by the circulation of a letter, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, in which the university’s president outlined the parameters for finding a new interim dean to replace Thomas Switzer, who is retiring. In the Jan. 27 letter, President Lloyd Jacobs told his provost that a “business orientation” – not a background in education – was essential.
“I strongly suggest a person outside the JHCOE: indeed, a person outside the ‘educational establishment,’ ” wrote Jacobs, who is a medical doctor. “I have some ideas I would like to share with you.”
Efforts to reach Higher Ed Holdings Wednesday were unsuccessful.
Gregory Stone, an associate professor of research and measurement, said he’s worried about the implications of the partnership with the company, as well as the broader notion of running a public university like a private corporation. “The problem is education can’t be entirely run as a business,” he said. “It’s not as clear cut as making widgets and selling them, and unfortunately the notion of quantity over quality within the business world seems to be paramount.”
Details of the potential partnership with Higher Ed Holdings are still sparse, but Provost Rosemary Haggett said Wednesday that Toledo is not looking to outsource curriculum development.
“They would be our degree programs taught by our faculty members,” she said. “Where HEH comes in is they would provide a distance learning platform.... This is a way to take these [programs] to scale, to reach a large number of individuals in the state.”
“What’s important to us is to maintain the high quality of our programs,” she added. “These remain our degree programs.”
Under the roughly outlined agreement, Toledo faculty would continue to teach online courses through video lectures, but students would be assisted by “coaches” employed by Higher Ed Holdings. Toledo faculty say they’re unsure what the credentials of the “coaches” would be, and that’s a source of discomfort.
“They would be hired by HEH, [but] we would have the opportunity to decide whether or not the coaches were adequate,” Haggett said. “We have the opportunity to say ‘No, this isn’t working.’ ”
“The way I’ve thought about these coaches is they are sort of like graduate students, which we use in our face-to-face classes all the time,” she added.
The American College of Education, a subsidiary of Higher Education Holdings, LLC, describes the coach as “the primary contact person for students’ concerns and questions.” Furthermore, the coach is charged with evaluating students’ performance and participation after “training by faculty.” The professor, on the other hand, has the responsibility of maintaining course quality and serving as the “role model for students as well as the professor of academic record.”
The arrangement, as it’s been described, stands to undermine quality, according to one faculty member who asked not to be identified.
“If I’m a talking head on video, I would have very limited contact with my students,” the faculty member said. “The only people who would have contact would be ‘coaches,’ who have a masters degree – or not; who would understand – or would not understand – [course] content or the province that I have in my classes. It’s probably the worst case scenario, as far as I’m concerned.”
Cronyism Charges
Apart from concerns about the model, faculty say they’re troubled by the choice of Higher Ed Holdings for a number of other reasons. Best, who runs the company and served as a major fundraiser and contributor for George W. Bush, endured charges of cronyism when he received lucrative contractsconnected with the No Child Left Behind program. Voyager, one of Best’s companies, sold for $380 million after its program for remedial students was employed in Reading First, a $6 billion federal initiative designed to help low-income schools meet federal NCLB requirements. Charges of conflicts of interest plagued Reading First, particularly after a federal report demonstrated that participants weren’t reading any better than those who didn’t participate.
“We’re concerned about the quality of our educational programs, given that this guy’s first company, [connected to] Reading First, was pretty questionable,” said one Toledo education faculty member, who asked not to be identified.
Best, who denied that his connections to Bush helped him win contracts, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Asked if she thought Best’s history was a source of legitimate concern, Haggett said “No. I do not.’”
A few moments later, however, Haggett sought to clarify her statement: “We intend to do due diligence about the company, certainly if we want to pursue anything with them.”
The decision to pursue anything, however, will happen “in a matter of weeks rather than months,” she said.
Toledo CFO sat on Company’s Board
It’s no coincidence, professors say, that Higher Ed Holdings ended up on Toledo’s radar. Scott Scarborough, the university’s chief financial officer, has a history with the company, and once sat on its board.
When Scarborough was executive vice president of administration at DePaul University, he helped broker a deal with the American College of Education. In a controversial agreement, the college acquired DePaul’s Barat College, and – more importantly – Barat’s accreditation with the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
Toledo officials concede that Scarborough’s history with American College was what started the conversations with Higher Ed Holdings. They dispute, however, any notion of a conflict of interest.
“This company has no direct connection to our CFO,” Haggett said. “He happens to know who they are.”
In an e-mail to Jacobs, Toledo’s president, Scarborough sought to dampen any suggestion that he had a stake in the negotiations with the company now courting the university.
“I have no financial ties to Higher Ed Holdings,” he wrote in a Feb. 20 e-mail. “I do know the people who work at Higher Ed Holdings and admire the quality of their work.”
Scarborough went on to explain that while at DePaul he was the university’s representative on the company’s board of directors, but he vacated that position when he “left DePaul.” Scarborough, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday, was questioned by faculty about his ties to Higher Ed Holdings even during the DePaul negotiations. In a statement provided to the Faculty Council in 2006, Scarborough said he was given $1,750 for attending four board meetings – a fact he said he disclosed in conflict of interest papers.
If DePaul faculty had a primary concern about Scarborough, however, it was his tendency to allow financial concerns to override academic priorities, according to Anne Clark Bartlett, who was president of the Faculty Council in 2006-07.
“Academic decisions were being driven by financial parameters and protested vigorously [by faculty],” said Bartlett, chair of DePaul’s Department of English. “That was definitely the historical view [of Scarborough].”
A business-driven approach to academics, however, appears to be in keeping with President Jacobs’ desires for the College of Education. In his letter last month to the provost, Jacobs stressed that a business focus was essential to the college’s future, and that the search for a permanent dean should be conducted with that goal in mind. While a search committee will be formed to help select candidates, Jacobs insisted that “we will not approve the selection of a [search] firm from the ‘educational establishment.’ "
“The search should emphasize the need of fresh thinking, creativity and new paradigms,” he wrote. “A business orientation is essential.”

— Jack Stripling

Meanwhile, Arne Duncan couldn't agree more as he continues his support for the kind of chain gang urban work camps that result when the Carnine and Lyon methodologies are implemented--which, by the way, would never, ever, be used on children of the leafy suburbs.

The College Caste System and Crushing Student Debt

It is not at all surprising that many well-intentioned folks concerned with the costs of higher education today have turned to technology in hopes of reducing costs and limiting tuition increases.  After all, when students are at home in their pajamas and the professor (maybe in his pajamas, too) is connected via the web (in real time or asynchronously) from anywhere in the world, and no one is using physical classroom space with maintenance costs, utility costs, and parking problems, how great could that be?  Pretty great, particularly if you are a large public university dealing with shrinking shares of public funds while trying to compete for top students, pay the football coach, stock libraries, run research facilities, and hire quality faculty.

After all, if you can put a good chunk of classes online for students who can't afford to drive in or live on campus, and hire some of those ultra-cheap academic sharecroppers to teach them at about $3K per class, maybe you can build that new health club just across from Fraternity Row or that new living/seminar center for the gifted students.  One adjunct for the poor, then, can teach ten sections a year for $30,000, with no benefits/retirement costs for the university.  That's what I call efficiency.

The University of Maryland, University College is a great example of this kind of lucrative college caste system, whereby those who are in most need of a nurturing learning experience are plugged in from afar.  UMUC has 90,000 students worldwide hooked up to its virtual campus, and UMUC has people waiting to help you fill out those federal loan forms.  Want to guess the graduation rate in Maryland?  6 percent. From WaPo in 2011:

Can it be that a university in the vaunted Maryland state university system has a 6 percent graduation rate? Well, yes and no. UMUC is a contemporary model of the traditional night school, an institution designed for adults returning to higher education. Much like the for-profits, University College tends to take students who have been in and out of the collegiate revolving door. Thus, its federal graduation rate is based on a comparatively low number of full-time, first-time students. But no one at UMUC is claiming the school’s true completion rate is vastly higher than 6 percent. Their point is more that a traditional graduation-rate analysis simply does not work at the Adelphi campus.

Now if you are a for-profit "university" with the price points studied and worked out by the best bean counters that millions of Pell Grants can buy, the deal gets even sweeter.  Take the University of Phoenix, for instance, with its 328,000 students and about 17,000 professor, 95% of whom are adjunct or part-time.  That's right--fewer than a thousand full-time faculty for 328,000 students, and that includes "doctoral" programs.

How sweet does make the bottom line for the UofP?  Last year net profits were $572,000,000 on revenue of $4. 71 billion!!

But wait, something is happening, for this fiscal year profits are down by 21 percent to a mere $422,000,000 on revenue of $4.25 billion.  And analysts predict 2013 to be lower still.  What has happened?  Has the public finally caught on to the scam, after numerous accounts of shady recruiting practices?  My favorite was the one involving recruiters down at the homeless missions with federal loan forms and Pell Grant paperwork, looking for future Phoenixes to sign up.

And how about their completion rates?  9 percent nationally. From the NYTimes in 2010:

A new report on graduation rates at for-profit colleges by a nonprofit research and advocacy group charges that such colleges deliver “little more than crippling debt,” citing federal data that suggests only 9 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor’s degree students at the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit college, graduate within six years.

The report, “Subprime Opportunity,” by the Education Trust, found that in 2008, only 22 percent of the first-time, full-time bachelor’s degree students at for-profit colleges over all graduate within six years, compared with 55 percent at public institutions and 65 percent at private nonprofit colleges.

Among Phoenix’s online students, only 5 percent graduated within six years, and at the campuses in Cleveland and Wichita, Kan., only 4 percent graduated within six years.

“For-profits proudly claim to be models of access in higher education because they willingly open their doors to disadvantaged, underprepared students.” said José L. Cruz, a vice president for the trust. “But we must ask the question, ‘Access to what?’ ”

Meanwhile, the debt for the 90+ percent of poor students who never finish continues to pile up, along with the federal debt from Pell Grants to fund these rapacious diploma mills.  And what is U of Phoenix doing about it?  They are moving all in on online, choosing to concentrate their resources where there is the most profit and the least likelihood that students will graduate.  Story from the NYTimes:

The University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit university, is closing 115 of its brick-and-mortar locations, including 25 main campuses and 90 smaller satellite learning centers. The closings will affect some 13,000 students, about 4 percent of its student body of 328,000. 

It is also laying off about 800 employees out of a staff of 17,000, according to Mark Brenner, senior vice president for communications at the Apollo Group, which owns the university. 

After the closings, which are to be completed next year, the University of Phoenix will be left with a nationwide network of 112 locations and a physical presence in 36 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. 

Apollo stock closed Wednesday at $21.40, down $6.09, a 22 percent decline.

Enrollments at the University of Phoenix and in the for-profit sector over all have been declining in the last two years, partly because of growing competition from other online providers, including nonprofit and public universities, and a steady drumroll of negative publicity about the sector’s recruiting abuses, low graduation rates and high default rates. 

Late last month, Kaplan Higher Education, a division of the Washington Post Company, announced that it was closing nine of its campuses and consolidating four others into nearby locations. The company did not give a reason, but in an August filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission it disclosed that an accrediting commission had warned that its campuses in Baltimore, Indianapolis and Dayton could lose their accreditation — and with it, eligibility for the federal student aid that makes up more than 80 percent of Kaplan’s revenues — for failure to meet student achievement requirements.

As the negative publicity about for-profits mounted — including many charges that the schools enrolled students who had almost no chance of succeeding, to get their federal student aid — both Kaplan and the University of Phoenix announced new programs, offering some form of free trial, to ensure that they enrolled only students who had a reasonable likelihood of success. Those programs cut substantially into their enrollment numbers. 

“We’ve said publicly that about 20 percent of the students in our free three-week online orientation program either don’t complete the program or don’t enroll,” said Mr. Brenner. . . .

To help boost enrollment, the University of Phoenix last week announced a tuition freeze for students who remain consistently enrolled.. . .

Two Americas But Only One With Advantages

From another piece in WaPo on the new challenges faced by the College Board to maintain a system rigged against the poor:

. . . . After years of muted criticism, there has been a growing chorus of concern about increasing inequalities in access to higher education. Much of the debate centers on how to make college more affordable for lower-income students. But some educators also argue that standardized exams are a more accurate measure of economic privilege than of the potential to succeed in college and in life. Meanwhile, more nonprofit and government programs are cropping up to give disadvantaged students test preparation and other help getting into college.

Last fall, the National Association for College Admission Counseling broke new ground by urging colleges and universities to rethink their reliance on standardized testing and switch to exams that are more closely tied to high school achievement. The counselors' report suggested using measures such as Advanced Placement exams, the SAT subject tests, and tests linked to the specialized International Baccalaureate program.

"It is nothing even remotely like a level playing field," said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, and leader of the commission that studied the issue.

Among wealthier families, he said, "parents might be more into test prep, your peers are more likely to be into it, many of the better schools, whether they think this way or not, tend to teach to the test . . . There are at least two Americas out there, and the advantages are all in one of them."

Bob Schaeffer, co-founder and public education director for the nonprofit National Center for Fair and Open Testing, has long urged colleges to reconsider the entrance exam requirement, saying the tests are stacked against kids without financial resources. He cites studies that show these students can easily slip behind their more affluent peers when tackling the college admissions system.

"Our biggest concern about the SAT is that the SAT, rather than a gateway to opportunity, reinforces the factors that hold kids back from access to college," he said. SAT scores "march up -- it varies -- by about 30 to 50 points for every $20,000 in family income. Kids whose families earn less than $20,000 per year have an average combined score of 1320 on the SAT; those with income of $80,000 to $100,000 have a combined score of 1543; for those who reported family income of $200,000 or higher, the combined score is 1676." A perfect score is 2400.

More than 800 colleges have already deemphasized test scores in the admissions process, Schaeffer said, many of them "very fine schools."

Barry Mills, president of Bowdoin College, which stopped requiring standardized tests in the 1960s, said this approach has worked well for the highly selective college in Brunswick, Maine. Bowdoin receives about 6,000 applications for almost 500 spots in its freshman class, he said, and each applicant's package is read at least twice.

"When we look at the students who have done well, or moderately well, there is a huge correlation between our reader ratings, and a lesser correlation with SATs," he said. He acknowledged that such personal attention is easier to provide at smaller colleges such as Bowdoin, because the applicant pool is relatively small.

A student's overall record in high school is crucial, too, he said. "Often what we find is how a kid does in high school, even with grade inflation, is a much more accurate reflection of how they are going to do in college than SATs."

A spokeswoman for the College Board acknowledged that economic and academic inequalities affect tests scores, but says the tests themselves are not to blame. "The unfortunate reality is that underrepresented students, such as low-income students, often don't have the same access to the educational opportunities, rigorous courses and resources as other students do," said Alana Klein. "Their performance on standardized admissions tests, as well as on other educational assessments, often reflects this." . . . .

You are right, Ms. Klein, the tests are not to blame--it is the use of the tests by your kind of technocratic deniers to determine poor people's educational opportunities that is to blame. And Ms. Klein, or Alana if I may, your preferred "rigor" solution of turning poor schools into anti-thinking testing camps devoid of the arts, humanities, or humanness (think KIPP) is not a morally-defensible alternative to addressing the shame of poverty in the richest country in the world. So, you see, your "solution" simply offers to perpetuate the College Board's punishing of the poor as the basest and most malevolent form of class warfare against children. We need to change the unfairness of the system, Alana, rather than changing the children so that we can continue to pretend that what you are doing is fair.

Only Bad Reasons Remaining to Require SAT

Below is announcment letter to Wake Forest faculty from their Director of Admissions, Martha Allman, on the decision to no longer require applicants to submit SAT scores. Pay special attention if you will to references to the research from Bates College, which has not had an SAT requirement since 1984.

Clearly, the SAT has outlived its reason for being in the first place, which was institutionalized ostensibly to create the basis for an objective measure from which to establish an intellectual meritocracy and to predict the success rates of incoming freshmen. With scores simply mirroring disparities in family income, and with women, who score lower than men, finishing college at a higher rate than their counterparts, the SAT has failed on both counts.

What the SAT continues to do well is to make sure that social reproduction is achieved, that privilege is rewarded with enrollment in most of the best colleges, and that those who are struggling to overcome economic and social barriers are cut off at the knees. Well, Wake Forest is no longer one of those. Here's to Wake!!

Letter to faculty and staff

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Dear Faculty and Staff Colleagues,

We are pleased to join President Hatch in announcing that Wake Forest University will no longer require prospective undergraduate students to submit scores on the SAT or any other standardized test. As we indicated to the College and Calloway faculty in a confidential letter last week, this decision has the full support of the Board of Trustees, the Cabinet, Deans, and staff in the Office of Admission. Many faculty members, including members of the College Committee on Admissions, the College Committee on Academic Affairs, and the Executive Committee of the University Senate also agree that this change will add significantly to our distinction.

We want to take this opportunity to offer some of our thinking about the change. As we were considering it and listening to various discussions, especially among our faculty, several points influenced us. Some have implications far beyond Wake Forest, and reach across all of higher education in the US. Others are specifically about who we are at Wake Forest.

Across universities and colleges in the U.S., there is more and more evidence that the SAT is less sound as an indicator of college success than we once thought. We are referring to studies showing that high test scores — especially on the SAT — do not predict college success. These studies, coupled with a possible testing bias against women and groups who are marked by ethnic or socioeconomic diversity, and recent SAT scoring errors, suggest that it is time to reconsider the use of standardized tests in the admission process.

Our own Joseph Soares, Associate Professor of Sociology, is an important contributor to this national conversation on college admissions. In his recent book, "The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges," Joseph argues that current admissions policies are not resulting in equality of opportunity at our nation's best colleges. As he points out, approximately 80% of students at America's top colleges are from families of the highest socioeconomic status. He presents compelling evidence that reliance on the SAT and other standardized tests for admission is a major barrier to access for many worthy students.

Admission directors are listening to this important national conversation and have begun to respond to these problems. In 2007, the National Association for College Admission Counseling formed a commission to look at the issues closely (the Commission on the Use of Standardized Testing in Undergraduate Admission). William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, is leading their effort to learn more about the effect of test preparation on scores, test biases, and the link between standardized tests and high school curricula.

Many liberal arts institutions, however, have studied these issues already and decided to make the SAT optional. Now at least 30 of the 2008 Top 100 U.S. News & World Report "Best Liberal Arts Colleges" have SAT-optional policies in place. The list includes Bates, Bowdoin, Hamilton, Middlebury, Smith, and Mount Holyoke — all ranked within the top thirty. Why have these distinguished colleges dropped the SAT requirement?

Studies show that there is little or no difference in the college GPAs of those who submit SAT scores and those who do not. In 1984, for example, Bates College made the SAT optional, and now about a third of each class enters without submitting an SAT score. In a 20-year study of their policy and its results, Bates found that the difference in the performance of the SAT submitters and non-submitters is not significant (GPA average of 3.06 for non-submitters and 3.11 for submitters). The difference in Bates' graduation rates between submitters and non-submitters is one-tenth of one percent (0.1%).

In addition, Bates linked their SAT-optional policy to almost doubling their total application pool and, more importantly, found that applications increased from all the subgroups that commonly worry about standardized testing: women, U.S. students of color, international students, low-income students, and rural students.

Bates also reported that non-submitters are slightly more likely to choose creative majors like art and theater. Although their admission numbers for students of color and international students have increased, white students opting not to submit SAT scores outnumber students of color 5-to-1 at Bates.

New information about actual admission practice also influenced this decision. Just this month The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 2, 2008) reported on two recent studies showing that elite colleges are under market pressure to give more weight to standardized admissions tests, because higher scores can boost their position in various ranking systems.

In addition, the percentage of universities who report that they give considerable importance to standardized test scores has risen from 50 percent to about 60 percent over the past decade, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Despite policies in admission offices across the country that encourage the staff to review a student's entire application, it seems that admission offices feel pressure to put undue weight on the SAT.

During our discussions here at Wake Forest, evidence that standardized testing is still biased against some groups of students, limiting access for minority and low-income students, for example, influenced the decision. According to The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a non-profit organization that critiques standardized testing, women consistently receive lower scores than their male counterparts despite the fact that women — as a group — earn higher grades in both high school and college.

Minority students, including African Americans, Latinos, and new Asian immigrants, also score significantly lower than white students. According to another recent report, over the past 19 years there has been a slight improvement in the combined SAT scores of both Blacks and Whites. But the gap between the scores of Black students and White students has actually increased.

So looking outward, there is compelling evidence to drop the SAT requirement. Then we looked in toward Wake Forest. Wake Forest is a university — but not a huge one, and this brings an advantage we can use. You may have noticed that the schools we cited above for making the SAT optional are liberal arts colleges, not universities. Colleges seem to have the capacity to drop the SAT requirement more readily because they bring in smaller classes. With fewer applicants, they can do a better job of getting to know the students in their pool.

Because we are small in university terms, we can achieve this advantage as well. Our admission staff know all about our future students — and about those who do not get in. We want to invest more in this deep knowledge and increase the weight on high school GPA and the strength of the chosen curriculum. Coupled with other indicators, high school success in a difficult curriculum proves to be a better mark of college success. In fact, our own analysis of Wake Forest data indicates that the SAT is a weak predictor of success, measured as the first-year GPA.

This is the evidence that led us to ask a serious question. "Does reliance on standardized testing limit access to our university by discouraging applications from students who would succeed, and even thrive, if they got in?"

Our response is that Wake Forest is completely committed to equity — and we do not like the idea that just by its very nature, one test might eliminate qualified students who would do well here. By making the SAT optional, we are more open to all the factors that qualify a student. And we are making the admission decisions ourselves.

We look forward to welcoming the best students from all backgrounds, including members of minority groups, international students, women, and men. With this change, we expect the entering class not only to be stronger, but to be more interesting as well.

So we welcome the opportunity to take this step. As with other changes, we will study it carefully as it unfolds. We hope this move prompts an open and lively debate about our academic values and aspirations. To help you engage in these discussions, related literature on standardized tests and college admissions is posted on WIN. Click on "InfoCentral" and then on "Forms and Documents Library." Then click on "Information from the Provost." Please be in touch with us to offer your questions and ideas.


Best regards,

Martha Allman
Director of Admissions

Jill Tiefenthaler
Provost

Next Target: The State University System

Crackpot reform is not just for K-12 anymore. On the the way to their corporate dystopia, the Grover Whitehursts of the world want to make public univerities the new corporate vocational schools, as well as the new corporate R&D units that will be directed and funded by corporations that dole out money to university researchers who depend upon them to make a living.

Wonder how high the flames must get before academics will put down their Foucault and their monocles to their look outside the tower windows?

From the Austin American-Statesman:

Voucher-style funding, bonus pay for teachers among recommendations.

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, May 22, 2008

Gov. Rick Perry urged regents of the state's major public university systems Wednesday to pursue a series of higher-education reforms outlined at a conference in Austin that was organized by his office and a conservative think tank. The proposals included new requirements for tenure, bonus pay for teachers and a funding model that would essentially amount to vouchers for students.

"I'm not saying these are a dictate to you. One size does not fit all." But "the time is right for these types of reforms to go forward," said Perry, who appointed all the regents to their positions.

Officials described the Governor's Higher Education Summit at the Inter-Continental Stephen F. Austin Hotel as a first-of-its-kind joint meeting of the governing boards of the University of Texas System, the Texas A&M University System, the Texas Tech University System and other university systems. The nonprofit Texas Public Policy Foundation, which favors limited government and free markets, helped organize it.

Regents generally offered muted reactions to the proposals, and the president of a statewide faculty group questioned the business-oriented flavor.

"There's a lot of food for thought," said John White, a Texas A&M regent. "I don't think we're looking for revolutionary change."

H. Scott Caven Jr., chairman of the UT regents, said further discussion is warranted. "I haven't formed any firm opinions about any of the recommendations," he said.

The proposed initiatives, billed as "breakthrough solutions," included requiring evidence of teaching skill before granting tenure to some professors, awarding bonuses to faculty members and teaching assistants who get the best evaluations from students and separating budgets for research and teaching to focus on excellence in each category.

Many of the proposals would be controversial, and some would need legislative approval.

The proposal for voucher-style funding is a case in point. Lawmakers currently allocate tax dollars to public colleges and universities to subsidize undergraduate and graduate education based on formulas that take into account the number of students and other factors.

The proposal calls for placing much of that money directly into students' hands, thereby emphasizing their role as the customers of higher education. All students qualifying for in-state tuition would receive the same amount of money, regardless of family income. Need-based financial aid would be on top of that.

Perry has suggested a similar approach in the past, to no avail. In January 2001, shortly after becoming governor, Perry touted an advisory panel's recommendation to wean institutions of higher learning from most of their direct appropriations.

Another proposal — to create a national accrediting agency that would focus on graduation rates and other results — couldn't be implemented by the regents. But they were asked to add their voices to calls for such an agency.

The proposals were outlined for the regents by Jeff Sandefer, co-founder of the Acton School of Business, a satellite campus in Austin of Hardin-Simmons University, a private school in Abilene. Acton has put in place a number of the proposals, such as linking faculty pay to student evaluations.

Retired House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Dallas, also addressed the group. He criticized faculty senates as "an imbecile institution" and urged regents to sharply reduce the role of faculty members in university governance.

"Our universities are not fulfilling their essential mission in our culture, which is to teach our children," Armey said.

Some people attending the conference questioned the proposals. Charles Miller, a former chairman of the UT regents who led a panel on higher education for U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, said that heavy-handed treatment of top researchers could cause them to flee.

Lynn Tatum, president of the Texas conference of the American Association of University Professors, who did not attend, said he was troubled by the tone of the recommendations.

"Many of these initiatives appear to derive from a business model rather than an educational model," said Tatum, a senior lecturer in the honors college at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco. "In fact, students are the product. It is society that has employed faculty to provide thinking, well-rounded, educated adults."

rhaurwitz@statesman.com; 445-3604

'Breakthrough solutions'

Seven proposals, billed as 'breakthrough solutions,' were floated at the conference:

Post student satisfaction ratings and other information to publicly recognize the best teachers.

Award bonuses to professors, teaching assistants and other instructors based on students' ratings of how well a course delivered on its promises.

Split research and teaching budgets, paying teachers for the number of students they teach and paying researchers according to research dollars they receive.

Require evidence of teaching skills before awarding tenure to faculty members.

Provide each student with a personalized 'learning contract' before he or she enrolls that discloses the graduation rate and starting salary for the average student in that major with equivalent SAT scores.

Provide each in-state student with a voucher of sorts — a scholarship funded by legislative appropriations that currently go directly to public colleges and universities.

Support efforts to create a new national accrediting agency that would focus on results, such as knowledge gained between the freshman and senior years.

The College Caste System

For the past few years, there has been a bigger and bigger squeeze on state colleges to hold down costs. Conservative think tanks point out that state university tuition costs have increased faster than family incomes. What these pols don't mention, of course, is that they are shipping away American jobs while American family incomes have actually gone down in recent years. The state-run colleges, nonetheless, become a new source for the old reliable political strategy of ignoring the real problem and blaming someone else for a problem they did not create.

The resulting political pressure to trim state college costs and costs in tuition-driven private colleges has added to the impetus for solidifying a streamlined college caste system, one that offers a marginal education to the middling and poor folk, and a top notch education for the ruling 10-20 percent who can still afford the best. Whereas the latter will have the best professors, luxurious campuses, and the best libraries, the former will look more like isolating online or "hybrid" degree factories for those determined to make the most of their bronze futures.

Here is a clip from the NY Times today on the brave new world of college for the poor in their pjs (if they can afford them):

. . . .Welcome to the brave burgeoning world of online education. It’s a world most of us, whether we like it or not, will have to grapple with, as students, tuition-paying parents or employees. Nearly 3.5 million college or graduate students, one of every five, took at least one online course last fall, double the figures of five years earlier, according to a survey of 2,500 campuses published last week in a collaboration among the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the College Board and a Babson College research group.

Taken at face value, the study was chilling. This writer’s first impulse was to recall a college course taught by Irving Howe, who read Robert Frost’s poems with tenderness and an edge of menace that conveyed the poet’s respect for the sinister beauty of nature. Those poems would not be as richly appreciated online.

Yet for now such fears would be misplaced. The study’s fine print makes clear that growth is not across the board. Selective private four-year colleges that are the subject of so much angst this season are barely dipping their toes, typically providing online courses for students studying abroad or slackers who needed that 8 a.m. math course to graduate. Some, though, have taken note; for example, Columbia for several years has offered online master’s degrees in some engineering fields.

Still, the surge is mostly among community colleges, professional programs like business and education, specialized online schools like the University of Phoenix, and public universities like Penn State and Illinois that feel obligated to accommodate far-flung residents. And the numbers are expected to grow partly because Congress last year dropped a requirement that colleges deliver half their courses on actual campuses in order to qualify for federal aid, a move critics saw as an enticement for diploma mills. Just as newspaper and television professionals are fumbling to figure out how to survive in an Internet world they did not grow up in, professors and students are realizing that they will have to learn, as one wag once said, to play the violin while performing at Carnegie Hall. QUESTIONS persist. What kind of content works best online, and what gets lost in translation? Which instructors and students function best in the virtual classroom? What happens to all those brick-and-mortar dormitories? How do you calculate the price of tuition?

Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers wonders what will happen, should campuses go exuberantly online, to the intangibles — the late-night bull sessions, the serendipitous strolls with professors, the chance to feel one’s oats in student government? And what will one more switch to electronic conversation do to our need for intimate human connections, he asks? . . . .