Breyer State

According to their website they still have an Alabama license

Mike Woolf, at 7:45 am EDT on June 24, 2008

A Disgrace!

I taught English for two years at one of these business colleges and, over time, became increasingly appalled at the blatant thievery to which students are unknowingly subjected. These schools exist for financial aid; that is their profit. Most of the students enrolled (after watching repeated commercials about the lucrative careers of pharmacy technicians, police, medical assts)are poor and barely literate. They don’t consider that their apparently free education is funded by loans they’ll have to pay back. They don’t consider that the jobs they are training for—pharmacy techs and medical assts—not only need no more than on-the-job training, but also won’t provide a salary large enough to repay their loans.

For a research paper assignment, I had students investigate their chosen professions: talk to potential employers, talk to a few employees, find ads in the papers, look up the jobs in the Occupational Handbook. One older woman was astonished to find out that a medical asst made barely $20,000 yearly, not the $50,000 she was promised in an admitting interview. Another student discovered that Walmart and Walgreen’s had their own training programs for pharmacy techs (who are, after all, primarily cashiers). Most thought these jobs would be stepping stones into nursing or medical school....

These students see barely a penny of the thousands of dollars they borrow. They are forced to buy books at the highest prices. Most students don’t own computers and aren’t forced to use them for class assignments. Most of my students—many foreign—could barely read at an elementary school level. Two were completely illiterate, one a 17-year old girl who had just graduated from high school (surprisingly, she had scored high on her reading tests; despite my flunking her out of developmental English, she turned up next semester enrolled in a medical terminology class!). No wonder the school had us sign confidentiality agreements!

Nothing embarasses these folks, not even receiving copies of resumes written by their graduates that are practically unreadable. Most disappointing was the students’ reaction to information other than what they had seen on television—even when they found out for themselves, they would not believe it would affect their own path. I left after being told that I had to pass students who had barely been to class and had failed tests.

These schools need close supervision and assessments by “honest” accreditors who can get past window dressing to see the scams for what they are.

macktan, Mgr, Lrng Ctr, at 10:15 am EDT on June 24, 2008

Double standard?

After looking at the guidelines for “Instructional Staff” at Alabama’s private schools, I couldn’t help but notice that they are more stringent — *if enforced as written* — than those regulations that apply to public schools and colleges.

We have the same problem in Florida: the faculty credential check conducted by CIE as part of the private institution licensure process is far more rigorous than that conducted by FL DOE.

And this doesn’t even include those high school instructors teaching dual enrollment classes for college credit.

Overall, the underlying problem is a lack of quality control in higher education. Frankly, whether private or public, 2 yr or 4 yr or dual enrollment, you have no way of knowing what you end up with once you step into a classroom. As Head Start moves to put the credentials of their teachers on-line, isn’t it a good idea for higher ed to do the same?

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 11:35 am EDT on June 24, 2008

For-profit schools mire graduates in debt.

The comment from kgotthardt must be emphasized — “Some schools that market accredited degrees are pretty low-end as well.” Low end indeed, and our public K-12 schools do a terrible job of informing and thus empowering its students to be wary of for-profit higher education. As a former secondary teacher in California, I was shocked to learn that our high school sponsored assemblies for ITT, Bryman (now Everest), and California Design College (CDC, one of the Art Institutes, and owned by Education Management Corporation).

In fact, during a low point in my career search, I had decided to interview with CDC for an academic advisor position. The hiring manager shared that his school had increased enrollment from 300 to almost 900 students in the last two years. Such a huge increase in enrollment could have occurred only because the school’s aggressive admission representatives attended the local high school career fairs and dangled financial aid packages as way for students to pay the exorbitant education costs. Of course, the problem that confronted CDC was that attendance began to fall and some student had considered dropping altogether. Ergo, CDC needed an academic advisor to corral the potential drops that could threaten the school’s retention and completion rates, and likely the loan default rates.

Should anyone be surprised about what happens when education becomes privatized? It’s a sham and a shame that state education agencies allow for-profit schools, usually vocational career colleges, to saddle students with loans from between $50,000 and $100,000. This is especially egregious when we consider that public colleges and universities can not only provide similar, and more often better, vocational training but can do so at a fraction of the costs demanded at these private “colleges.” We have to seriously question our system of education when schools consider students as customers.

Tom Edelberg, at 2:45 pm EDT on June 24, 2008

Many thanks to all those who wrote earlier describing the massive fraud that goes on in these for profit “colleges.” We must all do our best to prevent such institutions from robbing the public.

These colleges would be out of business if the loan givers use more scrutiny. If money is available to fund such fraud, there will always be scam artists to take advantage of the loose loan guidelines and operate boiler rooms to attract naive people.

Haim Baruh, Professor, at 4:40 pm EDT on June 24, 2008

Breyer State University

There is a constant problem with the acceptance of educational credentials in the USA, it is all about the money. I recently attempted to transfer credits from one major university to another for enrollment into a professional cerificate degree/program. All credits were in that field and matched two of the required courses, I was told I would not be allowed to transfer those credits, I had to PAY and take the courses again. Unaccredited schools are not all bad, in fact, I took a number of courses at an unaccredited school that exceeded in quality and focus on the student, courses I took at a major accredited university. This ‘unaccredited’ school was recently ‘beat into submission’ by the ‘brick and mortar’ institutions who took legal action against them in the name of ‘accreditation’ but really all because it took money out of their pockets. Shame on ‘us’ for being so self-serving and nieve to think that the government always knows what’s best for us.

Ron Craddock, at 9:35 am EDT on August 27, 2008