Let's not forget how all of this started, with greedy bankers and investors wanting profits every quarter. Eventually, almost everyone bought in. Even teacher pension funds were invested in the greedy enterprise.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/college-meltdown-open-letter-ny-fed-dahn-shaulis/?published=t
@ssi and vyh, yes, its the NY FED, and Goldm_n Sacks and Wells Frago, and Apollo Global Management. It's ASU, PSU, SNHU, and Liberty, and it's USC and Yale and Harvard. It's Sallie Mae and Navient and anyone else who can steal a buck.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/college-mania-c-apademia-dahn-shaulis/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/us-education-racket-dahn-shaulis/?trk=mp-author-card
Respect, SSI. You've nailed the larger contextual problem of for-profit education. Un(der)-qualified students, desperately seeking a ticket out of poverty; predatory subscribers seeking to ride the education gravy train as part of their financial planning; a society that has never trusted learned people (those terrible elites), yet fully requires credentialing before hiring regardless of role and in-house training; a legacy of racism, mandating affirmative action admissions regardless of literacy levels and the failure, utter failure, of traditional schools in remediating under-qualified students; and a rapaciously materialistic society. Yes, you are right: it is not only the for-profit sector that has much to atone for. But, the for-profit sector has been the most egregious offender, wantonly accepting students of any stripe for financial aid, regardless of the tonnage that would drop or fail out, deeply in debt, while those at the top reaped a Croessian wealth. Additionally, there is a complete and total lack of regard for faculty--especially those with Ph.D. degrees, whose intellect and training should elicit respect and interest in their perspectives. Instead, they are diminished, their accomplishments and training devalued.
And, if all that weren't enough, we are in a sea change in higher education. K-12 teaches nothing for all of its testing. We treat teachers as babysitters, underpaying them--and, many of them do come from the bottom third of their college classrooms, perpetuating control over creativity, discouraging innovation in favor of conformity. How else but in a society that admires arrogant ignorance masquerading as freedom could education have fallen into such disarray?
Mmm...I love the smell of fresh troll first thing in the morning.
Let’s actually not forget how this started: the guy who invented the portable motion picture projector for education started a school named after his more famous inventor friend, who had developed vacuum tube amplification. About half a century later, two DeVry grads started a stand-alone business school and used the profit from that to buy DeVry. They integrated the two and were forerunners in accelerated models and enhanced distance learning—-but ultimately more aggressive managers were brought in: DP, DH, RP to boost short-term profits as the for-profit education industry matured and then declined due to public criticism, government action, and the continual online bad-mouthing of the school and its grads, some of whom should never have been admitted. The decline in educational standards continued as the school sought to admit anyone with a pulse and creditworthiness—to the point that we see now where there are 60+ students in a class, and the intro business course asks them to write fifth-grade papers about lemonade stands and go take pictures of a Wal-Mart. Meanwhile, traditional schools are attempting to enter the same space online and treat their students like factory components as well—ASU, SNHU, Penn State Global...because EVERY school is a business...and society is questioning whether higher education is even worth the outrageous costs and debt burdens students are asked to bear. Your local college has likely scaled up their tuition costs massively over the last few decades to pay for administrator salaries, shiny new buildings, and extensive marketing to compete with others—at a sacrifice of full-time faculty lines. Higher Ed is breaking up upon re-entry...in part because of a general sense that information is available online, so what’s the point of paying anyone to “teach” you anything—when you can just Google it if needed, and watch how to do it on YouTube?
You should really watch the South Park episode where they believe that Wal-Mart is evil, only to find that the heart of it was not corporate greed, but the greed of all of society in wanting cheaper things. Not to say that DeVry is cheap (though compared to a $200k degree in art history, it looks like a bargain...but we all needed to question what’s behind underprepared students wanting to complete a degree quickly, or only online...it’s society not understanding what the actual purpose and method of a college education is supposed to be, and the absurdity of HR people requiring ir preferring a bachelor’s degree for jobs that honestly don’t require one.