I thought about writing a (more significant) post, but there’s not much I can touch upon that James Joyner didn’t here. There’s no single snippit that I want to excerpt, so I would recommend going over and reading the whole thing.
I am not anti-corporation or anti-profit, though I have to confess some skepticism of for-profit universities. I’ve been contemplating going back to college in an online capacity and have been sticking to state colleges (and WGU). There are so many bad incentives involved that make me skeptical. Bad incentives from the government. Bad incentives from society. Bad incentives for and from the potential customers.
Some of this is related to my very strong belief in the State University. I am not as skeptical of the non-profit privates as the for-profits, but I am still not a huge fan. This does qualify as a bias. When I see a list of state universities that are struggling, I am more likely to come up with alternative explanations as to why this doesn’t mean that the model is necessarily bad. Of course, sometimes I think the model is bad. I think it’s problematic to send ill-prepared kids to college. I question whether open enrollment universities should even exist (I’m more sympathetic to community colleges). But even here, I don’t think the universities themselves are the problem. Even though, if I were running things, at least some of them would cease to exist. But I’ll still take them over their for-profit alternative, so I guess as long as we have the University of Phoenix, we should have a lower-cost alternative.
One thing I’ve noticed over and over and over with regards to for-profit schools is how many people say something to the effect of “get your math or english or other core classes at a local community college, then transfer those credits to (for-profit college).”
I’m finding it tough to figure out exactly why this bugs me as much as it does but you’d think that the competition would somehow manage to get (for-profit college) to be able to teach, say, trigonometry for a similar price rather than one that is higher to the point where people avoid it entirely.
It’s hard to compete on price when your competitors are subsidized and you have to be self-funding.
Weaker, less prepared students are often not good at, or interested in, the tougher math and science courses where grading tends to be much more objective. Also, could you imagine taking chem lab or zoology lab on-line? God help us when you can do on-line pre-med, engineering, or (forgive me for even thinking it) medical school. We are already suffering with the for-profit response to the shortage of RNs and other medical specialties like phlebotomists, respiratory therapists, etc. Hospitals and doctors’ offices are now loaded with lots of no very capable professionals and paraprofessionals.
Hospitals and doctors’ offices are now loaded with lots of no very capable professionals and paraprofessionals.
This is another thing that’s vaguely bugged me.
Not to use “intelligence” as a discrete, measurable trait that is transferrable across all disciplines but, for the sake of time, let’s use IQ as shorthand.
The majority of jobs in the medical field require IQs of at least one standard deviation above the mean. There’s a large chunk of those jobs where you’d want people at least two standard deviations above the mean.
The problem is that there are only so many people one or two standard deviations above the mean… and if you have an open position you’re stuck with a choice between not hiring someone for the position or hiring the best qualified person (where best indicates a qualitative relationship to everybody else who applied rather than a quantitative relationship to ability). Now iterate that thousands of times across the country.
Is there actually any evidence that, given the quality of the inputs, for-profit schools actually perform worse than the alternatives? Granted that the outcomes for typical University of Phoenix students aren’t great. But it’s not clear that they’d be doing any better at four-year universities—indeed, many of them have already failed to do so.
What I don’t understand is why there aren’t any elite for-profit schools. I suspect that the answer involves path-dependence.