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Education in America

A Degree from a Proprietary School? Is it worth the cost?

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Reader Robin commented on Thursday’s post, “It Never Rains but It Pours,”

Off topic, but I watched Frontline’s investigative piece on corporate higher education (i.e., The University of Phoenix among others) last night and found it dismaying. Couldn’t help wondering how you felt about this burgeoning overlap of academia, corporate America and Wall Street.

This program aired on May 4, 2010. Anyone who’s interested in the state of higher education, who’s thinking about pursuing a degree at the University of Phoenix, Argosy, or a similar institution, or who has a son or daughter contemplating a program in one of these schools should watch it.

Graduation ceremony at Oxford

@ Robin: The University of Phoenix is huge. At 450,000 students it is now the largest university in Arizona, Michael Crow‘s pretensions to empire notwithstanding. It’s popular among people who want a degree for no other reason than to get a job or a promotion, because most or all of the coursework is online, few gen-ed courses are required, and the courses are very easy.

A friend is teaching an online course through UofP. Pay is even worse than in the community colleges. To give you an idea, at Paradise Valley Community College I earn $2400 for sixteen weeks of work. The course she teaches is a watered-down version of freshman comp. The amount of attention it demands is so slight she manages to hold down a full-time editorial job at Arizona State University, a part-time job tending bar, and a substantial freelance contract from a huge textbook publisher and still “teach” UofP courses.

UofP classes are canned courses: management gives the instructor a ready-made syllabus and a ready-made set of assignments with ready-made rubrics. Then they sit the instructor down and explain exactly how the course is to be conducted and how the assignments are to be graded. So there’s no room for flexibility, no room to communicate any research expertise, no room for much of anything. It is, in short, as a can of Green Giant peas to a basket of garden peas fresh off the vine. However, there are some reputable programs out there, such as DeVry’s business management program; you just have to sift through the suspect schools. Reputable sources such as U.S. News‘s “Best Colleges 2012” review online and part-time programs of this nature.

I do think this strategy represents the wave of the future for higher education, and probably in time for secondary education, too. Although mounting courses online is expensive, once you have it all in the can, running the operation is cheap: you don’t have to hire tenurable faculty, you don’t have to provide office space and computers or any other support for faculty, you don’t have to build classrooms. You don’t even need full-time faculty at all. Hence no expensive benefits.

And students love online courses. When I first started teaching online—I created the first fully online course in my college—I was astonished at the number of people who swarmed to get in. Offer a course online, and it fills in two days. So, these enterprises are potential engines of great wealth for their proprietors, some of whom are already billionaires.

Indeed, Arizona State University President Crow so likes the model that he regards these proprietary schools as direct competition and is moving to go head-to-head with them. Arizona State offers a number of online degrees—you can now get an MBA with ASU’s relatively prestigious name attached without ever entering a brick-and-mortar classroom. Online courses are offered in almost every department, and some of them have no caps. One adjunct writing instructor was assigned an upper-division course in Writing for the Professions that ended up with 400 students in one section! Under those conditions, of course, the quality of education students receive from a state university will be no better than what is described in the Frontline documentary.

Few employers care where rank-and-file white-collar or even middle-management workers get their degrees. I know people who have obtained master’s and doctoral degrees through proprietary online “universities” and then walked into high-paying jobs. One of my former students, who can’t write her way out of a paper bag, wouldn’t recognize a comma splice if it bit her on the ankle, and knows nothing about literature or writing, got herself an M.A. from a London-based for-profit online school and forthwith landed a full-time job teaching English at a Maricopa County college, where average salaries range from $63,000 to $68,000. Another got an online Ed.D. and was promoted at Arizona State to assistant dean, a job paid upwards of $70,000, depending on your department.

On the other hand, obviously if you’re training to be a nurse and your clinical is at a day-care center, as four of the former students of one proprietary school report, you’re not going to get a job. And just as obviously, if you aim for an elite career in business or government, you need a real degree from an elite school. You don’t see any U.S. presidents or cabinet members who graduated from Arizona State University or the University of Phoenix. But if you’re just going to be a working schlep, counting the days to retirement? Meh…maybe. Still, if it’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, why not take an online program at far less cost from a public school?

The problem is, these proprietary outfits pass themselves off as “private” schools and charge commensurately for tuition. Undergraduate tuition for an online degree at Grand Canyon University, which is mentioned in the documentary, ranges from $250 to $415 a credit hour: given a typical 120 hours for an undergraduate degree, a B.A. at this place could set you back $30,000 to $49,800! This will leave you strapped for cash, deep in debt, and with no guarantee of a job.

Graduate tuition rates at private nonproprietary schools are even higher. Over a year ago, a young friend of my son graduated with a master’s of international management from the Thunderbird School for Global Management, a school that has a decent reputation. Payments on her student loans are $1,400 a month. She’s never been able to get a job. She had to move back in with her mother and is now earning under-the-table cash by harvesting marijuana seasonally for a California grower. And that’s with a degree from a high-ranking private school.

Proprietary schools, which are anything but high-ranking, can be enormous rips. The quality of their education is highly suspect. At one point I had a client who hired me to turn her dissertation into English; she was pursuing a doctorate at Argosy University. Her dissertation was extremely weak. Sections of the document that made no sense and reflected no credible research were accepted, and it soon became clear that her chair was simply pushing her paper through to move her out of the program. Unable to get into Arizona State’s graduate program because of her inadequate preparation, she was so anxious to obtain a doctorate—largely, she admitted, for reasons of ego—that she was willing to pay extravagantly for it, and to hire someone else to rewrite her dissertation under the guise of “editing” it. This woman was going to end up with a degree that would leave her no better trained or educated than when she started and would qualify her for nothing.

Students who seek vocational degrees tailored to help them land specific kinds of jobs would do far better to attend community colleges and universities. Many decent public schools now offer a broad choice of online courses and even entire programs conducted online. If your grades and test scores are too low to get you into a university at the outset, two years at a community college will generally qualify you for entry at the junior level. Compare a community college’s $71-per-credit-hour cost with Argosy’s breathtaking $510. A fully online undergraduate program at Arizona State will cost you $3,980 for twelve credit hours, or $331.66 per credit hour. Take yourself in person to the campus, and the cost is a bit lower, $3,423 for anything over 7 credit hours; for a 12-credit semester, that works out to $285.25 per credit hour.

Costs are still very high, but nothing like the gouge from a proprietary school. And an established public college or university does have a tradition of legitimate teaching and faculty who are paid decent salaries to teach, do research, and share knowledge creatively with the next generation.

That is different—way different—from what you’ll get from a course that comes out of a can.

Another sad day for academe

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Deflected from writing a post this afternoon by the startling news from Alabama: denied tenure, a junior faculty member tried to take out her department and succeeded in killing three colleagues.

What a tragedy for everyone, the maddened assistant professor as well as those whose lives she ended, and all their families.

Considering how much commitment, work, and struggle go into attaining a Ph.D., how much more struggle, work, abuse, frustration, and sometimes downright misery a junior faculty member goes through, and how much rides on a single tenure decision—often made by committees not all of whose members may operate with the purest of motives—it’s surprising this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. In fact, the fear that it could does surface every now and again.

Some years ago my department on the West campus of Arizona State University decided to dismiss a tenure-track assistant professor after the chronic frustration of working at that august institution had driven him quite insane. One of my students, a police officer, had let it slip in front of another student that she had arrested this guy for beating up a young boy; I reported this to the dean. The dean and the campus cops confirmed its accuracy, but no action was taken. Only after he threatened to cut off a colleague’s head and pee down the hole—giving said colleague an excuse to decline to come into campus even to meet his classes—did our administrators finally feel moved to get rid of him.

The chair of the department went to the man’s house, accompanied by a phalanx of armed police officers, to give him the news and to tell him he was not to come back to the campus. Before he left on this mission, however, the chair called some but not all of the faculty members and warned them to stay away from campus that day. Strangely, he didn’t tell everyone. It was obvious as day that if our disaffected colleague walked into the second-floor office suite carrying a street-sweeper, he wasn’t going to distinguish between those who merely annoyed him and those who drove him to distraction. But some of us were left to take our chances.

Jayzus! Imagine having a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University and then being denied tenure by a public school in a state like Alabama…probably the only state in the Union that’s more backward about education than Arizona. How crushing!

For those who don’t know what this implies: it’s extremely difficult to land a tenure-track job at a university in the best of times; during times of recession, almost impossible. To hang onto the job and build anything resembling a career in academia, you have to fight your way to tenure, usually on a three- to seven-year deadline. Tenure decisions require you to jump through many flaming hoops, and too many times the decisions are anything but fair. If you fail to obtain tenure, your job at that institution is over and your chances of landing another tenure-track job are nil. Should you stay in the academy at all after that, you’ll likely end up teaching five sections a semester in some junior college, with no research agenda and no chance of ever having a research agenda. Effectively, tenure denial ends the career for which you spent 10 to 15 years preparing.

So, all the while a junior faculty member is working toward tenure, he or she is under soul-wracking pressure. It is, even for the best of us, a difficult time. It’s not surprising that some people crack. Given the pervasive violence and madness in our culture, I guess we’re lucky events like today’s are rare.

What’s a master’s degree worth?

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Associate editor and business partner Tina sends a link to this interesting discussion. The main post itself has several links to relevant, equally interesting posts and conversations.

Given the astonishing burden of student loans that too many young people are saddled with—M’hijito’s roommate’s girlfriend, for example, remarked that she will graduate from a top-quality institution with a master’s degree in international business and $1,400-a-month student loan payments—assessing the “value” of graduate education is not a crass or pointless exercise. It’s well and good to love learning for learning’s sake and so to feel that the graduate school experience is irrelevant to one’s vocational prospects. However, once that graduate school experience ends, you still have to pay for it. You still have to keep a roof over your head, put food on your table, and foot the considerable cost of raising a family. When young people are saddled with five- and six-figure student loan debt, they should reasonably expect the financial investment in graduate education to pay off with jobs that will support them.

“That, unfortunately, is too often not the case. In our current economy, there simply aren’t enough decent jobs (or jobs at all) to accommodate the rafts of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s that learning factories like GDU crank out each year. Certain degrees, like an executive doctorate in educational leadership, make for more employable graduates than others, hile some degrees, such as the M.B.A., need to come from a top-tier (read “wildly expensive”) school even to get the holder hired, to say nothing of commanding an upper-middle-class starting salary. And some degrees, to be blunt about it, are simply fraudulent: they’re money-making scams perpetrated by administrators solely to extract as much cash as possible from as many suckers as will bite.

For example, GDU has a much-ballyhooed interdisciplinary master’s degree that has virtually no entrance requirements and virtually no substance. Students in this program, which the university advertises as something that will help working adults get ahead in their careers, pay a $200 per credit surcharge, on top of the regular graduate tuition and various extra charges (all GDU students, for example, pay an extra fee to support the athletic program). Since a standard graduate course carries three credits, every single course you take in this program costs you $600 more than any other student on the campus would pay for it. Students enrolled in the program take a few core courses taught by the program’s director and then fill out their card with electives in regular departments. One elective is U.S.-Mexican border history. A student in this exotic interdisciplinary program may sit next to a History Department graduate student who pays a full $600 less to be in that classroom. Because the program is pretty fluffy and leaves one with a master’s degree in nothing recognizable by another university or by an employer, its value is highly questionable. IMHO, it’s a scam.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t pursue a master’s degree. Or a doctorate, or a J.D., or degrees in nursing, public health, history, English, library science. To the contrary. Graduate education has—or should have—real financial value in addition to the intellectual adventure and polish that students rightly expect to gain from it.

After altogether too many years in the ivied halls of academe, I would advise those who are thinking that now is the time to go back to school for a master’s degree, a professional degree, or a doctorate to plan very carefully. You need to develop a two-pronged planning scheme:

1. Intellectual and spiritual planning

The prospective graduate student should ask Why, really, do I want to do this?

• Do you want to pursue a subject because you’re crazy-passionate about it, so much so that you don’t care whether you can ever make a living at it? (There’s nothing wrong with this, BTW.)

• Do you feel a graduate degree will make you look smarter to people who matter to you? (You’d be amazed at how many people with Ph.D.’s wanted, at heart, to prove to someone that they weren’t so stupid after all! This is not a good reason to go to graduate school.)

• Do you want a graduate degree because you hope it will open the door to an interesting line of work, whose pay doesn’t really matter as long as the job doesn’t bore the pants off you?

• Do you want the degree because you think it will open the door to high-paying occupations, whose remuneration very much does matter?

• Is it that, at the grand old age of 28 or 30, you still don’t know what you want to do when you grow up and you’d like to take a couple years in graduate school to figure that out? (Chances are you won’t figure it out then, either—precious few of us ever know what we want to do when we grow up!)

The answers to these and similar questions not only bear on your choice of major, they bear on financial issues, too. To make a just-barely-living wage in teaching, journalism, or library science, for example, requires a master’s degree, but it doesn’t require one from an expensive university. As long as you can put food on your table, a vocation that calls to you need not earn a ton of money. But…maybe it shouldn’t put you in hock for the rest of your life. And surely Tucson, Buffalo, or Austin is as good a place as New Haven to take two years to seek the meaning of your life. On the other hand, if a high-powered corporate career is what you’re after, then you probably need a degree from a world-class institution—a costly program may pay for itself within a few years after you graduate.

2. Financial planning

Bringing your real motives into sharp focus goes a long way toward deciding how much to spend on a degree and how to finance it. First, of course, you now can decide whether you truly need a degree from a prestigious (i.e., expensive) school or whether an in-state public university will suffice.

• Consider that even lukewarm public universities often have one or two first-rate—even world-class—programs. The University of Arizona, for example, has one of the premier programs in astrophysics on the planet. Psychology programs at Michigan, Cal-Berkeley, Illinois, UCLA, Minnesota, Indiana, and Washington rank among the top twenty in the U.S. Cal-Berkeley, NYU, North Carolina, Indiana, Washington, and Maryland’s MBA programs have shown up among the top twenty. Don’t discount your home state’s public schools, especially if you’re in a place in your life where one master’s degree is about as good as another. Check university rankings for schools in your state and for public universities whose out-of-state tuition is more or less within reason.

• If nothing close to home has a program that suffices, investigate universities in other countries, such as Canada, where costs are far more reasonable than out-of-state fees in the U.S.

• Try to get your employer to foot part or all of the bill. Many companies and government employers will underwrite graduate training relevant to the job. Even if you have to agree to stay with the company for a number of years after you finish the degree, that’s more than a fair trade to avoid being saddled with student loan debt for years.

• Look for research assistantships that waive tuition. Tell the program director or whoever is trying to recruit you that you can’t attend unless you get an assistantship or other support that will waive tuition. Remember: graduate students are the bread and butter of most university departments. They want you.

• Failing that, try to get a 50 percent FTE job on the campus. Most universities waive tuition for employees, and often this applies to half-time as well as full-time workers. GDU, for example, considers a 50 percent time job to be “full time,” complete with health insurance and tuition waiver. The waiver is taxed as income, but since you will earn so little, your tax will be minimal…certainly compared to a lifetime of student loan payments. Often this applies only to in-state tuition; bear that in mind if you’re looking at out-of-state schools.

• Some universities will waive tuition for an employee’s spouse. If your husband or wife has a job that’s fungible and is willing to work at the desired college or university, this is a strategy that might make sense.

• If you’re interested in a university in another state, get a job in that state, register your car there, register to vote, and wait a year to enroll. This will establish residency and avoid the outrageous tuition often charged to  out-of-state students.

Do everything you can to avoid having to take on student loans, even if it means maintaining your dreary day job and taking coursework online and at night. If you possibly can get by on a part-time income, tighten your belt for the two to four years it will take to complete a program while you work. That’s a hard row to hoe, but well worth the goal: completing the degree free of debt.

Finally, I’d add one more bit of advice:

Caveat emptor!

Investigate and think carefully about any degree program before enrolling—no matter which institution offers it. Some otherwise respectable universities have gone into the diploma mill business—under pressure from legislators and alumni to compete with outfits like the University of Phoenix, university administrators and boards of regents crave to operate their institutions on a business model, even though education is not and should never be a business.

Any degree program that does not require the GRE, the GMAT, the LSE, or a similar entry exam is suspect. My university, for example, offers a very respectable Master of Business Administration, for which applicants must submit GMAT scores. It also offers several knockoff low-residency and online versions of the MBA, none of which requires an entrance exam of any kind. Savvy employers know the difference.

Any fully online degree program should be regarded with deepest suspicion. Any low-residency program should be approached with caution. Any interdisciplinary program that leaves you with a strangely titled degree (“Master of Liberal Studies,” for example) should be avoided. These degrees may get you a perfectly fine job. Maybe not, too.

If higher education is a business, then students are consumers, and they should use as much care in buying the “product” as they do in buying a refrigerator or a dishwasher.

Postscript, June 6, 2009: One other strategy for underwriting a master’s degree without going into permanent hock is to join the military. I didn’t think about this as I wrote the post, first because it’s such a huge commitment and second because IMHO, you should join the military because you want to serve your country, not because you want to extract a lagniappe. If your main motive for signing up is to have the taxpayer cover the cost of your graduate tuition, you really ought to ask yourself whether a master’s degree is worth risking your life. There are higher reasons for serving America.

Images:

Oxford University, Andrew Yong at Wikipedia Commons
U.C. Berkeley, Tristan Harward, at Wikipedia Commons, ShareAlike License

Education: We are what we sow

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Uhm…I guess I’ll have to rescind my ire at the remark by one of our state legislators that teachers are feeding at the public trough. Now, bear in mind that the Goldwater Institute is a conservative think tank, and as we all know, it’s pretty easy to slant a survey. But…hevvin help us, take a look at this. After you’ve run your eye down the list of very basic questions the surveyors asked Arizona high school students, go on to page 2 for the eye-popping results.

Don’t believe it? I wouldn’t, either, if I hadn’t asked a roomful of university juniors and seniors to brainstorm a list of important events that happened in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. World War I made the list. What didn’t make it? Emancipation. The Spanish-American War. The Gadsden Purchase. Lewis and Clark’s expedition. The War of 1812. Construction of the Erie Canal. Nat Turner’s revolt. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. War with Mexico.

None of those. Didn’t happen. Or if they did, we didn’t notice.

Well. Bring up ignoramuses, and they elect ignoramuses to state and federal office. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Maybe there’s method in our state legislators’ madness…

Student Loans: Whither young college graduates?

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This morning the Times reports that student loan forgiveness programs are faltering. Designed to draw young people into crucial but often low-paying careers such as teaching and nursing, these state and nonprofit programs can no longer generate the cash required to underwrite the loans they agreed to help with, leaving altruistic young men and women high and dry.

The crisis in the health care system is one we’re all aware of, and one that affects virtually every American. But I’d add that we have a crisis in higher education with the potential to affect almost as many of us: if we can’t get teachers because smart young people realize the lifetime pay of a teacher isn’t worth racking up back-breaking debt, our school systems—already in trouble in many parts of this country—will wither and die. And more to the point for all young people, no matter what their career choices: we’re looking at a situation that requires all young men and women to start their adult lives under the burden of huge, potentially bankrupting debt, just to get a fairly ordinary college degree.

M’hijito’s roommate and his girlfriend are each about to graduate with master’s degrees in international business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, one of the premier business programs in the country. A master’s degree from this institution will set you back a hundred grand. The young woman told M’hijito that when her loan payments kick in, she will owe $1,400 a month. There are programs that allow people to refinance student loans but there is no telling how much it could help M’hijito’s friend. When the school had a job fair, major corporations showed up to interview students…or not. Several told the young people that they came because they had agreed to do so, but none of them were hiring.

Fourteen hundred dollars a month! That’s more than the mortgage on the house M’hijito and I are copurchasing in a choice centrally located district. Significantly more!

Degrees in law and medicine are similarly pricey, as is any MBA from an internationally recognized private school. Less radiant graduate degrees are not cheap, either: M’hijito figures a master’s in public administration from the Great Desert University will set him back $40,000; I think that’s a conservative estimate.

The implications of this do not bode especially well for the future of this country. Something is wrong when young people have to start their careers so deep in hock it will take them twenty or thirty years to dig out, years during which even an excellent salary will leave their budgets pinched and their options narrowed.

Just as Americans need a decent health care system if we are to continue to think of ourselves as a developed country, America needs to provide higher education for its young people at a price they can afford. If we fail in that, over the long run we risk failing as a sovereignty. If we want our country to continue as a world leader, we need world-class education at affordable prices for all our talented young people, including those who have other ideas for their futures than careers in law, the business of medicine, and high finance.

Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money

State legislators get their way

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So, here’s what happens when you gut a state university’s funding:

§ Applications to next year’s freshman class at the Great Desert University are closing.
§ Four dozen academic programs are closing.
§ Each satellite campus will be left with only one college; all other colleges and programs at those campuses, which serve the eastern and western districts of a huge, far-flung metropolitan area, will be closed.
§ The nursing progam will be further reduced (enrollment had already been cut) and moved to the downtown campus.
§ The program for training firefighters will be closed.
§ The clinical laboratory sciences program will be closed.
§ The master’s degree in sports business will be discontinued.

Here’s a summary of other programs that will be canceled at this one university:

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Tempe)

• M.S. Kinesiology
• Master of Natural Sciences (MNS)
• Concentrations in Natural Science in
• Life Sciences
• Geology
• Speech and Hearing
• MA Anthropology concentrations in
• Archaeology
• Physical anthropology
• Sociocultural anthropology

Herberger College of the Arts

• Ph.D. in History and Theory of Art

Music

• M.A. Music and Music Theory Concentration
• M.M. Music concentrations in
• Performance (Music Theatre/Opera Directing)
• Music (Performance)
• Performance (Music Theatre Performance)
• Performance (Music Theatre Musical Director)
• Music Ed (Jazz Studies)
– Music Artist Diploma

Theatre

•  MFA Theatre concentration in Scenography

Mary Lou Fulton College of Education

• Ed. D. in Curriculum and Instruction
• Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction
• Physical Education
• Ed. D. in Adult Education
• M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction
• Communication Art
• Professional Studies

College of Teacher Education and Leadership

• M. Ed. Education Administration & Supervision concentration inEducation Entrepreneurship

College of Technology & Innovation

• Computing Studies
• M.S. Tech. concentration in Computer Systems
• Electronic Systems
• M.S. Tech.
Electrical Engineering Technology concentrations in
• Instrument and Measurement Technology *
• Microelectronics

Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering Tech

• M.S, Tech Mechanical and Manufacturing Tech concentrations in
• Aeronautical Engineering Technology
• Security Engineering Technology

Information Management Technology]

• M.S. Technology

Technology Management

• M.S. Tech.in Fire Service Administration
• Undergraduate Certificate in Fire Service Management
• BS in Industrial Technology
• BAS concentration in Materials Joining Manufacturing Technology
• BAS concentration in Fire Service Management
• BAS concentration in Aviation Maintenance Management Technology
• BAS concentration in Digital Media Management
• BAS concentration in Digital Publishing
• BAS concentration in Municipal Operations Management
• BAS concentration in Law Enforcement Management
• BAS concentration in Technical Graphics
*BAS concentration in Computer Systems Administration
• BAS concentration in Cyber Security Applications
• BAS concentration in Software Technology Applications
• BAS concentration in Microcomputer Systems
*BAS concentration in Alternative Energy Technologies
• BAS concentration in Instrumentation
vBAS concentration in Semiconductor Technology

Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness

• B.S. in Agribusiness with concentrations in
• Golf and Facilities Management
• Professional Golf Management

New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

• M.A.I.S. (Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies)
• M.A. in Communication Studies
• M.A. in Social Justice and Human Rights

Now, just between you and me, a few of these programs should have been closed years ago. But most are legitimate professional programs that train workers for decently paying jobs, many of which contribute not just to the state’s economy but also to the welfare and safety of the entire citizenry.

The wacko right-wingers have gotten their way: they’re killing the beast. Let’s just hope the next time the morons who vote for these people need a nurse, a firefighter, an IT specialist, or someone to diagnose and treat their hearing-impaired child, they remember to thank their elected representatives for the result.