Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[polly_mer]

You know, I don't think that there's any argument that, for the most part, these proprietary online schools have been a sham.  But they serve a specific demographic which we all understand.  Why not have this demographic served by us?

Because it's very expensive to really serve the demographic well and what the people need has much less to do with college-level education and much more to do with enough stability in their personal lives to focus on anything other than rent and food for this week.

If we really wanted as a society to help the demographic, then we'd invest in good k-12 with the life stability to believe that longer-term investments in education will pay off.

[quasihumanist]

You know, I don't think that there's any argument that, for the most part, these proprietary online schools have been a sham.  But they serve a specific demographic which we all understand.  Why not have this demographic served by us?

I think the problem is that almost everyone is delusional about what it takes to serve this demographic.

We're talking about students who have not had 13 years of elementary and secondary education; they have really had 13 years of babysitting.  They may have memorized a bunch of facts, but they're basically 6 to 8 years behind in intellectual development.

Traditionally, what our regional comprehensives have done is given these folks their third middle school education (which is mostly 4-6 more years of babysitting) and called it college.  Is it any wonder that they come into the workforce and can't keep jobs that really require a college education (as opposed to just evidence that they can sit down and do the work)?

Now what it might take to bring someone up to the level of a college grad might be 10 years in classes of 20 students.  Who has the resources for that? Would they even be willing to spend 10 years training their minds?

Sure some of these online providers don't even provide a third middle school education, but is there a difference between not good enough and really not good enough?  If what's really demanded is just evidence of willingness to sit down and do make-work, can't a non-educational online provider do just as well?

[polly_mer]

Regular readers of this thread might be interested in https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-financial-fitness-tracker-n1235337

Funny that MacMurray College that closed this year is listed as having zero of the stress factors.
Wesley has three of four stress factors.
Mills College has zero of four factors.
University of Akron has one stress factor.
University of Arizona has one stress factor.

[selecter]

Dangit Polly, I was just celebrating that my "perish" school looks fine in Hechinger. (As does MacMurray.)

[polly_mer]

Dangit Polly, I was just celebrating that my "perish" school looks fine in Hechinger. (As does MacMurray.)

Yep.  Hechinger's factors are weird because I know that having an endowment that's only 110% of annual expenses is bad.

I know that the important enrollment number is total enrollment, not new student trend or retention.  Super Dinky is listed as having a slight increase in new student enrollment and retention.  However, retaining 100% of ten new students is much worse for the budget than getting 200 new students and retaining 80% of them.

[jimbogumbo]

You know, I don't think that there's any argument that, for the most part, these proprietary online schools have been a sham.  But they serve a specific demographic which we all understand.  Why not have this demographic served by us?

I think the problem is that almost everyone is delusional about what it takes to serve this demographic.

We're talking about students who have not had 13 years of elementary and secondary education; they have really had 13 years of babysitting.  They may have memorized a bunch of facts, but they're basically 6 to 8 years behind in intellectual development.

Traditionally, what our regional comprehensives have done is given these folks their third middle school education (which is mostly 4-6 more years of babysitting) and called it college.  Is it any wonder that they come into the workforce and can't keep jobs that really require a college education (as opposed to just evidence that they can sit down and do the work)?

Now what it might take to bring someone up to the level of a college grad might be 10 years in classes of 20 students.  Who has the resources for that? Would they even be willing to spend 10 years training their minds?

Sure some of these online providers don't even provide a third middle school education, but is there a difference between not good enough and really not good enough?  If what's really demanded is just evidence of willingness to sit down and do make-work, can't a non-educational online provider do just as well?

This may be the wrong thread for the post, but so it goes.

Quasihumanist, that's just BS. I work at a regional comprehensive, and it depends completely upon the major. Our Engineering degrees are ABET accredited, Business AACSB with Accounting students the best in the state, and the  CS and Science departments produce excellent students. Political Science helps students become Fulbright Scholars, Physics has an amazing program, and my department has a top tier Actuarial Science program along with a graduate program that has sent many students on to to finish Ph.D.s

My colleagues in the Humanities and Social Sciences are just outstanding. Our students DO take 4-6 years to graduate, but that is almost completely due to having to work.

[Wahoo Redux]

You know, I don't think that there's any argument that, for the most part, these proprietary online schools have been a sham.  But they serve a specific demographic which we all understand.  Why not have this demographic served by us?

I think the problem is that almost everyone is delusional about what it takes to serve this demographic.

We're talking about students who have not had 13 years of elementary and secondary education; they have really had 13 years of babysitting.  They may have memorized a bunch of facts, but they're basically 6 to 8 years behind in intellectual development.

Traditionally, what our regional comprehensives have done is given these folks their third middle school education (which is mostly 4-6 more years of babysitting) and called it college.  Is it any wonder that they come into the workforce and can't keep jobs that really require a college education (as opposed to just evidence that they can sit down and do the work)?

Now what it might take to bring someone up to the level of a college grad might be 10 years in classes of 20 students.  Who has the resources for that? Would they even be willing to spend 10 years training their minds?

Sure some of these online providers don't even provide a third middle school education, but is there a difference between not good enough and really not good enough?  If what's really demanded is just evidence of willingness to sit down and do make-work, can't a non-educational online provider do just as well?

This may be the wrong thread for the post, but so it goes.

Quasihumanist, that's just BS. I work at a regional comprehensive, and it depends completely upon the major. Our Engineering degrees are ABET accredited, Business AACSB with Accounting students the best in the state, and the  CS and Science departments produce excellent students. Political Science helps students become Fulbright Scholars, Physics has an amazing program, and my department has a top tier Actuarial Science program along with a graduate program that has sent many students on to to finish Ph.D.s

My colleagues in the Humanities and Social Sciences are just outstanding. Our students DO take 4-6 years to graduate, but that is almost completely due to having to work.

I was gonna say something along these lines, but I sometimes wonder if there is any point in defending what we do.

Our uni doesn't produce many graduate students compared to other schools of a similar size, but we do educate people who often struggle with exactly the circumstances Quasihumanist describes.  Almost every student works.  Many come from poverty and an all-but-debilitated secondary school system.  But we are not a middle-school-operation.  Many of our students work extremely hard, some only do as much as necessary, but we have a good graduation record and a good record of upward mobility.

If I fault our admin for anything it's lack of transparency (which seems to be standard these days) and an inability to capitalize on the good work we do.

[polly_mer]

What's the drop out rate at your institutions?

What's the admit rate and the stats on the students attending?

I worked at a regional comprehensive with ABET accredited engineering.  Our graduates were indeed good.  However, our program attrition rate was astounding for students coming from certain school districts.

It was really noticeable to be teaching in engineering classes versus general education courses.  The engineering students after the weedout first year courses were fine. 

The general education students had a non-negligible fraction of students who couldn't do problems as hard as we routinely gave the gifted and talented middleschoolers in the summer program.  I was taken quite aback at having to teach people every term how to literally divide 100 by 10 using their calculator.

There are indeed people who are taking middle school for a third time in college and places that cater to that.

[quasihumanist]

You know, I don't think that there's any argument that, for the most part, these proprietary online schools have been a sham.  But they serve a specific demographic which we all understand.  Why not have this demographic served by us?

I think the problem is that almost everyone is delusional about what it takes to serve this demographic.

We're talking about students who have not had 13 years of elementary and secondary education; they have really had 13 years of babysitting.  They may have memorized a bunch of facts, but they're basically 6 to 8 years behind in intellectual development.

Traditionally, what our regional comprehensives have done is given these folks their third middle school education (which is mostly 4-6 more years of babysitting) and called it college.  Is it any wonder that they come into the workforce and can't keep jobs that really require a college education (as opposed to just evidence that they can sit down and do the work)?

Now what it might take to bring someone up to the level of a college grad might be 10 years in classes of 20 students.  Who has the resources for that? Would they even be willing to spend 10 years training their minds?

Sure some of these online providers don't even provide a third middle school education, but is there a difference between not good enough and really not good enough?  If what's really demanded is just evidence of willingness to sit down and do make-work, can't a non-educational online provider do just as well?

This may be the wrong thread for the post, but so it goes.

Quasihumanist, that's just BS. I work at a regional comprehensive, and it depends completely upon the major. Our Engineering degrees are ABET accredited, Business AACSB with Accounting students the best in the state, and the  CS and Science departments produce excellent students. Political Science helps students become Fulbright Scholars, Physics has an amazing program, and my department has a top tier Actuarial Science program along with a graduate program that has sent many students on to to finish Ph.D.s

My colleagues in the Humanities and Social Sciences are just outstanding. Our students DO take 4-6 years to graduate, but that is almost completely due to having to work.

I was gonna say something along these lines, but I sometimes wonder if there is any point in defending what we do.

Our uni doesn't produce many graduate students compared to other schools of a similar size, but we do educate people who often struggle with exactly the circumstances Quasihumanist describes.  Almost every student works.  Many come from poverty and an all-but-debilitated secondary school system.  But we are not a middle-school-operation.  Many of our students work extremely hard, some only do as much as necessary, but we have a good graduation record and a good record of upward mobility.

If I fault our admin for anything it's lack of transparency (which seems to be standard these days) and an inability to capitalize on the good work we do.

I teach at an R2.

I think many of our students work very hard, and the faculty try their best to get students to learn what they can in the time they have.

Right out of college, I did a stint in technology consulting.  Maybe 10% of our graduates could actually keep that kind of job for 6 months.  They just don't have the ability to take in new information by themselves, process it, and draw decent conclusions.  When faced with problems they haven't seen before, they might not freeze, but they can't get anywhere.  If they have 2 days to learn how some new technology works and make sense of it, they can't do it.

I have a friend who was kicked out of a PhD in English, and recently as a side gig she was doing some Internet marketing for some rich guy's vanity poetry project.  She has no marketing training.
You take our marketing majors, and while they would know how to do the standard things that people have used to market shampoo for the last 50 years, I'm sure 95% of them would have no idea where to start on this kind of marketing project.

[jimbogumbo]

Polly and Quasihumanist: that is precisely why I specified specific majors. Yes, the drop out rate is high, and there is no question that lot of students do take a college curriculum that is sort of kind of middle schoolish. That also happens at many R1s, including many state flagships.

To me that is a giant so what? My point was that in the types of majors I mentioned (as well as others) regional public comprehensives are nothing like middle school. The overlap is with good junior and senior level Honors and AP classes in quality high schools, as it should be.

[quasihumanist]

Polly and Quasihumanist: that is precisely why I specified specific majors. Yes, the drop out rate is high, and there is no question that lot of students do take a college curriculum that is sort of kind of middle schoolish. That also happens at many R1s, including many state flagships.

To me that is a giant so what? My point was that in the types of majors I mentioned (as well as others) regional public comprehensives are nothing like middle school. The overlap is with good junior and senior level Honors and AP classes in quality high schools, as it should be.

To me, I've never been able to feel comfortable with working at an institution that fails(*) well more than half the people it's supposed to serve.  It's that demotivational poster: FAILURE: When your best is just not good enough.

I also think that ABET and AACSB accreditation just give a floor that's not good enough if most of your students are basically at the floor.  I teach a couple classes in the CS program (I'm a mathematician), and while the graduates know the content they're supposed to, too many of them just don't have the problem solving creativity and imagination needed to work in the field - and they aren't getting there any time soon because their schooling has consistently neglected to develop it for 13 if not 17 years.

(*) Some of the people we fail we fail by giving them degrees.

[Wahoo Redux]

I probably shouldn't say it again, but we are overwhelmed with frustration and negativity.

Maybe it's the people who come here.

[polly_mer]

I probably shouldn't say it again, but we are overwhelmed with frustration and negativity.

Maybe it's the people who come here.

Who are you calling 'we'?  One of my biggest frustrations is being accused of negativity for pointing out facts and the mismatch between stated goals and activities that can't possibly reach the goals.

We, as a society, could do better in public education, but that means looking at the situation and really seeing it instead of focusing on what's easy and is practically no change in what the system is already doing.

If regional comprehensives were already doing well at serving the underserved, then there wouldn't be a market for the diploma mills with bad graduation rates.

[jimbogumbo]

Quasihumanist: if you are saying half your math and physics majors are "failing" I have to question who your institution is recruiting. I cannot and will not argue that you are wrong about issues with PreK-12 education; I've spent a career trying to help change it. It is like playing Whack-a-Mole. You make a difference (demonstrable in multiple ways), and it either doesn't scale or just dies out as staff moves/retires. It is soul sucking.

To the regional comprehensive statement, again I'll point to my institution's Actuarial and Accounting programs. Our Actuarial students are wonderful, all get jobs, and are passing exams easily. You can't do that with smoke and mirrors. Accounting students exam scores the highest in the state, with the competition including three excellent R1s. Again, not smoke and mirrors.

As to Polly's last comment about regional comprehensives and the market for for profit diploma mills, I call BS again. In my state there are not even remotely the resources to deal with the needs of those students. The for profits don't even really pretend to see those needs. They do have slicker marketing, charge more, have the advantage of many years of lax Federal oversight and actively TARGET those students KNOWING they can't succeed as the coursework is much lower level than any of the regional comprehensives in my state.

[Wahoo Redux]

I probably shouldn't say it again, but we are overwhelmed with frustration and negativity.

Maybe it's the people who come here.

Who are you calling 'we'?  One of my biggest frustrations is being accused of negativity for pointing out facts and the mismatch between stated goals and activities that can't possibly reach the goals.

We, as a society, could do better in public education, but that means looking at the situation and really seeing it instead of focusing on what's easy and is practically no change in what the system is already doing.

If regional comprehensives were already doing well at serving the underserved, then there wouldn't be a market for the diploma mills with bad graduation rates.

Well Polly, not everything you say is a "fact," sometimes the facts are cherry-picked, and you frequently misstate or misquote what other posters have said ("instead of focusing on what's easy and is practically no change in what the system is already doing" sounds like nothing anyone I know has said, including myself).

No need to go into history (or start a flame war) but you are admittedly the "voice of doom," are you not?

You last comment in your quote about is a perfect example.  There are lots of reasons that certain groups are "underserved" by our educational system, public funding being one of them.  There are lots of reasons that the proprietary schools prospered and just failed----one of which is that actual higher ed DOES have standards (see Quasihumanist above) and another of which is the ease of access proprietary ed promised, a business which legitimate colleges are now getting into and which you've already cast aspersion upon.