WHY IS “FOR-PROFIT” SUCH A BAD WORD IN EDUCATION?
Call me crazy, but I thought making a profit was one of the most important things that a good business needed to do. Just because you run a business doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to make a profit. You’ve actually got to earn it. Making a profit is how you stay in business and keep your employees and their families fed and it’s how the marketplace ultimately tells you that you’re doing the right things. Customers pay you a profit because you provide a product or a service of real value to them that’s worth paying for. Or at least that’s the way the world should work. And, maybe most importantly, focusing on profitability helps to make sure that you keep your business and your offerings truly competitive.
Of course, if you’re the government with a captive audience and the ability to print your own currency, you don’t really care how many employees you have. The economy’s always great in Virginia, Maryland and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
And, if you’re a well-regarded and selective non-profit college, you’ll always be turning a certain crowd of wanna-bes away; your tuition prices can soar every year; and your facilities and non-teaching faculty (and salaries) can grow to the sky. After all, you’re really living off your endowment and the stock market and not the real market where the relationship between price and value actually matters.
But eventually every bubble bursts and even the newest and greatest “big lies” bust out. (Although “the check is in the mail” and “I gave on the Web” are still pretty workable.) I think we’re finally over the fantasy that everyone in America should (or can afford to) own their own home. And, in the same way, it’s pretty clear now (as the rest of the world has known for decades) that not every high school graduate should (or needs to or can afford to) go to an expensive four-year college (even on the Government’s dime) in order to get a degree instead of getting prepared for a real job. There are plenty of alternative, faster, less expensive and more productive ways to prepare our graduates for today’s highly competitive global economy.
Borrowing tens of thousands of dollars each year from Uncle Sam to finance an “education” with no real connection to or commitment to real employment is just an especially nasty way that we’ve let millions of well-intentioned kids (and their families) mortgage their futures and hitch their wagons (they can’t afford cars and don’t want them anyway) to a false dream of future success.
But when you have a perfect storm of a continued crappy economy, collapsing employment opportunities for millions of people (especially new college grads) and a do-nothing Congress stuck in an election year, and then the economic bubble really bursts, the media and the politicians need to find someone else to blame.
And, for the last couple of years, the easiest whipping boys and the folks in the dunk tank (even though they represent in the aggregate only a tiny fraction of overall college enrollments) have been the large, for-profit education companies. And while the election is right around the corner, I don’t see things getting much better for the sector any time soon.
Of course, the fact that (presumably former) employees of these schools did a lot of dumb, deceptive and greedy things (on tape and video no less) hasn’t exactly helped their cause. Some of these guys are to quality education what the Olive Garden is to Italian cuisine.
And, even though the big guys have fired many of their CEOs and are shrinking their businesses, dropping their tuitions, and “rebranding” themselves (talk about putting “lipstick on a pig”), they don’t really seem any more interested than the fat and happy non-profit colleges are in making the real substantive changes necessary to provide their students with the proper tools, training and technologies and then the pre-graduation job search support and networking assistance required for them to be successful when (and if) they graduate. These are time, resource and people intensive changes that don’t happen overnight and also don’t really scale that easily. And in the world of the giant, for-profit players, if something doesn’t scale, it doesn’t sell. Maybe that’s true for any business these days.
But, for me, a more serious concern is that there are people doing for-profit education really right and our small, but growing college is a perfect example. We’re a for-profit, digital media arts college (Tribeca Flashpoint Academy in Chicago) where – in an intense, hands-on, cross-disciplinary two-year program built to industry standards – we’re training hundreds of passionate and talented creative kids to get ready for real jobs in the rapidly expanding digital economy. And, frankly, we don’t think our work ends until their jobs begin.
I’m just tired of all of the “for-profits” getting painted with the same bullshit brush as the big guys who definitely deserve some of the abuse they’re getting. I don’t want to see the baby (and the right-time, right-place idea of high-end, high-tech vocational training) tossed out with the bums and the bathwater. And it also wouldn’t hurt if parents across the country started asking for answers from ALL colleges – if we’re going to hold for-profit colleges accountable for real education value and real employment prospects – then we should be demanding the exact same standards and results from the 90% of the college marketplace represented by the non-profit schools who are basically doing an equally horrible job of equipping our graduates with the skills, work ethic and training they need today to succeed tomorrow and in the future.
