How A For-Profit College Created Fake Jobs To Get Taxpayer Money

[marmar]

Eric Parms enrolled at an Everest College campus in the suburbs of Atlanta in large part because recruiters promised he would have little trouble securing a job.

He'd seen the for-profit school's television commercials touting its sterling rates of job placement, and he'd heard the pledges of admissions staff who assured him that the campus career services office would help him find work in his field.

But after completing a nine-month program in heating and air conditioning repair in the summer of 2011 -- graduating with straight As and $17,000 in student debt -- Parms began to doubt the veracity of the pitch. Career services set him up with a temporary contract position laying electrical wires. After less than two months, he and several other Everest graduates also working on the job were laid off and denied further help finding work, he says.

Even that short-lived gig wasn't secured on the strength of Parms's degree. The college had paid his contractor $2,000 to hire him and keep him on for at least 30 days, part of an effort to boost its official job placement records, according to documents obtained by The Huffington Post. The college paid more than a dozen other companies to hire graduates into temporary jobs before cutting them loose, a HuffPost investigation has found. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/corinthian-colleges-job-placement_n_4433800.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037&ir=Politics

[mike_c]

1. this is disgusting....

The shit people do for money. Sheesh.

[FatBuddy]

2. if you're looking for higher education

don't go to schools that advertise on daytime teevee between judge judy and social security disability lawyer commercials.

please. just don't.

[exboyfil]

3. As opposed to illustrious institutions such

as SUNO or UDC which abysmally low graduation rates. In fairness a metric needs to be put into place to clear out the lousy colleges that do not enhance employment opportunities and strengthen our economy vs. those which do (even if they address remedial concerns and should be in a different category for comparison). The public school feeder for UDC spends $27K/yr on its students (11:1 student ratio). It appears these urban campuses are an extension of kick the can down the road (and acquire student loan debt along the way). I think the same argument can be found in some of the smaller rural schools as well (Kent State Liverpool) and Rogers State for example.

Most for profit colleges and many private "not for profit" colleges are crap and should not be supported by the taxpayers dime (as well the problem of victimizing their students with debt that can never be paid back and can't be discharged like normal bankruptcy). Some for profit colleges do make sense - in many cases they can react faster than public institutions with advanced training in new technology.

I know an argument exists to resist treating colleges as vocational technical, but at the end of the day the country needs to spend its money on higher education on opportunities which enhance skills and the subsequent tax base. Not all kids should be pursuing a liberal arts education - many should be considering a more technical application which enhances job skills. The corollary to that is that we need to preserve our employment opportunities in this country through our trade and immigration policies.

[KamaAina]

5. The two examples you cite are both historically black institutions.

Surely you could have found one "illustrious institution" that isn't an HBCU.

[exboyfil]

7. I did list two rural mostly white

colleges. The top two, SUNO and UDC, were one and two for lowest graduation rates on a list which I looked at. I agree that there are societal reasons in play as well, but a 11% graduation rate is doing no one any good. SUNO and UDC are Masters granting institutions and cannot be viewed as a B.S. feeder unlike many others on the list (Kent State, Ohio University, and Purdue feeders).

http://www.jbhe.com/features/50_blackstudent_gradrates.html

"We come now to a most disappointing set of statistics. The graduation rate of African-American students at the nation's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) tends to be much lower than the graduation rate for black students at the nation's highest-ranked institutions. Yet the graduation rate at a significant number of HBCUs is well above the nationwide average for black student graduations, which, as stated earlier, currently stands at an extremely low rate of 42 percent."

The JBHE recognizes that there is a problem. I am open to suggestions on solutions. I just think targeting only the for profits without addressing the publics is the wrong approach (and this leaves out the whole discussion of community colleges which I mostly view as a check the box based upon my daughter's experience with them in Iowa).

[Recursion]

11. UDC is also a land grant

And doesn't have a state budget to support it, and until a few years ago was open enrollment for any resident. (I did some Masters work there, but mostly my point is that it's hard to do an apples to apples between UDC and anywhere else. )

[xchrom]

4. du rec.

[Egalitarian Thug]

6. Is anyone surprised by this "revelation"? The entire industry was founded in order to feed

Big Companies a supply of barely trained, but compliant workers that could "buy a job" after taking on the expense of their own training.

Just another shearing of the flock.

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. Anybody who tells you that you will definitely get a job from a degree program

Whether it is this Everest shithole, some other trade school, or the chair of Biology at Harvard is fucking lying to you. Period.

[exboyfil]

9. My daughter is going off to college next year

We are very informed consumers who have only visited two campuses so far (two of our three state universities - the third - our local one - is off the table because it does not offer engineering). Two things the engineering departments constantly emphasized - placement rates (along with those services) and semesters to graduation. When I went off to college I was the first generation and, while I made mistakes along the way, I was fortunate enough to end up at a great university (Purdue). Your major and your university (both by reputation and what they teach you) are the two largest drivers for assessing employment opportunities. It is about probabilities not certainties as you characterize it. It is ironic that you cite Harvard University - my brother in law received his Doctorate in Biochemistry from there and he did have some employment difficulties early in his career (as did I with a B.S. and M.S. in Engineering and an MBA). My brother in law actually received the highest award for his dissertation, and he still could not find placement at a larger tenure track university (he is a researcher in private industry but he went through two employers before that and two post-docs).

[Rex]

10. Crapitalism! Such a wonder it is!

I'm sure the 'campus' will close down and run off to another town to swindle more people. Bank on it.