Huffington Post has a startling expose of how a particular for-profit college paid employers to hire its graduates, but only temporarily.
This was done to pad its job-placement numbers.
This will please federal regulators and enable the college to say that its graduates are easily hired.
What they don’t admit: They are soon laid off.
Here is the story:
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.
It turns out that the college paid the contractor $2,000 to hire its graduates for at least 30 days.
Why would the college pay a contractor to hire its graduates?
Everest College’s $2,000-per-head “subsidy” program in Decatur, Ga., stands among an array of tactics used for years by the institution’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges Inc., to systematically pad its job placement rates, according to a review of contract documents and lawsuits and interviews with former employees.
More than a marketing tool to lure new students, solid job placement rates allow the company to satisfy the accrediting bodies that oversee its nearly 100 U.S. campuses, while enabling Corinthian to tap federal student aid coffers — a source of funding that has reached nearly $10 billion over the last decade, comprising more than 80 percent of the company’s total revenue.
When the Obama administration begins its public ratings of colleges, imagine the games that will be played to burnish the data that affects a college or university’s ability to get federal student aid.
Note: It is called Campbell’s Law.
Wow. Another of many examples of how education has become a system to game.
The student that received 19.5/ hour was really being paid below minimum wage by the company with their $2000 incentive for the month!
The worst part is that it takes the “overseers” so long to find these thieves, when will they ever catch up to the Hedge fund-charter thieves?
Isn’t this business as usual? Here in America the business community would see nothing wrong with this practice.
An excellent example of how the edupreneurial mantra of “unfettered greed will answer every need” needs an English-to-English translation.
And if Señor Swacker doesn’t mind, let me venture: $tudent $ucce$$ for me and mine, student debt for thy and thine.
Could it be that, paraphrasing that timeless Mexican Superhero of yesteryear, El Chapulín Colorado [the Red Grasshopper], that the charterites/privatizers “se aprovechan de nuestra nobleza” [they are taking advantage of our nobility]?
Inquiring minds…
Oops! Forget inquiring minds. Not on the Common Core bubble-ins.
😎
Not surprising. There are numerous studies, even a documentary or two about the outrageous pricing of these for profit “colleges” have and their misleading ads, their horrific job placement ad nauseum. Fits into the pattern.
This piece is strangely reminiscent of a KCRA TV report about Sac Charter HIgh aired just yesterday, and the abject LIES and other claims of ‘excellence’ put forward by the school, which could be driven through by a Mack Truck….
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/13/3816563/ex-ind-fla-education-chief-pushing.html
On a related note…
Just one more instance of blackmail to effect “change”. Obama and Arnie Duncan are destroying the American educational system by dangling the federal government’s money carrot in front of every institution that depends on it. Effectively, this move is the same as the “race to the top”, only for colleges. Who in the government was rating the ivy league schools that Obama attended?
I am curious about why this school is being called a college. This institution seems to be what I would usually call a trade school.
Are you proposing regulations on what sorts of institutions are allowed to use the word “college”?
No, just thinking that a trade school teaching HVAC skills is different enough from MIT to be thought of as being in a different category from MIT.
My conscience always tells me: Stay away from unaccredited academic institutions. Some of them don’t even have academic programs.
That is good advice.
That makes me furious. They are deliberately fooling these young college adults and leaving them high and dry with debt to pay, for their own selfish gains. What a disgrace.