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Tom Ultican: Relay “Graduate School of Education” is a “MarketWorld” Fraud

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2019 //
34

Tom Ultican, a former teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, is diligently analyzing the tentacles of the Corporate Reform Movement, which he calls the Destroy Oublic Education Movement.

Relay Graduate School: a Slick “MarketWorld” Education Fraud

In this post, he scrutinizes the Relay “Graduate School of Education,” a program run by the charter industry to give master’s degrees to charter teachers who have mastered the arcane arts of no-excuses discipline and test-score raising.

You must read the entire post. It is carefully documented and chilling. He names the key players, the funders, and gives powerful insight  the emptiness of the program.

He begins:

Relay Graduate School of Education is a private stand alone graduate school created and led by people with meager academic credentials. Founded by leaders from the charter school industry, it is lavishly financed by billionaires. Contending that traditional university based teacher education has failed; Relay prescribes deregulation and market competition. Relay does not offer “coursework in areas typical of teacher education programs—courses such as school and society, philosophy of education, and teaching in democracy ….” Rather, Relay trains students almost exclusively in strict classroom management techniques.

Ken Zeichner is one of America’s leading academics studying teacher education. In a paper on alternative teacher preparation programs he noted that Match Teacher Residency and Relay “contribute to the inequitable distribution of professionally prepared teachers and to the stratification of schools according to the social class and racial composition of the student body.” Zeichner clarified,

“These two programs prepare teachers to use highly controlling pedagogical and classroom management techniques that are primarily used in schools serving students of color whose communities are severely impacted by poverty. Meanwhile, students in more economically advantaged areas have greater access to professionally trained teachers, less punitive and controlling management practices and broader and richer curricula and teaching practices. The teaching and management practices learned by the teachers in these two independent programs are based on a restricted definition of teaching and learning and would not be acceptable in more economically advantaged communities.”

Relay is another component of the destroy-public-education infrastructure that mirrors Professor Noliwe Rooks’ definition of segrenomics; “the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation.”

Founding Relay Graduate School of Education

Relay’s foundation was laid when the Dean of City University of New York’s Hunter College school of education, David Steiner, was approached by Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, David Levin of KIPP charter schools, and Dacia Toll of Achievement First charter schools. Dean Steiner agreed to establish the kind of Teacher Preparation program at Hunter College that these three charter industry leaders wanted. The new program which began in 2008 and was called Teacher U.

Kate Peterson studied Relay for a Philadelphia group. She noted,

“Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program ….”

The following year the newly elected and extremely wealthy Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl H. Tisch, tapped David Steiner to be Commissioner of Education.

Read it all.

Personally, I find it offensive that a charter industry program calls itself a “graduate school of education” when it has no scholars on its “faculty,” no library, no research. It is a training program with one purpose only: to award master’s degrees to charter teachers who know nothing of the history, philosophy, economics, or sociology of education, who know only one form of pedagogy, who know nothing of child or adolescent psychology. Their students are indoctrinated into the charter way of thought, not educated to think for themselves, not exposed to different points of view.

Robert Hutchins, who was president of the University of Chicago and a great thinker, said long ago that the purpose of professional education is to teach people to become critics of the profession.

That will never happen at Relay.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Higher Education, Privatization

How a Billionaire Bought the Right to Put His Name on the Yale Commons

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2019 //
55

Yale opened a dining hall for its students in 1901, called The Commons. It was a common meeting ground for students who lived in many different buildings.

A recent history of The Commons described it like this:

They say Hogwarts’s Great Hall, home to treacle tarts and pumpkin juice, was modeled after it. That’s not true — the honor belongs to the dining hall in the College of Christ Church at Oxford University — but it may as well be. High, cavernous ceilings; lights strung around the interior as if it is never not Christmas; long, dark auburn tables; and portraits of mythical (mostly) men who have had some affiliation with the school. Commons is the wizarding world come alive for a few hours a day; it’s the Harry Potter series of dining spaces — some patrons are diehards, others poo-poo the popularity, but everyone recognizes the cultural importance.

But times change, and money talks. Yale has a large endowment, but all big institutions are always on the lookout for more money.

In 2015, billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, class of 1969, gave Yale University $150 Million. He wanted one thing, and one thing only: the historic, culturally significant Commons must be renamed the Schwarzman Center.

The president of the university agreed to the billionaire’s terms.

At the 50th anniversary dinner of the class of 1969, Schwarzman spoke proudly of his gift, but his classmates did not appreciate his beneficence.

At the class of 1969’s 50th reunion dinner in May, Stephen Schwarzman ’69 — a business mogul who founded The Blackstone Group — rose to the podium. Standing under a tent on Old Campus, Schwarzman explained why he donated $150 million to the University in 2015 to transform Commons dining hall into the Schwarzman Center.

“People who have resources get some unwanted friends, and [University President] Peter [Salovey] came to me with a list of projects Yale wanted to fund,” Schwarzman said, as Salovey stood several feet away from him. “I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about this list.’”

Schwarzman went on to discuss his experience as a lonely first year who often ate alone in Commons. He explained that the new student life hub is personally significant to him because he learned to be independent during his time at Yale.

In an email to the News in July, Blackstone spokesperson Christine Anderson clarified that Schwarzman’s comments at the class reunion dinner were “made in jest and in a lighthearted way….”

Still, according to Class Secretary Kenneth Brown ’69, Schwarzman’s comments rekindled the debate around the construction of the Schwarzman Center.

For one, political science lecturer Jim Sleeper ’69, who was present at the dinner, interrupted the business mogul during his speech and criticized Schwarzman for Blackstone’s alleged role in “dispossess[ing] tens of thousands of people out of their homes.” Later, Sleeper revisited the encounter in a blog post on the class of 1969 webpage.

“There is some stuff that Yale simply should not eat, and as I watched some other diners rolling their eyes and shifting uncomfortably in their seats while Steve went on and on, I decided that someone had to object,” wrote Sleeper, who has criticized Schwarzman and his company for their allegedly unethical business dealings in op-eds published in Salon, Dissent Magazine and Washington Monthly, among others.

Moreover, the business mogul’s claims about his indifference towards Yale’s priorities stood at odds with the University president’s previous explanations about the circumstances surrounding the $150 million gift.

In 2015, the announcement of Schwarzman’s gift for a student life hub drew criticism from faculty members and students alike, who argued that the money could be better spent on other projects on campus. Many, including American studies professor and former chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate Matt Jacobson, expressed concern that major University projects seem to be driven by donors, rather than by faculty members and the University’s mission.

University President Peter Salovey explained that he brought a list of projects to the billionaire, and he wanted his name on the Commons because he “loved” it.

Probably he also loves the New York Public Library, where he donated $100 million, and the library agreed to name its iconic main building—the one with the lions in front—the Stephen Schwarzman building.

Jim Sleeper wrote about Schwarzman’s passion to spread his name on significant cultural institutions in Dissent last year in an article called “Plutocracy Comes to Campus.”

A recent article by Tom White in Medium reported that Schwarzman gave £150 million to Oxford to create the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities. White listed the “dirty money” associated with the Blackstone Group:

Schwarzman’s payment — I decline to call it a “donation” or “gift” — represents a significant transfer of wealth from some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to an already vastly wealthy institution. At a recent open meeting regarding the new centre, senior management were keen to stress that Schwarzman had passed the University’s “rigorous” clearance tests. Precisely what those tests involve wasn’t made clear. Did they take into account UN special rapporteur Leilani Farha’s recent identification of Blackstone, the largest property owner in the world, as the main contributor to the global housing crisis? Or that in 2013, Independent Clinical Services, a NHS care provider owned by Blackstone, was found to have avoided paying millions of pounds in tax? Or that the company has also made significant campaign donations to climate denier politicians like Republican US senator John Barosso, and has made large investments in shale gas drilling? Just last week, amid raging fires in the Amazon, it emerged that Blackstone owns two Brazilian firms that are “significantly responsible” for its rapid deforestation. The University apparently sees no incongruity between these latter facts and its recent commitment to cut its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030…

The grim irony of building a centre for the study of ethics with money amassed through some of the most predatory and socially and ecologically damaging practices of modern capitalism is apparently lost on Oxford’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Louise Richardson. “Do you really think we should turn down the biggest gift in modern times, which will enable hundreds of academics, thousands of students to do cutting-edge work in the humanities?” Richardson asked in response to criticism of Blackstone’s business practices and Schwarzman’s connections to Donald Trump.

Last year the New York Times published an article about the competition among billionaires to buy monuments to themselves.

Here is a nugget about the one institution that took Schwarzman s money and didn’t put his name on their building.

In 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art cut the ribbon on a four-block-long plaza named after Mr. Schwarzman’s downstairs neighbor David Koch, who paid $65 million for the privilege. Shortly afterward, the Met’s leadership announced that the museum was eliminating the jobs of up to 100 people in administrative, conservationist and curatorial positions in an effort to address a ballooning $30 million deficit.

“All that money for a bunch of useless fountains,” said Michael M. Thomas, the best-selling author who preceded Mr. Schwarzman both as a student at Yale and as a partner at Lehman Brothers.

According to Mr. Thomas, Mr. Salovey is right to argue that Mr. Schwarzman is one of many people at Yale with a space named in his honor. But that reveals the extent of the problem with modern philanthropy, not its absence, he said.

“That’s why I’m not going to my 60th reunion,” he said. “Yale is Whoresville, U.S.A. You can quote me on that.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Schwarzman gave $25 million to the high school he had attended in Abington, Pa. But plans to rename it after him were scrapped when people in the town nearly had a conniption.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Higher Education

The Whistle-Blower at MIT Knew That Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Was Tainted

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2019 //
13

The Chronicle of Philanthropy published a fascinating story about a  young woman who worked in the development office at MIT when the institution was seeking Jeffrey Epstein’s money. She knew it was wrong, but she was young, a newcomer, and who would care what she thought.

Development support staff are rarely in the limelight, even within their own organizations. But Signe Swenson has had a whirlwind of a week. The former development associate at the MIT Media Lab helped inform New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow’s exposé about the center’s financial ties with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender.

In previous interviews, Swenson recalled her and her colleagues’ concern that young women who accompanied Epstein on a campus visit and looked like models may have been victims of trafficking. “We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them,” she told NPR. Employees even checked the trash for any pleas for help scribbled on napkins and discarded. Among the lab’s staff, she told Farrow, “All of us women made it a point to be super nice to them.”

Swenson was in her mid-20s at the time and left the lab in 2016. Now director of marketing and operations at an education nonprofit, she spoke with me about what happened when she initially raised concerns to leaders and why she felt like she was one of the only people who could blow the whistle on Epstein’s relationship with the institution. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What follows is a Q and A. Here is one answer:

I expressed that I was aware of Epstein’s conviction and that I thought working with him was a terrible idea. I remember learning that if I chose to take the job, this was not going to be my choice, or necessarily Peter’s [Peter Cohen, director of development and strategy]. I did say that I guess it would be OK as long as I’m never in a room with Epstein. I sort of was drawing a line in that moment, but it’s interesting looking back. Clearly, I wanted the job very badly and did speak up, but it does feel as if I was just tested to see how confidential I could be. This was five years ago, and I was less confident than I should have been about my beliefs of what was unethical.

When it comes to fund-raising, there are no ethical standards in higher education or in the museum or library sectors. When robber barons or pedophiles have millions to cleanse their reputation, the institutions will take their  money.

Categories Funding, Higher Education, Scandals

John Thompson: The Corporate Makeover of Tulsa University

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2019 //
94

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the philanthrocaptalist makeover of Tulsa University. A tale of our times.

Surely we can agree with The Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbiel, who says that the faculty and administration “disagree bitterly … about whether that transformation will be good or bad for the university.”

Krehbiel provides plenty of space for the case made by T.U. President Gerry Clancy and the city’s philanthropists. Its supporters cite economic challenges, as well an opportunity for new revenue from courses that include cyber and health sciences. They claim that the plan is “not etched in stone,” and that it can evolve as the faculty weighs in.

Even so, Kreibiel reports, “a large number of students and alumni are furious about not only the plan itself but the manner in which it was developed … The Arts and Sciences faculty voted 89-4 not to implement True Commitment.” He also cites the participation of EAB, an education consulting firm. EAB’s role is unknown, but such secrecy is likely to be one reason why Krehbiel closed with a faculty member’s words, “I don’t think anyone is really optimistic.”

To get really pessimistic, read Jacob Howland’ articles in the Nation and City Journal magazines. He acknowledges the role of local philanthropies, especially the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), in “early-childhood education, delivering health care to indigent families, and making Tulsa more vibrant and economically robust.”

Howland writes:

GKFF spent $350 million on Tulsa’s new Gathering Place, the largest private gift to a public park in US history. The foundation has invested more than $100 million in the Tulsa Arts District since 2009. It is the major funder of early-childhood education in the state, and has spent more than $20 million in Tulsa alone on Educare early-childhood education centers.

But Howland suggests that the GKFF has overreached:

It has also pursued a strategy of populating city boards and commissions. In 2017, GKFF staff members headed the Tulsa school board and the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust, and had seats on the Economic Development Commission, the Tulsa Performing Arts Center Trust, and the Tulsa City Council. For the past two years, a Bank of Oklahoma executive has chaired the board of directors of the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Howland concludes, “the True Commitment restructuring were all part of Kaiser’s plan to gain control of the university.” And he argues that “TU’s administration has employed smashmouth tactics in dealing with faculty opposition to True Commitment.”

I’ve long admired the great job Tulsa edu-philanthropists have done in early education, “two generation” family supports, and criminal justice reform, and I’ve often asked GFKK leaders why they have also supported their opposite – the data-driven, competition-driven corporate school reforms that have failed so badly in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS). I’ve repeatedly urged an open and balanced, evidence-driven public discussion of the TPS, which is led by the notorious teacher- and union-basher, Deborah Gist.

I was then saddened when the GKFF even joined with the Bloomberg and Walton foundations in funding “portfolio management” directors to “absorb the duties of the director of partnership and charter schools,” and “in the future, implement ‘new school models resulting from incubation efforts of the district.’” I was later stunned to learn that Stacy Schusterman donated almost $200,000 to California union-busting, teacher-bashing campaigns.

PreK-12 EDUCATION

http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1372632&session=2017&view=contributions

I would now urge Tulsa philanthropists to follow the links cited by journalists and educators and see if the EAB consultants have evidence to support the policies they promote, and then ask whether the values EAB proclaims are worthy of universities in our democracy.

Nowhere on the EAB website, is there any evidence that it’s approach is beneficial to students or society. EAB’s sales pitch certainly doesn’t sound like it has an appropriate role to play in higher education. On the contrary, its claim to fame is being the “brand police.” But how would its “integrated brand strategy” be able to coexist with the founding principles of universities, and their commitment to the clash of ideas? How could a commitment to academic freedom coexist with EAB brand “that all departments, schools, and colleges were onboard with.”

Its blog proclaims:

At EAB we have an ongoing fascination with organizational charts. (Really, we do.) Org charts can tell a story about a university’s strategy, its priorities, and how it gets things done. And when positions start moving on an org chart, we take notice. The latest example: The rise of the strategic marketing and communications (marcom) leader.

The most advanced marcom departments are strategic marketing partners and get involved in everything from institutional branding to admissions to fundraising. And to make sure that there’s a single source of marketing and advertising truth, they function like an in-house ad agency—their clients are departments, colleges, and offices around campus.

https://eab.com/insights/blogs/strategy/its-time-for-marketing-communications-to-have-a-say-in-campus-strategy-heres-how/

But universities aren’t a corporation where everyone is supposed to be on the same page in the search for a single “marketing and advertising truth.” To take one example, tenure protects the clash of ideas. But, EAB’s approach to “‘what you measure matters’” is a “mentality” that “sparks some ambivalence in academia to put it lightly.” So, how do you reconcile the scholarly and the business advertising mentalities? EAB’s response to tenure is:

One solution is to adopt academic metrics that also capture research effort. These metrics can include:
• The number of proposals or papers submitted
• The dollar amount of proposals
• Proportion of funding from different sources
• Benchmarks for the success rates of proposals and papers

https://eab.com/insights/blogs/strategy/3-ways-to-align-tenure-criteria-with-your-institutional-strategy/

Finally, I have enjoyed many conversations with Tulsa philanthropy leaders at events where they assembled talented professors from the O.U. and O.S.U. medical schools. Even though we disagreed on corporate school reform, I’m sure we would share our respect for those medical professionals who are battling the opioid epidemic. We would likely agree that privatization was a major contributor to the deaths of thousands of people in Oklahoma and across the nation.

I hope that philanthropists, who I am confident will contribute to the battle against opioid addiction, will ask a basic question. How many Oklahomans would still be alive and well if it was university medical professors who educated doctors about painkillers, as opposed to the drug companies’ sales reps who would misrepresent medical science in the name of “so-called unbranded promotion?” In times like these, should we not rally behind the principles which drive our universities’ search for knowledge, as opposed to something called “brand equity,” “integrated brand strategy” or whatever profit-seeking consultants spin?

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Higher Education, Oklahoma, Tulsa

College Board Abandons “Adversity” Score

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2019 //
23

The College Board has dropped the controversial idea of giving students a score for their social-economic circumstances.

The College Board is abandoning its plan to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT, after facing criticism from educators and parents.

Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points. The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t combine the metrics into a single score.

The original tool, called the “environmental context dashboard,” combined about 15 socio-economic metrics from a student’s high school and neighborhood to create something college admission officers called an “adversity score.”

Considering a student’s race and class in college admissions decisions is a contentious issue. Many colleges, including Harvard University, say a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. A lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher standard is awaiting a judge’s ruling. Lawsuits charging unfair admission practices have also been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California system.

In case the WSJ article is behind a paywall, here is another.

Categories Higher Education, Testing

Florida: The Revenge of the Impoverished Adjuncts

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2019 //
14

 

Higher education rests on the backs of ill-paid adjunct professors, who spent years getting a Ph.D., then learned that full-time positions were nearly impossible to find.

This article describes a revolt by the adjuncts in Florida. 

“Two half-time adjunct jobs do not make a full-time income. Far from it,” Ximena Barrientos says. “I’m lucky that I have my own apartment. I have no idea how people make it work if they have to pay rent.”

We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.

As Barrientos chatted with another adjunct in the empty classroom, the conversation turned to horror stories: the adjuncts forced to sleep in their cars; the adjunct who was sleeping in classrooms at night; the adjunct who had a full mental breakdown from the stress of not being able to earn a living after all of the time he had put in getting his PhD. Such stories are common, from campus to campus, whispered by adjuncts who know deep down that they themselves are living constantly on the edge of personal, professional, and financial disaster. Other than academic credentials, most adjunct professors don’t have much. But recently, Ximena Barrientos, and her 2,800 colleagues at Miami Dade College, and thousands of others just like them throughout the state of Florida, have acquired, at shocking speed and on a grand scale, something of great value—a union. And they want nothing less than dignity….

University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.

What can the adjuncts do? They are doing what they must, the only thing they can do to get decent working conditions and a living wage: they are unionizing.

Categories Education Reform, Florida, Higher Education

Peter Greene: DeVos Puts Profits Over Students (Are You Surprised?)

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2019 //
10

 

Peter Greene writes here about Betsy DeVos’s recent decision to roll back Obama-era regulations intended to protect students against predatory for-profit colleges. 

Sadly, this is what we have come to expect from a Secretary of Education who is more interested in protecting the free market than protecting students against fraud.

Greene writes that DeVos rolled back

the Obama-era requirement that such schools either show that their graduates actually land jobs, or the school would lose access to all that sweet sweet federal money. That was a powerful piece of leverage, because the for-profit colleges focus on veterans and poor folks with the result that a great deal of the for profit college revenue stream comes from the feds, who loan to the students and pay off the schools, guaranteeing that the for-profits get paid and that the students are in hock to the feds.

Rolling back Obama-era protections is problematic because the Obama administration itself did a super-lousy job of riding herd on these predatory schools. At one point, having announced that they were now by golly going to clamp down those outfits, they turned around and bailed out one of the worst. Then, when that outfit collapsed anyway, the feds let them be sold off to a debt-collection agency.

It was after all that foolishness that the administration finally implemented a gainful employment rule. This was also followed by  students scammed by the for-profit agitating to be released from their debts. The Department of Justice requested that the Department of Education simply release the portion of that debt that they held; they refused.

All of that happened before Trump ever descended the escalator to unleash havoc on US politics; it’s only fair to note that this is, in many ways, a mess that DeVos inherited and which the Obama administration never exactly showed signs of fixing.

Last week, DeVos was sued–again–by a boatload of students stranded in massive debt. The student position is that they were defrauded and their loans should be forgiven.

DeVos’s position about loan forgiveness has been to simply pretend to lose all the paperwork and never process any of the requests to have loans erased. Having ignored the rules for two years, DeVos last year tried to get rid of them, and this week she finally did it.

Hundreds of thousands of students who were defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges are on their own. Shameful.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Corruption, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education

Oklahoma: The Billionaire Who Bought the University of Tulsa and Stifled the Liberal Arts

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2019 //
7

D

Read this sad story. 

A billionaire with too much money and no vision buys the University of Tulsa.

His plan gutted the liberal arts, raised default teaching loads across the university from five courses per year to eight, eliminated all academic departments, created new divisions to house surviving programs (including one called “Humanities and Social Justice”), and established a “Professional Super College” consisting of the formerly independent colleges of law, health sciences, and business.

The author Jacob Howland is a professor of philosophy at UT.

Who needs philosophy these days?

Billionaires do the darnedest things.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Higher Education

DeVos Hires Advocate for For-Profit Colleges to Oversee Higher Education

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2019 //
13

 

Add this item to the Department of Unbelievable.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has hired an advocate of for-profit colleges to oversee higher education for the federal government. DeVos, of course, is known to have invested in for-profit education.

Depending on whom you ask, Diane Auer Jones has returned to the Education Department with either a mission or a vengeance…

Now, as the chief architect of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s higher education agenda, Ms. Jones is leading the charge to overhaul the accreditation system, and, to critics, revive the fortunes of for-profit organizations that operate low-quality education programs that have a track record of shortchanging students and taxpayers.

Jones is in charge of writing new rules for accrediting agencies that oversee higher education.

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, For-Profit, Higher Education

USC Launched the World’s Largest Online Social Work Graduate Program. But Then the Bubble Burst.

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2019 //
16

 

I wish you had a subscription to the Los Angeles Times so you could read this article in full. If you do, you should.

The University of Southern California had one of the nation’s best graduate social work programs. In search of more revenue, it made a deal with an East Coast digital startup to establish an online degree in social work, and enrollment ballooned from 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016. The university saved on the cost of dorms and classrooms.

The money was rolling in, but the big beneficiary was the tech company, which kept more than half the revenue and is now valued at more than $2 billion. USC’s once prestigious social work school has lowered its standards to admit students who would not have qualified in the past; its reputation has suffered; and it is “facing a budget crisis so severe that nearly half of the staff may lose their jobs.”

Maryland-based corporation 2U Inc. now services universities around the country and abroad, but it relies on USC for about a fifth of its revenue.

Industry analysts have pressed 2U executives repeatedly about the unfolding situation at the social work school, and the company lowered revenue forecasts last fall, citing in part instability at the Los Angeles university…

Part-time teaching positions are being largely eliminated and professors required to shoulder significantly heavier course loads. A university committee has recommended laying off up to 45% of the non-teaching staff….

2U takes a 60% cut of online tuition from the social work program, and the contract carries onerous penalties if USC breaks the arrangement. People familiar with the agreement told The Times it contains a so-called poison tail that requires the university to continue handing over its revenue share for two years after canceling.

USC’s contract with the company extends to 2030.

The arrangement has been great for 2U. Not so much for USC.

 

 

Categories Higher Education, Online Learning
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