The Morality of a For-Profit College, in One Act

[Blue_Tires]

Months into his job as an admissions counselor at a for-profit college somewhere in the Midwest, Aaron Calafato began to grow increasingly conflicted. Responding to the college's pressure, he says, he was signing up poorly prepared students for expensive degree programs that would leave them heavily in debt, all so he could make sure he himself had money he needed to keep paying off his own student loans.

"I couldn't sleep at night," he says. He worried for the guy to whom he was "peddling a degree for $28,000 in criminal justice and he doesn't need it." He questioned the morality of a company that would entrench itself into a struggling neighborhood and take advantage of its residents, and he wrestled with his own culpability in the process.

Now in a new one-man play called For Profit that Mr. Calafato wrote and performs, the character of "Aaron," an admissions counselor at For Profit University, wrestles with some of those same moral questions. They include one that Mr. Calafato finds so central to American society right now: "How far will you go for your own economic security?"

An actor by training, Mr. Calafato, 28, says the 75-minute production—which has already been staged in venues in New York City and in the Cleveland area, with future stagings in the works for Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—is his attempt to translate his yearlong experience through the medium he knows best.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Morality-of-a-For-Profit/131417/

[tularetom]

1. When you turn a public need into a commodity

The hucksters and fraudsters move in and it becomes a scam.

It happened with health care.

Now it's happening with education.

[get the red out]

2. I was a "for profit" admissions counselor years ago

I worked in a job like that years ago, I was desperate for a job and didn't know much about the industry when I started working there. I came to the same conclusion; it was taking advantage of people who would go into massive debt and end up with a degree that didn't make them any more money than they were making before. That school had no reason to exist, in my opinion. There was a public community college and large university both in this city, yet several of these rip-offs taking advantage of people too, with their low requirements, evening schedules, and continuous start dates.

The upper management were like fictional characters, every once in a while one would show up and whichever admissions person wasn't enrolling "enough" students would be sent out the door. One of the tactics was to take the person straight to financial aid on their first visit to emphasize how much they could get in loans as opposed to the actual cost of attending.

I hope word about these places gets more publicity. They are such a rip-off.