How Pricey For-Profit Colleges Target Vets' GI Bill Money

[marmar]

from Mother Jones:



Last winter, the Department of Veterans Affairs tasked its newly hired blogger, a cantankerous Iraq vet named Alex Horton, with investigating the website GIBill.com, one of many official-looking links that come up when you Google terms like "GI Bill schools." With names like ArmedForcesEDU.com and UseYourGIBill.us, these sites purport to inform military veterans how to best use their education benefits. In reality, Horton found, they're run by marketing firms hired by for-profit colleges to extol the virtues of high-priced online or evening courses. He concluded that GIBill.com "serves little purpose other than to funnel student veterans and convince them their options for education are limited to their advertisers."

The 65-year-old GI Bill is widely credited with transforming post-World War II America by subsidizing vets' college education and fueling the expansion of the middle class. Yet recently, the program has also become a cash cow for for-profit schools like Capella, DeVry, ITT Tech, Kaplan, and the University of Phoenix, eager to capitalize on vets coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a beefier post-9/11 GI Bill has kicked in, a surge of service members has left the ranks armed with benefits that will cover the full cost of attending public college. In 2009, the for-profits took in almost as much military money as public colleges, even though they enrolled about one-third the number of vets. Spending on military education benefits has shot up to $10 billion; for-profit schools' share of that money has gone up 600 percent, as revealed in a recent PBS Frontline exposé. For example, at Kaplan—owned by the Washington Post Co.—military revenues grew to an estimated $48.9 million last year, up from $2.6 million in 2006.

The result has been a bonanza for schools' executives and shareholders. "We didn't foresee that the for-profit sector, eager to please Wall Street investors, would go after this new funding aggressively, often in ways that are not in the best interests of veterans and service members," stated Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) after leading an investigation into 30 major for-profits earlier this year. Or as one University of Phoenix alum put it on RipoffReport.com, the school "treats military students like cash piñatas." ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/gi-bill-for-profit-colleges

[TwilightGardener]

1. I am not entirely opposed to for-profit schools, if a vet is simply looking

for a specific job-training program and not a traditional four-year college experience. Lot of these guys come out of the military with families and have to have day jobs, they aren't little 18 year old freshmen living in dorms anymore.

[lapislzi]

2. The problem with for-profit colleges is right there in the title.

It's the same commodification that we've witnessed with health care. The Kaplans and the AIs regard education as a "product," and that they are purveyors of said product. There are no students; there are customers. Teachers are customer service providers.

Their function is to turn a profit by selling the product to the consumer.

You think I'm kidding? My husband is employed by one of these institutions. He receives periodic "customer service training" designed to improve the "customer experience." He's not paid to teach kids marketable skills (although that's what he does do). His employer expects him to provide a "positive customer experience," for which he is also reviewed periodically by the "customers."

You can imagine the kind of academic atmosphere this generates. He was recently reprimanded by his superiors because he had admonished a student (customer) who had failed to back up his work.

It may be a great business model, but it fails as an educational model. Not that Goldman Sachs care about kids or vets being educated.

[InkAddict]

3. You slowly come to the realization that the field in which you

trained is already saturated at entry-level in your area and/or that follow-on 4-year programs have left the state because the "career" is in full spiral down the drain or is being shipped across the ocean. Employers, nevertheless, require "certified" everything to meet ISO criteria; just meeting continuing education credits while one waits for something/anything to open up is likely to set one back a pretty penney or two -- Then you find out your IT Manager was most recently a nanny without a single class in InfoTech, and the receptionist tells you that indeed the boss must be in because his office smells terrible.

what a racket!

Won't get fooled again!