University of Phoenix Loses Military Students
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Apollo Education Group, the for-profit education company that operates the University of Phoenix, “is getting destroyed” on the stock market. Dawn Bilodeau, Chief of the Defense Department’s Voluntary Education Program, had released the following statement: “The institution will not be authorized access to DoD installations for the purposes…
Is the Exploitation of Education Coming to an End?
In The New York Times today is an article, “For-Profit Colleges Accused of Fraud Still Receive U.S. Funds.” Exploitation of the failed student loan programs (failed, that is, in terms of protection against fraud by for-profits) continues, the Times says, even in the face of an Education Department crackdown on “bad actors.” The article claims:…
The Corporatized Globalization of Higher Education and Cotton Picking in Tajikistan
We read a great deal about the internationalization of higher education—which, in many contexts, is simply a catchphrase for the corporate provision of digitalized higher education through conglomerates such as Laureate, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. But if this one-size-fits-all approach to education has created all sorts of issues in North America and Europe, it is inevitably…
The Future That Is Already Here Isn’t Much of a Future
Here is the weekly newsletter from Education Dive, which focuses largely on digital innovations in higher education: The first article somewhat blithely acknowledges that “instructor availability” is one of the major concerns of students enrolled in MOOCs, as if it is a problem that can be resolved with more “innovation,” rather than one of the…
Where shared governance goes to die.
I’ve had a strange fascination with an education start-up called Minerva for some time now. They’re a Silicon-Valley inspired online operation that has actually enrolled students now. Yet unlike so many other for-profit education ventures they’ve always aspired to be highly selective – the first “Online Ivy.” I think the source of my fascination stems…
Because I Am Apparently a Masochist
Phil Magness keeps attributing the growth in the percentage of part-time faculty to the rise of the for-profit universities. But his own chart seems to show that that impact has been less than one might expect. Notice that the percentage of part-time faculty at all institutions is 47%, only .4% higher than the total for…
The Decline of the For-Profit Colleges Continues
Forbes September 7, 2015 issue will contain an article “Black Arts: The $800 Million Family Selling Art Degrees and False Hopes” by Katia Savchuk. It’s about the for-profit Academy of Art University, another of such colleges that expanded greatly over the last couple of decades. Since 1992, its “enrollment has skyrocketed from 2,200 to 16,000,…
Donald Trump and Higher Education
The title of this post is, of course, a misleading tease if you, the reader, are expecting some sort of summary of Donald Trump’s positions on higher-education issues. The Trump campaign’s website includes no “issues” section presenting the candidate’s positions on higher education or on anything else. So, what is the point of this post?…
Now That We Have Transformed Our Institutions to Compete with the University of Phoenix, It’s on Life Support
In late March, I wrote a post titled “The Meaning of the Failure of the Online For-Profit Universities” It was a response to CNN’s hour-by-hour graphing of a dramatic one-day decline in the stock price of the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix. The stock price had plummeted on the acknowledgement that the…