Education, Unltd: Part 2
This piece continues on from Part 1, which looked at the basic dynamics of the for-profit US education industry: brokers scouring the country for underperforming schools that have held on to the very highly valued Regional Accreditation status, which is both prestigious and unlocks federal loans to students to pay for courses they can’t afford. The federal loans are unexpectedly nasty to be holding on to. Once found, the brokers link up the school with Wall Street investors or more bizarre sources of funding, like megachurches looking to add education to their other businesses (music labels etc), or the Carlyle Group, a gigantic global arms/defence contractor.
Prospective students are enticed into the promise of a better future by college recruiters and pushed into courses which their previous educational background makes them unsuited for (they can’t cope, and future recruiters bin their CV – and this is something I have personally heard happens in the UK – again, see Part 3).
The message (forcefully delivered) is: you’re investing in your future, and somebody else is providing the money up front.
It’s a hugely leveraged system that’s state-subsidised because it’s thought to provide a public-private hybrid solution to bring social mobility to poor Americans at little to no up-front cost to them. Sound familiar? It’s the same logic that saw US banking regulators giving the thumbs up for zero downpayment mortgages to subprime borrowers; duping the subprime into taking easy credit to fund a sure-thing investment in real estate, giving Americans the independence of home ownership and the net worth to get them out of poverty. Wonderful ideals based on cretinry. Because the value of houses would obviously keep going up, this cheap capital would drag millions out of poverty. And obviously, the value of education will keep going up, too.
And the courses, sometimes, really are appalling. In the most tragicomic section of the PBS Frontline documentary this blog post is about, 40 minutes in, three women are sat around a table, recounting the practical experience they got on their degree in vocational nursing.
“They took us to the Museum of Scientology for our psychiatry module” “For the pediatrics rotation, we got taken to a daycare”.
When the hospitals inevitably ask them about that experience, they have to admit: these qualified vocational nurses have never set foot in a hospital.
Related:
- Education, Unltd: Part 1
- There is a mortifying Frontline documentary out at the moment, produced by the USA’s answer to the BBC (PBS). Called College, Inc, it takes it as granted that US education is increasingly commoditised, and a fundamental commodity to future employment. A degree is considered invaluable to the productivity of the member of a workforce. And [...]...
- Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts
- I have only offered limited comment on the PBS documentary at the heart of this 4-part series of posts. A lot of the discussion it attracted was understandably US-centered, and I’m just not qualified to discuss the detailed structure of American higher ed. My take-away was more philosophical. I suppose my first point is how [...]...
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