The Rise and Fall of For-Profit Schools

Also public schools in NY are zoned so you have to live the right place to get your kid into the right school.

No matter what it's not a money problem. No amount of money will solve that problem. Only a shift back where parents are as responsible for their childrens education as they paren't will solve this.

True for public schools.

2) Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped. The problem here is that the cost of a single student attending a school district is largely buried in fixed costs: when the state takes $6000/yr from a district and gives it to a charter school, the district's costs do not decrease by $6000. This makes school districts worse, which accelerates flight to charter / private schools.

Open enrollment causes the same issues.

3) Educational standards are different -- Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc.

True for public schools.

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What are some things that Charter schools allow teachers to do (to develop a contemporary learning environment) that teachers' unions prevent in public schools? (and not other factors like budget constraints, etc.)

One of the services that my company (IntegriShield) provides is collecting these placement statistics; it is one of the less-profitable things we do, the sort of grunt work that you'd usually offload to a call center, but we insist on Doing It Right. It's a messy business: usually contact information is sparse and incorrect, and graduates mostly just let calls go to voicemail rather than give us 5 minutes of their time, possibly because they hear "we're calling you on behalf of " and think "we're calling you about your student loans" or so, which we're not.

I guess my point is, I'm totally unsurprised that less-scrupulous employees faced with that hairball just said, eh, I'll make up that I successfully contacted them, what harm could that do? -- and if that happens, you've got across-the-board confirmation bias going on, "of course our graduates land good jobs in the field."

> a 2010 undercover government investigation of fifteen for-profit colleges found that all fifteen “made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements.”

Yep, that's another service we offer: we'll call your admissions reps undercover and see if you lie to us. Then you can retrain admissions reps to scale back or remove those claims.

> For-profit colleges have capitalized on our desire to make education more inclusive.

For chrissakes, don't blame the for-profit colleges for this! They did what any company does: they stepped into a business void. Your typical for-profit might be a barber/hairstyling/cosmetology college; they don't do anything that an apprenticeship at a similar business didn't already do; they just made it their raison d'être. The business gap existed because the apprenticeship normally takes a while and can't be done by dilettantes (people who have other jobs going on in their lives).

What really happened was that the economic recession led to lots of people being laid off, and some of those people had always wanted to move into a more-artistic service industry instead. They funded this training with government-issued student loans, which unfortunately have draconian legislation on them (like they can't be discharged in bankruptcy, the government doesn't even try to audit where the money is going, etc.). Still, the people who took these loans in theory were taking an informed risk; there's been no scandal about "nobody told me how much tuition was until after I graduated;" nobody's been fleeced.

Yes, there is some chicanery about for-profit colleges making the dream seem too-good-to-be-true (especially with regard to graduate placement). Combined with aggressive marketing that encourages people to dream big, there may be a valid complaint that they're overtraining the population so that more people are qualified barbers than any city legitimately needs, so that job prospects bottom out alongside wages. But they didn't provide the dream and they didn't provide the loan, they just inserted themselves in the middle, to take the loan money and service the dream. A voice of wisdom saying "hey, are you sure you want to drop everything for this dream? You're going to be in debt for quite some time if you take this loan" would be nice but it's also supererogatory: capitalism doesn't usually breed such saints.