Why attend predatory colleges in the US? – academia.stackexchange.com #JHedzWorlD

I just read something about predatory colleges in the US:

http://fusion.net/story/204007/students-ruined-by-for-profit-colleges-fight-back/

Now, I am not from the US and would not ask in the comments of that side because I did not want to insult anyone concerned.

I just wondered: Before you enroll for any degree, would not you compare what the college officials say with reality? Like, look on the internet whether you find people with a degree from that school who got jobs, ask a local employment worker, ask at a local employer if they would consider giving a job to someone with a degree from that school, something like that?

So how is it this article says the students were so young they could not possibly have known they were being tricked? If you are old enough to go into debt with thousands of dollars for a college education, how can you not be old enough to check for the quality of that education first?

Why would people attend predatory colleges?

A few possibilities:

• These people genuinely don’t know any better. They think a degree is a degree. I would guess that they come from parents that did not attend college. A friend of mine started at a for-profit school because she really didn’t know that there was a difference between my 4 year bachelor degree and her 12 month online degree.


• People want to take shortcuts and these schools know that.


• These schools spend a lot of money on commercials and marketing to try to convince people to attend. It isn’t surprising that people would fall victim if you see a commercial for a school 3 times a day.


• These schools also promote their currents/past students to help recruit their friends. I have certainly seen this on my own social media feeds.


• I once had a manager at a large company that was working on a degree from a diploma mill because the company was imposing a new policy that all managers had to have a degree, but it didn’t matter from where.

So to directly answer your questions: No, a lot of people probably don’t look into the details of past student success. The type of people that would do this, aren’t the ones being targeted by these schools. And even if they do, you’re bound to find some successes (confirmation bias) which the school will proudly advertise.

Unfortunately, these types of schools prey on uneducated and less intelligent people, so while it seems like common sense to us, those people may really be getting tricked and yet the government continues to have surprisingly loose regulation.

There are lots of rubbish colleges in my country that offer “Degrees” there is even a place called MIT which is the Manakau Institute of Technology. Not to be confused with the top league place in the USA. The pass rates are high in the rubbish colleges. In the US they would be probably called “Diploma Mills”. The property developer “BOB JONES” wrote a book about it called “Degrees For Everyone”. This book was intended as a bit of a joke but in future will become a cornerstone for academic reform. The real success rate of a college is the employment outcome ratio. The employment outcomes are terrible at the easy colleges and very good at the good colleges. In my country the labour market is relatively deregulated so if someone with a degree can’t get a job in his or her field the pay is a disaster. In other words if you end up with a macjob in the service industry you may never pay off the loan and never own a house. People must think very carefully about whether it is worth it to take out a student loan. Unfortunately most young people don’t think that way.

Why attend predatory colleges in the US? – academia.stackexchange.com #JHedzWorlD