Students, lawmakers question value of for-profit colleges - Kansas City Star

Taryn Zychal thought she'd be working as an industrial designer after graduating from the Art Institute of Philadelphia. Instead, it's the debt collection agencies that are working overtime, calling her nearly 30 times a day from 8:30 in the morning to 9:30 at night.

The 27-year-old says she has around $150,000 due in loan payments from attending the private, for-profit university, but Zychal said she couldn't get a job in her chosen field, and not one of her credits would transfer when she tried to switch to another school.

With what she says is a useless degree, she can't pay her loans, which cost $1,500 a month.

"I don't think I learned anything at the Art Institute other than how to get scammed by somebody. I don't think I learned anything to go into an entry-level job in my field," Zychal said.

The Art Institute's parent company, Education Management Corp., declined to comment.

There are about 2,000 colleges operating in the U.S. as profit-seeking businesses eligible for federal student aid. They offer various degrees, both online and on campus, from certificates and two-year associates degrees to MBAs. Some for-profits - such as Kaplan, owned by The Washington Post Co.; Bridgepoint Education; and the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix - are publicly traded corporations.

Because Zychal's story is similar to thousands of other students who've attended certain for-profit colleges, the Obama administration in early June approved new regulations requiring for-profit schools to make sure their students are able to pay back federal loans, and a Senate committee is poised to begin drafting legislation. In addition, 17 state attorneys general are reviewing the industry for possible violations of consumer protection statutes. The aim is to protect both students and taxpayers.

Not all for-profit schools are implicated in wrongdoing, but various investigations have found problems, particularly with those that derive most of their revenues from federal student aid.

A government investigation from last year found practices such as overly aggressive recruiting, where school representatives barraged potential students with phone calls, gave false information about a college's accreditation, potential salary and job opportunities after graduation, and doctored federal aid forms. Investigations have also noted that tuition at for-profits can cost thousands of dollars more, even as much as 30 times the price of comparable programs at community colleges.

Other investigations found that for-profit recruiters heavily target low-income and minority students, veterans and people whose parents have never gone to college. Enrollment at for-profits has increased fivefold in the past decade to nearly 2 million.

Students often choose to attend these colleges for a variety of reasons, including the hope of getting a degree faster, a perception that the classes may be easier, and the availability of night and weekend classes.

However, degrees from for-profit institutions often don't lead to good careers. Data from several investigations at the federal and state level suggest that the public investment in educating students at some for-profits isn't a good deal for taxpayers, or for many students. Thousands of students have taken out federal loans to attend a for-profit college, only to default on them.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, for-profit colleges educated around one in 10 students in 2008, but these students took out nearly a fourth of all federal student financial aid dollars - around $24 billion of taxpayer money. They also account for almost half of loan defaulters. In many of the larger for-profit schools, federal dollars account for around 90 percent of revenues.

Harris Miller, the chief executive officer and president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, said for-profits aren't at fault.

"The default rate among students is not based on whether a school is profit or not-for-profit. It's based on the demographics of the student population," Miller said in an interview.

"We accept and try to educate students that the traditional higher education system is not interested in educating or is not willing to educate," he said.

An investigation by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee found that one for-profit college, Bridgepoint, enrolled about 8,000 students in associate degree programs for the 2008 school year. By 2010, 85 percent had withdrawn, and only about 1 percent had received a degree. Dropout rates at most of the other schools investigated hover around two-thirds.

If the numbers are right, however, they clearly show that taxpayers aren't getting a good return on their investment.

The new regulations include a three-strikes-and-you're-out rule. Schools must demonstrate that their educational services lead to "gainful employment" and show that 35 percent of their students are paying down their loans by at least $1 a year. If schools don't meet the requirements three years in a row, they'll lose eligibility for federal funding.

Many lawmakers oppose the regulations.

On Wednesday, the House Education Committee approved a measure, sponsored by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the chairman of the committee's Higher Education panel, aimed at weakening certain aspects of the new regulations.

Other Republicans, including Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, boycotted Senate hearings and called them partisan shows.

"The fact is that more employment is achieved through for-profit institutions than not-for-profit institutions," Burr said in an interview. "For-profit institutions are providing a great service, or they wouldn't have a clientele."

The new regulations also went up against a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign by the industry, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Senate Education Committee hopes to add legislation, which is generally stronger and longer-lasting than regulatory protections. At its fifth hearing on the subject last week, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said the regulations were "modest" and "better than nothing," adding that for-profit college companies' stocks boomed when the regulations came out.

However, any bill that passed the Democratic-controlled Senate increasing regulation of the for-profit college sector is unlikely to advance in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, whose Education Committee has shown little interest in toughening laws governing the sector.

Education Department spokesman Justin Hamilton called the regulations a common-sense approach to give career colleges the opportunity to improve, but not let them off the hook, as students are being hurt. The proposal already has led to voluntary efforts by the industry to improve practices, and parts of the regulations will increase transparency about graduation rates, job placement and student debt levels.

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Art, class, and value or Controversial

Art is sometimes perceived as belonging exclusively to higher social classes. In this context, art is seen as an upper-class activity associated with wealth, the ability to purchase art, and the leisure required to pursue or enjoy it. The Palace of Versailles and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg illustrate this view: such vast collections of art are the preserve of the rich, of governments and wealthy organizations.

Fine and expensive goods have been popular markers of status in many cultures, and they continue to be so today. There has been a cultural push in the other direction since at least 1793, when the Louvre, which had been a private palace of the Kings of France, was opened to the public as an art museum during the French Revolution. Most modern public museums and art education programs for children in schools can be traced back to this impulse to have art available to everyone. Museums in the United States tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum.) But despite all this, at least one of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a marker of wealth and social status.
Performance by Joseph Beuys, 1978 : Everyone an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism.

There have been attempts by artists to create art that can not be bought by the wealthy as a status object. One of the prime original motivators of much of the art of the late 1960s and 1970s was to create art that could not be bought and sold. It is "necessary to present something more than mere objects"[36] said the major post war German artist Joseph Beuys. This time period saw the rise of such things as performance art, video art, and conceptual art. The idea was that if the artwork was a performance that would leave nothing behind, or was simply an idea, it could not be bought and sold. "Democratic precepts revolving around the idea that a work of art is a commodity impelled the aesthetic innovation which germinated in the mid-1960s and was reaped throughout the 1970s. Artists broadly identified under the heading of Conceptual art... substituting performance and publishing activities for engagement with both the material and materialistic concerns of painted or sculptural form... [have] endeavored to undermine the art object qua object."[37]

In the decades since, these ideas have been somewhat lost as the art market has learned to sell limited edition DVDs of video works,[38] invitations to exclusive performance art pieces, and the objects left over from conceptual pieces. Many of these performances create works that are only understood by the elite who have been educated as to why an idea or video or piece of apparent garbage may be considered art. The marker of status becomes understanding the work instead of necessarily owning it, and the artwork remains an upper-class activity. "With the widespread use of DVD recording technology in the early 2000s, artists, and the gallery system that derives its profits from the sale of artworks, gained an important means of controlling the sale of video and computer artworks in limited editions to collectors

Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (c. 1820), was a social commentary on a current event, unprecedented at the time. Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863), was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to men fully dressed in the clothing of the time, rather than in robes of the antique world. John Singer Sargent's Madame Pierre Gautreau (Madam X) (1884), caused a huge uproar over the reddish pink used to color the woman's ear lobe, considered far too suggestive and supposedly ruining the high-society model's reputation.

In the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils, to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town. Leon Golub's Interrogation III (1981), depicts a female nude, hooded detainee strapped to a chair, her legs open to reveal her sexual organs, surrounded by two tormentors dressed in everyday clothing. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1989) is a photograph of a crucifix, sacred to the Christian religion and representing Christ's sacrifice and final suffering, submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine. The resulting uproar led to comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts.

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