TeluGlobe » Education

Colbert Educates Us at His Own For-Profit Colleges

Mohan — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:14:29 +0000

There is nothing better than comedy, a well delivered comedy to drive a strong point across. It applies to one of my pet topics: Focus on the fraud perpetrated by the for-profit colleges in US. In last night’s episode of Colbert Report, Stephen reinforces my arguments against the outfits who soak students with excessive debt for worthless pieces of paper as ‘degree.’ Stephen makes a connection that I could not make earlier – a connection between Goldman Sachs and the for-profit education

If you are in the market for a degree from College Inc., this is a must watch video.

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University of Fraud?

Mohan — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:14:29 +0000

I don’t need to write much – just watch this ABC news undercover video and see confirmation of whatever I have been saying for a couple of years. These guys at Universities of Fraud are worse than vultures. Look at the bold-faced lies by the senior official at the university. [This comes to you via Huffington Post]

Following the recent revelation that for-profit college recruiters often use deceptive tactics when reaching out to potential students, ABC News decided to go undercover and see if that was still the case at the University of Phoenix.

Short answer: Yes.

A University of Phoenix recruiter guaranteed an undercover producer that, after completing a bachelor’s of science of education program at the school, he would be able to find a job as a teacher in New York or Texas. Additional research by ABC proved otherwise.

University of Phoenix President William Pepicello responded to the sting: “Can we do better? Absolutely.”

TG Tip: The Complete Guide to Saving Money on Textbooks

Kanaka Byraju — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:26:42 +0000

Textbooks are ridiculously expensive, and publishers love to pull tricks to force the purchase of new editions whenever possible. This school year, save loads of cash using these textbook-buying methods.

Photo by quirkyartist

In a nutshell, you’ve got four ways of obtaining textbooks; from most expensive to least expensive, you can: buy new, buy used, rent, or copy. Chances are you’ll need to combine a couple of methods based on availability and other issues you’ll encounter. Regardless of which method you’re employing, you’ve got plenty of ways to save money.

Buying New

Photo by GoCollege

The best strategy if you want to pay the most money when buying a new textbook: Go to your campus bookstore. Avoid this at all cost. There is rarely a situation where you can’t find a better deal through an online retailer like Amazon or even a local bookstore (although they may have to put in a special order). Whether you’re ordering online or in person, keep an eye out for coupons and deals to save a little extra.

If you do end up buying a brand new textbook and you want to make some of that money back, there are several places that will purchase your used textbooks. Your college bookstore is likely one option, but online textbook sellers like Amazon, Chegg, Barnes & Noble, BookByte, Cash4Books, and Alibris (which is Chegg-powered) are just some of your many options.

Buying Used

If you’re still set on owning your textbooks but don’t need a book that’s never been touched, buying used is a good way to save but comes with its own set of issues. With so many options online, you’ll want to pay attention to sites that have quality ratings or let you inquire about the quality of the textbook. While a mildly beat up book will serve you as well as a shiny new one, you want to be sure you don’t end up with a torn-up book spine or pages filled with cartoon penises. Also be sure to check the store’s return policy for those special occasions where you do, indeed, end up with a spineless, genital-ridden textbook and need a replacement. On the plus side, virtually every used textbook retailer is pretty careful about the used books they buy for resale, but once and awhile something will slip through the cracks. Additionally, in some cases you’ll find the best deals directly from another person and there won’t be an intermediary. It never hurts to double-check.

While a Google search will turn up a nearly endless supply of used textbook retailers, sorting through them all is a bit of a chore. Here is a semi-short list of your options:

Regardless of how you’re buying you’re going to want to find the cheapest price. Searching a bunch of sites individually can be a pain. CampusBooks and BigWords let you search several textbook stores at the same time for a real-time price comparison. BigWords also has an iPhone app for comparison shopping when you’re in, for example, your overpriced campus bookstore, though it’s missing a handy barcode scanning feature. CampusBooks has apps for both Android and iPhone with that feature. SnapTell (iPhone and Android), can also handle barcodes but will work from a photograph as well.

Renting

Textbook renting is becoming a more popular option these days, with Chegg sitting pretty as the (self-proclaimed) top textbook renting site at your disposal. Chegg lets you rent and return them, plus they’ll plant a tree for every rental. Chegg isn’t the only rental option you have, though. Valore, Textbook Rentals, BookRenter, Campus Book Rentals, andTextbooks.com are other possible options. Some colleges have even started renting textbooks directly. In some cases, they’ll even buy the book if they don’t have it available for rent. Check with your school to find out if that’s an option and plan ahead so they can order the book for you if necessary. If you’re going digital and want a rental option as well, check out CourseSmart. It’ll let you read online or via a copy-protected PDF. While they have iPhone and iPad apps available, support for other mobile platforms and eReaders is currently unavailable.

If you plan to sell your books once you’re finished with them anyway, you may as well rent. The important thing to remember is to avoid marking up the books or degrading their quality to much. If you do, you could end up paying a fee. Renting will save you money if you can take good care of the books, but since they’ll inevitably find a new home once you’ve finished you will need to keep them in the best shape possible.

Copying

Things get tricky when you want to copy. While you can potentially get a free textbook by photocopying or scanning the pages you need from your school library (or a friend), it takes a lot of work. If you have a day to get the job done (and you have free access to a photocopier or scanner), this may be a worthwhile option. Photo by DHagen

Photocopying is simple and sometimes serves as the best option. If you invest in a large three-ring binder, you can potentially store all your textbook pages in one place. You’ll want to contact your professors before classes begin to find out what chapters you’ll be covering so you can avoid copying more pages than you need (and wasting paper in the process). This can help you consolidate your reading material into a simple, smaller, and lighter solution. If you really want to be svelte and keep the weight out of your backpack, you can always leave textbook pages at home and swap them in as needed.

If you’d like to avoid the paper altogether and go digital, scanning textbooks is another option. This is an easy way to create PDF files that you can put on your laptop, ebook reader, or iPad, or sync with your Evernote account for free optical character recognition (OCR) of your textbook scans. For more information on digitizing books, check out our guide on digitizing your life and stay tuned for a guide to digitizing textbooks coming up later this week.

Getting the Right Book

Photo by r-land

If you’re not careful, you might end up spending good money on the wrong textbook. New editions generally reconfigure the chapters even if little new content has been added. While the book might still be usable it can be a pain to find what you’re looking for when the rest of the class has their book in a different order. Ensuring you order the correct volume(s) is also important, as each volume contains different chapters, and you can easily end up missing the material you need if you don’t check carefully. If you have the ability to contact your professors before classes begin, ask them for the book’s ISBN number to ensure you’ll find the right copy. If you can’t reach your professors, often the campus bookstore will have this information. If you’re really pressed, don’t feel you need to take the risk of buying the wrong book. Often you’ll find a copy of the book in the school library and can use that until you can get your hands on the right copy

[Via - Lifehacker]

For-Profit College Stocks Lose Ground

Mohan — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:17:28 +0000

Chickens are coming home to roost at for-profit schools whose shares are publicly traded. For the last several weeks, the stocks have been week. Last week the stocks have take a turn for the worse. Today Strayer University was down as much as 15% . The impetus for this downfall is a report from the US Department of Education. (Via WSJ)

Earlier this summer, the department proposed a rule intended to measure how well for-profit schools train students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation. Late Friday, the department issued its calculations on loan- repayment rates for more than 8,000 schools in an attempt to preview the rule’s potential impact were it to be implemented. Schools could “pass” based on student loan repayment rates, or by maintaining a debt-to-income ratio below a certain percent.

The schools could face tough new regulations stripping them of access to federal funds if their students are found to have heavy debt burdens and if they don’t land jobs earning enough to handle the debt. The regulation sets a 45% repayment rate as the threshold to qualify for student aid. Some argue the department is punishing schools for having graduates enroll in loan-deferment programs that the government itself supports. [Full story]

From Strayer’s 8-k filing today:

>>> If we are found to be in noncompliance with any of these laws, regulations, standards or policies, we could lose our access to Title IV program funds, which would have a material adverse effect on our business. In the 2009 fall term, approximately 72% of our students participated in one or more Title IV programs. Findings of noncompliance also could result in our being required to pay monetary damages, or being subjected to fines, penalties, injunctions, restrictions on our access to Title IV program funds or other censure that could have a material adverse effect on our business.<<<

It is about time! The sooner this sham exposed, the better.

This is Very Painful: Students of For-Profit Educational Outfits Turn to Stripping

Mohan — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:48:16 +0000

One of my passionate topics, which I often discuss on this blog is the fleecing of students by for-profit higher education institutions. Whenever I see news like this, I feel angry and hurt. I can certainly hope that the likes of University of Phoenix are shut down for good – sooner, rather than later. This comes to you via Huffington Post:

After graduating from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Carrianne Howard hoped to find a job in the video game industry.

She did — kind of. For $12 an hour, she worked as a recruiter for video game companies. And then her position was eliminated. So now, she’s working as a stripper.

According to Bloomberg, Howard spent $70,000 on her degree from the for-profit Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, the parent company of which is owned in part by Goldman Sachs. She told Bloomberg that upon a pre-enrollment visit to the school, a campus tour guide “made it sound like [she] was going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Howard’s story is not entirely unique — and experiences like hers are driving the government’s investigation into the efficacy and recruiting practices of for-profit colleges.

This week, a Government Accountability Office report detailed how for-profit recruiters often promise potential students unobtainable jobs and high salaries, and tell them to lie to procure more federal financial aid. [Full Story]

10 Best Colleges Work For: My Employer Made the List

Mohan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:27:11 +0000

What are the top 10 best colleges work for? I don’t know about them. I love my job and my employer (even though they didn’t give me a rise in 3 years).

Though it is large — more than 30,000 students and nearly 3,000 faculty — the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that employees at the Virginia university maintain a high rate of job satisfaction.

Full list at Huffington Post

Another Student gets killed

Bhanu Prakash — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:00:54 +0000

This time in Connecticut. I feel sad, someone needs to tell the kids to be careful. Sometimes it happens no matter how protective you can be, like that Indian scientist who was killed in his “Safe Neighborhood”. I really feel bad in my stomach.

Read the news via eenadu.net

WFH – An Evolution in Workplace

msaradhi — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:08:35 +0000

There has been a tremendous shifts in workplace or rather what we call workplace. The primary driver for this shift are the advances in Information Technology and Communications or simply, ICT.

One of premise in Transportation Systems Planning is that transportation is a derived demand. Meaning transportation is a means but an end in itself. In typical urban constellation people make millions of to-and-fro trips in day from their place of living to their destinations. Without much impact to accuracy, the work and education trips constitute a greater percentage of the total trips.

In early 1980s or late 1970s Alvin Toffler had envisioned these shifts and wrote an excellent futuristic book, a number one best seller those days, ‘The Third Wave.’

So coming back to our discussion, ‘Work From Home’ or WFM in short, has caught up to maturity in major corporations across the globe. While this is not applicable for all types of roles (especially front desk or customer facing roles), a great many service oriented opportunities can be de-linked from the traditional 4-walled office buildings.

In a First Wave Society, man is more like a prosumer, and his workplace is nothing but his own home or his own field. With the advent of industralisation in the Second Wave, man is forced to relocate to the factory or massive work compound from his place of residence. This has given rise to the birth of ‘work trip’ and brought to the fore the crux of moving people in large scale from their respective places of residence to respective places of work.

In the Third Wave dominated by ICT, created a newer vast pool of services industry, in turn office complexes to house these soft skilled people. On another front, ICT also enabled remote connectivity to enterprise computing virtually from anywhere, and the only requirement is that the person needs to have a desktop, laptop or any other mobile device, connectivity to the internet!

Leveraging on these possibilities major corporations de-linked their staff from cubicles. Here everyone is a winner: the corporations reduced drastically on workstation costs, utility charges, consumbles (coffee, tea…), and even storage space. Where the employee had the flexibility to work at ease from his home environment, avoiding or minimsing the need to travel. Even if a trip is required he could probably plan during off peak periods. Society has the advantage that it receives lesser traffic loads, improved infrastruture maintenance costs, less fuels, lesser carbon foot print…

Infact, this is primary enabler that shifted whole lot of work packages to off shore, ie., how India is enojoying todday the boom of ICT opportunities.

In essence, in the 2nd Wave people moved where there is work. The ICT Revolution facilitated to distribute back the work closer to the employee’s home. Implying work moved where the employee is!

This is a very interesting shift in work delivery, and I am sure many are enjoying WFH culture. Of course, the employee needs to be more disciplined, at times, faces boredom; and the managers face difficulty to enforce compliance; and there is lesser opportunity for inter personal relations. Despite of all these short comings WFH is still an inevitable move for the society, and for good.

In early 1990s I was working on Collaborative Models for a large scale project of Singapore Government. Of course, the technologies are more wide spread now than then, but those models I envisaged haven’t yet became common place yet. There must be a revolution in Communications or Internet, Security has to be strengthened. Once that happens Anywhere Workplace to a great majority becomes a norm rather than exception. I believe that may not be too far…

For-Profit “Colleges” Go to Hill

Mohan — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:42:36 +0000

I have been a vocal critique of many for-profit colleges who use deceptive marketing tactics to sell worthless degrees to some of the most vulnerable segment of the population. Many unsuspecting students at these colleges and universities often end up with no degree (or a worthless degree) and a boat load of debt that cripples them for the rest of their lives.

The life-blood of these colleges is the federal student loan programs. Imagine this: ten percent of the total student population in US study are enrolled in these outfits. Yet, 25% of total student loans go to these colleges.

Today, congress held another dog-and-pony show and questioned the colleges and critiques of these colleges about the abuses. Of course, none of this is news to me. But, for some it apparently is.. [Via NY Times Blog]

According to the report, the publicly traded education companies have a combined enrollment of 1.4 million students in the United States. The largest, the University of Phoenix, has 458,000 students — more than the undergraduate enrollment of the entire Big 10 conference.

And at least seven of the publicly traded for-profit colleges enroll most of their students exclusively in online programs.

Federal student aid comes mostly in the form of Pell grants, of up to $5,350 a year, and Stafford loans, which students must repay after they leave college. Although the aid is meant for the benefit of individual students, the disbursements actually go directly to their colleges. In 2008-9, for-profit colleges got $4.3 billion in Pell grants and $19.6 billion in Stafford loans.

And although for-profit colleges enroll less than 10 percent of the nation’s higher-education students, they get almost a quarter of the federal student aid.

I call this dog-and-pony show because, the lobbyists already seem to have the lawmakers in their pockets. But eventually the stocks of these colleges are expected to reach fair valuation, which to me is close to zero.

Poll 3: Now, Will You Give, or Take?

Mohan — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:49:02 +0000

In this tweak to the experiment, you get to keep all $10 and take up to $10 from the stranger. His/her decision to accept or not accept your offer is irrelevant on how much you get to keep.

What would you do in this case?

Questions View Results

What is the conclusion?

How can Talking Aloud Help You Learn and Remember Better?

Kanaka Byraju — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:12:28 +0000

I’m around a lot of studying. When I walk through the lobby of the Psychology building at Texas, I often see a few students on benches reading over their notes. A trip to the library requires navigating a sea of students at tables and carrels deep in study. Then, when I go home, I have three teens who are usually engaged in some kind of studying.

One thing you can say about studying. It sure is quiet.

Now, there are good practical reasons to want to be quiet while studying. If you’re in a public place, it would be disruptive to the people around you to start talking. Plus, if you are talking to yourself, that would look more than a little odd. Even at home, you may begin to think you have lost your marbles if you start muttering to yourself while studying.

A paper by Colin MacLeod, Nigel Gopie, Kathleen Hourihan, Karen Neary, and Jason Ozubko in the May, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, suggests that every once in a while, it might not be a bad idea if you talked a bit while studying.

In this paper, these researchers document what they call the production effect. They looked at people’s memory for items like a list of words. They found that if people studied the list by reading half of the words silently and the other half by saying the words out loud, that he words spoken aloud were remembered much better than those that were read silently.

Now, it isn’t that just reading things aloud helps, because people who read all of the items on the list aloud were no better at remembering the items than the people who read them all silently. And both of these groups remembered the words more poorly than the words that were read aloud by the people who did half the list silently and the other half aloud.

So, what is going on here?

One of the things that is known to help memory is distinctiveness. We tend to remember oddballs pretty well. An experimental example of this idea is the Von Restorff effect. If you study a list of words where all but one are birds and the remaining item is a sport, you are much more likely to remember the oddball than to remember any particular one of the birds. More commonly, when you meet up years later with friends from grade school, everyone remembers the names of the kids who were different from the crowd in some way. (If you discover that everyone from grade school remembers you, then you were probably the one who was different.)

[Via - Psycology Today]

[Read More]

For-Profit Education is the New Sub-Prime

Mohan — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:32:22 +0000

I often compared debt ridden students of “for-profit” colleges like U of Phoenix to sub-prime borrowers. I have been writing about this sector on this blog as a big house of cards which could implode any time.

Now I have company. A notable short-seller, no less. [Via Mother Jones]

Steve Eisman, the outspoken investor whose huge wager against the subprime mortgage market was chronicled by author Michael Lewis in his bestselling book The Big Short, has set sights on a new target: for-profit colleges of the kind of you might see advertised on daytime TV and at bus stops. Think ITT Educational Services, Corinthian Colleges, or Education Management Corporation.

In a speech titled “Subprime Goes to College,” delivered Wednesday at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, Eisman blasted the for-profit education industry, likening these companies to the seamy mortgage brokers who peddled explosive subprime loans over the past two decades. “Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong,” Eisman said. “The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.” (All of Eisman’s remarks here come from a copy of his prepared remarks obtained by Mother Jones.)

Eisman, a blunt, no-frills portfolio manager at FrontPoint Financial Services Fund, a Morgan Stanley subsidiary, became an overnight sensation as one of the main characters in Lewis’ latest. After witnessing the first wave of subprime madness in the 1990s, Eisman grew skeptical of the industry as a whole, Lewis writes. Then, when subprime surged again in the 2000s, he put his knowledge to work. Needless to say, he’s a lot richer than he was two years ago.

..

Eisman ended with a warning:

Are we going to do this all over again? We just loaded up one generation of Americans with mortgage debt they can’t afford to pay back. Are we going to load up a new generation with student loan debt they can never afford to pay back? The industry is now 25 percent of Title IV money on its way to 40 percent. If its growth is stopped now and it is policed, the problem can be stopped. It is my hope that this administration sees the nature of the problem and begins to act now. If the gainful employment rule goes through as is, then this is only the beginning of the policing of this industry.

But if nothing is done, then we are on the cusp of a new social disaster.

[Read full article here.]

College Inc.

Mohan — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:09:04 +0000

I am passionate about the subject of education. I am disturbed by the sleazy practices of various ‘for-profit colleges’ who essentially fleece the poor and the veterans and raid the Pell Grants (there by cheating the tax payers also.)

Shedding light on fraud in the name of higher education is my crusade. [Quotes from the video.]

federal student loans are the life blood of the for-profit schools
10% of college going public at these colleges consume almost 25% all federal financial aid.
Tax payers are essentially funding this industry. Something line 75% of their revenue comes from Federal grants and loans. University of Phoenix get something like 86% of the up from 49% from 9 or 10 years ago.
Debt load at for-profit school is more than twice the debt load at traditional colleges
[Watch the story of a single mother at 25 min mark]
[42 min mark] Student loan default worry is the next big worry for this nation. A good percentage of this is from for-profit colleges. But the colleges massage their default rates (called cohort default rates) with sleazy business practices.

Watch this Frontline video: College Inc. Decide for yourself.

Stay Away from those “On-Line, For-Profit” Schools

Mohan — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 04:01:12 +0000

Remember the pet-rock fad? People were stupid enough to buy those “pet-rocks.” Surprisingly, the business itself was legitimate. There is another ‘legitimate’ business, which is essentially fraud: several for-profit universities in USA!

Online education by the ‘for-profit universities’ is the next biggest fraud to be exposed.

These schools are businesses. They sell “degrees.” Nothing appears wrong with that until you dig down on their sleazy business practices. Buying a ‘degree’ is not like buying a finished product. Rather, you have to finish the product and take it with you. Few people finish these products.

New York Times has a great article on this recently (emphasis mine).

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

…..

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

For-profit schools have proved adept at capturing Pell grants, which are a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s efforts to make higher education more affordable. The administration increased financing for Pell grants by $17 billion for 2009 and 2010 as part of its $787 billion stimulus package.

Two years ago, students at for-profit trade schools received $3.2 billion in Pell grants, according to the Department of Education, less than went to students at two-year public institutions. By the 2011-12 school year, the administration now estimates, students at for-profit schools should receive more than $10 billion in Pell grants, more than their public counterparts. (Those anticipated increases may shrink, depending on the outcome of wrangling in Congress over health care and student lending.)

Enrollment at for-profit trade schools expanded about 20 percent a year the last two years, more than double the pace from 2001-7, according to the Career College Association.

Mr. Miller, the association’s president, said for-profit schools were securing large numbers of Pell grants because their financial aid offices were diligent and because the schools served many low-income students.

Before you dig deep into debt and enroll into one of these outfits for the lure of a ‘degree,’ which is essentially worthless:

Pet-rocks can be used as paper weights. But, your degree from some of these sleazy colleges will not have any weight even with pet-rocks sitting on top of it.

Are you Reflexive or Reflective? (The Best Presentation I Have Ever Seen)

Mohan — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:10:41 +0000

మీరు చూసి నేర్చుకుంటారా, చేసి నేర్చుకుంటారా, లేక చేసినా, చూసినా నేర్చుకోరా?

Whether you are a trader or not, investor or not – this is a presentation to keep for the rest of your life. The author is Sanjay Bakshi who appears to be a trader in Indian financial markets. Subject? Business, Life, Stocks and More

This is 327 pages (slides) of good stuff. Not just good, great stuff! Really great stuff. (I give 10 stars out of 5)

ఇది అద్భుతమైన, కాదు కాదు, పరమాద్భుతమైన presentation. తప్పక చూడండి. ఈ ఒక్కసారికి, ఇది చూసి నేర్చుకోండి!

Spread this around…

Confessions of a Value Investor- A Few Lessons in Behavioral Finance