For-Profit Colleges Continue to Harm Poor Students

[sanantone]

Well considering the community college doesn't even have a 30% graduation rate using your logic it should close its doors.

It depends on the programs you're looking at. If it's a vocational program, then it should revamp or close if most students are failing. If students are earning transfer credits and eventually earning a bachelor's degree elsewhere, then the CC did its job, which is to offer cheap freshman and sophomore classes. 

It would be cool to see a study asking for-profit students if they're just taking classes to transfer to a 4-year college. You have to select degree-seeking to receive financial aid, but many people have no intention of earning a non-vocational associate's degree. My guess is that most for-profit college students did not enroll into a degree program with the intention of saving money on lower level courses to transfer elsewhere considering that the average for-profit college is more expensive than public colleges and universities.

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This is why statistics is important. We're comparing a sector where 51% of colleges have graduates who will never see a positive ROI, on average, to a sector where 80% of colleges have a positive ROI in 10 years. We're comparing a sector where, overall, the graduation rate is below 50% to a sector where the graduation rate is over 60%. You can nitpick, but it won't change the fact that the majority of for-profit colleges are failures, and the public sector, as a whole, performs much better. 

If you were choosing a high school for your kid, would you send your kid to the school with a 30% graduation rate or to the school with a 60% graduation rate? It looks like you would see these two schools as equals because they don't graduate everyone. 

Statistics can be misleading too. 

WGU graduation rate is either 21% or 50% depending on which statistics you look at.

https://www.scholarships.com/colleges/we...ion-rates/

https://www.wgu.edu/student-experience/g...rates.html

These statistics probably fail to account if students transfer to another university and graduate later on.

WGU is a good school with a good reputation.

Capella owns Sophia.org  A lot of us here benefited from Sophia courses.

I looked at all of Capella's undergraduate stats, including part-time and full-time first-time students, and part-time and full-time transfer students. The highest graduation rate was 36%. The rest were abysmally low.