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Faculty at For-Profits Allege Constant Pressure to Keep Students Enrolled
By Kelly Field
Three times during the past decade, the Pittsburgh campus of Kaplan Career Institute was named “school of the year” by Kaplan Higher Education, a for-profit higher-education company with more than 70 campuses nationwide. The award recognized the college for its rapid growth and high graduation and job-placement rates.
But some former faculty members say the honor came at a steep price: To keep those numbers high, administrators would pressure employees to falsify attendance records, raise grades, and manipulate job-placement numbers. If a professor refused to change a student’s grade, the professor’s supervisor would do it, the faculty members say.
“We were constantly told to lower the bar, that we were helping poor people,” says Dolores A. Howland-Justice, a former instructor who has filed a lawsuit that accuses Kaplan of fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars in federal student aid by inflating its graduation and job-placement rates. “We were ‘do gooders’—that was really played upon.”
Kaplan is fighting the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida, where the case has been consolidated with a lawsuit that makes similar claims against the related Kaplan University. A Florida judge tossed out part of the Pittsburgh suit in December but granted the plaintiffs the right to file an amended claim.
Continued at: http://chronicle.com/article/Pawns-in-the-For-Profit/127424/
Model of the Moment
By Steve Kolowich
The terms “outsourcing” and “workforce development” rarely appear as allies in the same sentence. At least not in Rust Belt states like Indiana, where the loss of manufacturing jobs has driven an increase in demand for postsecondary degrees that point to jobs that will not soon be exported overseas.
But Indiana’s leaders have embraced an outsourcing solution to the state’s outsourcing problem. As Indiana faced down a challenge shared by many other states in the aftermath of 2008’s financial bloodbath — trying to increase capacity, especially for adult learners, at public universities while simultaneously gutting their budgets — Gov. Mitch Daniels decided that, instead of paying to expand online programs at its existing state institutions, Indiana would contract with a private university outside its borders.
Enter Western Governors University, a private, nonprofit, regionally accredited institution headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. Founded in 1997 with seed money from the governors of 18 western states, Western Governors had been, until recently, a sleeping giant. But last June, Daniels signed an executive order bringing Western Governors into the fold as Indiana’s “eighth state university.” Under the deal, Western Governors would create WGU Indiana: a locally branded — yet still remote, other than a new satellite office in Indianapolis — version of the university, to which Hoosiers could take their state financial aid dollars just as they would to Indiana’s other institutions. In late April, Washington State’s legislature passed a law creating WGU Washington. Other states are rumored to be in talks to create similar partnerships, including California, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana.
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