College has become the conventional life path for the majority of young people following high school graduation.
Picking an educational institution is perhaps one of the most important decisions a person will make in their young life. As a result, each person’s criteria for necessary accommodations are unique and customized to their future goals.
However, one statistic serves as a universal, top-priority selling point: the institution’s success rates for providing graduates job placement in their fields.
As with any other for-profit organization or business, satisfactory numbers are vital not only for growth of the company, but also for consumer confidence.
In 2008, the perfect storm came along. The economy took a nosedive. Businesses across the board suffered devastating financial losses. The unemployment rates began to soar, and companies made the necessary cuts in the workforce to keep their heads afloat.
For those already in their careers, this inflicted a world of pain arising from lay-offs, pay cuts and loss of benefits.
Whether you had a degree from an Ivy League school or community college, the results were the same.
What to do in such circumstances? Go back to school.
People enrolling in school were filled with optimism that the job market would inevitably improve by the time they graduated. It’s a win-win situation: They were exempt from the downturn of the market, and would enter back into the “real world” with polished resumes.
Sure enough, enrollment at colleges picked up, and the government lavishly loaned money to support such causes.
However, colleges still needed to place graduates in their field, even when unemployment rates were soaring. This was also key to attracting students.
To maintain accreditation, job placement rates must surpass the standards set by the designated accreditation agencies. This is where the scandal was born.
According to California Watch, an organization funded by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the company Career Education Corp. was recently exposed for falsely providing extravagant job placement rates for the 2010-11 academic period after a subpoena from the New York attorney general.
While Career Education Corp. reported an impressive job placement rate of 83 percent for the International Academy of Design & Technology and 92 percent for Brooks Institute, the actual numbers may have been significantly lower: less than 65 percent.
Coincidentally, CEO Gary E. McCullough shortly after announced his resignation. This left Steven Lesnik, the new CEO, with a lot to clean up. Pledging to recalculate and announce the 2010-11 numbers, Lesnik said, “We’re obviously very disappointed by these findings, but we took swift and effective action in identifying the conduct and rooting out the problem.”
This incident, combined with Career Education Corp.’s $40 million settlement with students from the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco for similar offenses in 2010, has certainly tarnished the company’s reputation.
The silver lining to such scandals is that attorney generals are keeping a keen eye on other independent schools. As the Higher Ed Watch of the New America Foundation claims, other for-profit education companies such as Kaplan Higher Education and Corinthian Colleges are being investigated as well to determine whether or not this is a more common issue.
Sooner or later, guilty parties will be revealed, and hopefully affected students will be refunded what is rightfully theirs.
Reach the columnist at britni.adams@asu.edu
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