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Diploma Mills: How For-Profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream
A provocative history of for-profit colleges and universities. Honorable Mention, PROSE Education Practice Award by the American Association of Publishers, FY17 The most significant shift in higher education over the past two decades has been the emergence of for-profit colleges and universities. These online and storefront institutions lure students with promises of fast degrees and “guaranteed” job placement, but what they deliver is often something quite different. In this provocative history of for-profit higher education, historian and educational researcher A. J. Angulo tells the remarkable and often sordid story of these “diploma mills,” which target low-income and nontraditional students while scooping up a disproportionate amount of federal student aid. Tapping into a little-known history with big implications, Angulo takes readers on a lively journey that begins with the apprenticeship system of colonial America and ends with today’s politically savvy $35 billion multinational for-profit industry. He traces the transformation of nineteenth-century reading and writing schools into “commercial” and “business” colleges, explores the early twentieth century’s move toward professionalization and progressivism, and explains why the GI Bill prompted a surge of new for-profit institutions. He also shows how well-founded concerns about profit-seeking in higher education have evolved over the centuries and argues that financial gaming and maneuvering by these institutions threatens to destabilize the entire federal student aid program. This is the first sweeping narrative history to explain why for-profits have mattered to students, taxpayers, lawmakers, and the many others who have viewed higher education as part of the American dream. Diploma Mills speaks to today’s concerns by shedding light on unmistakable conflicts of interest long associated with this scandal-plagued class of colleges and universities.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published March 15, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 20, 2016
This is a new and well-researched look at what the author calls for-profit colleges and universities – FPCUs in his telling. He manages to pack a lot of detail on this in 148 pages, and it’s not just the current problem but the full history of these institutions in this country; indeed, he doesn’t get to the current problem till the fifth of five chapters. First, we find that FPCUs of one sort or another had been in business, and out of business, early in the Republic’s history, the first big FPCU boom being in the mid-to-late 19th Century, with plenty of hucksterism and bankruptcy even then. We learn how they competed with the traditional nonprofit and public colleges and universities, and how the rise of professional associations and standards – medicine, accounting, the bar – eclipsed the first wave of FPCUs.
We learn how available funds – GI Bill and VA benefits after the Second World War, public Great Society funding, the wider availability of student loans – would attract FPCUs through the 20th Century, and how they would exploit these funds, sometimes to the detriment of the students seeking a better life. We learn how FPCUs would usually maximize spending on promotion, advertising and executive salaries to the detriment of instruction, and often misrepresent their statistics on graduation rates and graduate job placement. We find that the frenzy only grew in the first decade of the 21st Century, with more student loans, backed by more private-equity funding in loans and FPCU ventures, in the go-go years prior to 2008.
It’s an important, if detail-driven, book, that does bring us to the current wreckage: students with worthless degrees, limited job prospects and heavy student debt, sudden bankruptcies in the larger FPCUs, as well as the prospect of another debt-bubble collapse like 2008, something that would affect the economy and ultimately the taxpayers. We see just how much of this debt and human waste is concentrated in FPCUs, not in higher education generally. He sets out a case for an end to their subsidies, which, given the lobbying power the author describes, won’t be easy. Highly recommend, esp. for people in the educational and public sectors.
We learn how available funds – GI Bill and VA benefits after the Second World War, public Great Society funding, the wider availability of student loans – would attract FPCUs through the 20th Century, and how they would exploit these funds, sometimes to the detriment of the students seeking a better life. We learn how FPCUs would usually maximize spending on promotion, advertising and executive salaries to the detriment of instruction, and often misrepresent their statistics on graduation rates and graduate job placement. We find that the frenzy only grew in the first decade of the 21st Century, with more student loans, backed by more private-equity funding in loans and FPCU ventures, in the go-go years prior to 2008.
It’s an important, if detail-driven, book, that does bring us to the current wreckage: students with worthless degrees, limited job prospects and heavy student debt, sudden bankruptcies in the larger FPCUs, as well as the prospect of another debt-bubble collapse like 2008, something that would affect the economy and ultimately the taxpayers. We see just how much of this debt and human waste is concentrated in FPCUs, not in higher education generally. He sets out a case for an end to their subsidies, which, given the lobbying power the author describes, won’t be easy. Highly recommend, esp. for people in the educational and public sectors.
December 24, 2015
Diploma Mills as a book that helps you to think about the “analyses of national policy and the connection between critical predatory behavior” of the for-profit industry. In this books, it helps to look at reasons why for profits became what they are today and helps the reader to identify some of the practices that has led to the challenges they have faced. A quote in the book from the Department of Education summed it up this way, “The crooks open one school, run thousands through their programs, close their school, and retire as millionaires before they’re even scheduled for a program review.”
The book was an interesting and informative. It certainly opens the readers ideas to knowing that a change needs to be made in order to get a better ‘handle’ on the situation at these types of schools. I agree with the author that it will not be easy road. The book includes a number of informative charts and a detailed index of resources for the reader. An interesting book, worth picking up if you are interested in postsecondary education.
The book was an interesting and informative. It certainly opens the readers ideas to knowing that a change needs to be made in order to get a better ‘handle’ on the situation at these types of schools. I agree with the author that it will not be easy road. The book includes a number of informative charts and a detailed index of resources for the reader. An interesting book, worth picking up if you are interested in postsecondary education.
March 21, 2020
Terrible!
A painful read. One-sided,elitist bs. The straw man argument only works because of traditional higher education bias. It is impossible to explain the internal operation of traditional higher education. In the US it has no comparable organization. Public Universities get federal and state funding, expect hefty endowments, often have huge profit centers (football,basketball,hospitals,etc)and charge students large tuitions and room and board fees.with all this a few departments are meritorious but most just take large amounts of taxpayer money with no product or outcome. The author claims they are the good guys. Where is the balance. Not here. This book has only one goal: to confirm bias.
A painful read. One-sided,elitist bs. The straw man argument only works because of traditional higher education bias. It is impossible to explain the internal operation of traditional higher education. In the US it has no comparable organization. Public Universities get federal and state funding, expect hefty endowments, often have huge profit centers (football,basketball,hospitals,etc)and charge students large tuitions and room and board fees.with all this a few departments are meritorious but most just take large amounts of taxpayer money with no product or outcome. The author claims they are the good guys. Where is the balance. Not here. This book has only one goal: to confirm bias.
March 4, 2016
Diploma Mills covers the world of For Profit Colleges and Universities (FPCU) from their inception as trade schools in the colonial days to the modern incantations of Devry, University of Phoenix and Corinthian Colleges. This book confirms what most people in higher ed already know that the FPCU institutions spend 6 to 10 times more on marketing per student than instruction, the completion rates are abysmal, and they subsist off government subsidies in some cases filling false loan paperwork on behalf of the students.
The first half of this book deals with the apprenticeship system and the attempts of med, law and business schools to establish a standard for education following the civil war and into the Gilded Age. The modern system is born out of the GI bill which opened up the flood gates of easy government money that some schools which operated out of a single room and could not even have the facilities they claimed took government money by the millions and eventually billions to line their pockets. It talks about the lobbying arm that did what good lobbying arms do and kill regulation. It was at the state level where the modern system began to face trouble as coordinated investigations between the State governments and the SEC finally cracked down on the fraud of the FPCU’s.
Overall a good study of the topic and one that will leave you wondering how can we ever stop these various entities who close and resurface under another name shortly thereafter. The enforcement efforts to prosecute for fraud have been the best weapons so far against the scammers and the cheats that are behind many of these institutions. While there are a few out there that do some good it is the lure of easy government money that sustains these and I agree with the author that the FPCU’s should have to subsit without government funding if the model is ever to approve viable.
The first half of this book deals with the apprenticeship system and the attempts of med, law and business schools to establish a standard for education following the civil war and into the Gilded Age. The modern system is born out of the GI bill which opened up the flood gates of easy government money that some schools which operated out of a single room and could not even have the facilities they claimed took government money by the millions and eventually billions to line their pockets. It talks about the lobbying arm that did what good lobbying arms do and kill regulation. It was at the state level where the modern system began to face trouble as coordinated investigations between the State governments and the SEC finally cracked down on the fraud of the FPCU’s.
Overall a good study of the topic and one that will leave you wondering how can we ever stop these various entities who close and resurface under another name shortly thereafter. The enforcement efforts to prosecute for fraud have been the best weapons so far against the scammers and the cheats that are behind many of these institutions. While there are a few out there that do some good it is the lure of easy government money that sustains these and I agree with the author that the FPCU’s should have to subsit without government funding if the model is ever to approve viable.
February 25, 2016
An interesting take on the for-profit college issue by extending the discussion all the way back to the early days of the country. Perhaps the most fascinating part is a discussion of for-profit education from the 1910s to 1930s or so, which feels like it could have come word for word out of today's issues (except for the lack of an Internet).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews