Colleges compete for vets — and benefits

Uncle Sam wants veterans to sign up for college! And colleges and universities are vying to create “veteran friendly” programs, classes, and centers to attract the ex-G.I.’s—and the billions of U.S. dollars provided by the post-9/11 G.I. Bill.

Onondaga Community College, in Syracuse, N.Y., uses veterans to help new G.I. Bill enrollees. “I’ve seen almost instant rapport between a work-study vet who may have already been in school a semester or two as (s)he meets with a vet applying to school, giving the new student the benefit of their experience and continuing the habit of ‘watching your buddy’s back’ that most have developed in the service,” Keith Stevenson, a college staffer and Coast Guard veteran, told the ACE.

Some colleges have created special courses to help veterans transition back into civilian life.

Sierra College, in Rocklin, Calif., offers Boots to Books, which combines a remedial English class designed for veterans with a course on study skills.

However, some colleges have dropped special classes for veterans, preferring to focus on integrating them fully into the college community.

Most veterans enroll in community colleges or for-profit colleges.

After college, what will you earn?

If college is an investment, students should have some idea what they’ll earn with a degree in nursing or marketing or whatever from College X vs. College Y, writes Daniel de Vise in College, Inc. Soon more information will be available about post-college employment.

Especially as college continues to get more expensive, students rightfully want to make sure that that their investment has value. They’re asking: What are the chances I’m going to get a job earning a decent wage? And if I’m choosing between two or three schools as a prospective student, which will give me the biggest bang for my (and my family’s) buck?

The Labor Department is working with the states to share data on earnings and employment.  In addition, the Education Department will be releasing “gainful employment” reports on how for-profit and community colleges’ vocational certificate earners are doing in the workforce.

“If these reports show wide disparities among graduates from different colleges, can it be long before the same data are demanded for all bachelors’ degree programs?” asks de Vise.

The drive to raise graduation rates doesn’t address degree quality, he points out.  For most students — and especially those from low-income and working-class families — it’s important to earn a credential that puts them “on a path to earning a decent living.”

If students understood college costs and potential earnings, they’d be wary of enrolling in a high-cost for-profit college, especially for a bachelor’s degree program. They’d also avoid high-cost private colleges that don’t offer a lot of financial aid and an elite degree.

In Student Loans Weighing Down a Generation With Heavy Debt, the New York Times introduces a debt-doomed borrower: Kelsey Griffith, 23, borrowed $120,000 to earn a marketing degree from Ohio Northern University. She’s working two restaurant jobs and will move in with her parents while looking for a marketing job.

Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to a Times analysis of Department of Education data. This includes federal and private loans.

“Pursue your dreams” — but don’t do the math — is a cruel hoax being played on 18-year-olds and their financially naive parents.

What’s the community colleges’ niche?

Community colleges should “focus on their historic strength, general education,” and let for-profit colleges handle “high-cost vocational programs,” suggests Community College Dean. Vocational training is “their niche, they’re (sometimes) good at it, and they can charge enough to sustain themselves while doing it.”

Specialization makes sense, the dean argues.

One camp says that the way to compete with the for-profits is to do it all.  Another says that we should become more like them, and focus more intensely on workforce training.  I’m thinking those are both basically doomed.  The way to thrive in the new normal is not to try to be great at everything; the world is just too big.  Instead, it’s to find something you do really well, and own that.  Let the for-profits handle HVAC repair and dental hygiene; let the community colleges do the first two years of four year degrees.

These days, community colleges are struggling with general education, which is hard to do when so many students are unprepared for college work. By contrast, they’re getting lots of attention and praise for workforce training. It’s easier to get students to a vocational certificate than to an associate degree.

The high cost of low tuition

Students may pay a high cost for low tuition at community colleges, I write in U.S. News.

All Californians will pay the same low tuition for classes at Santa Monica College—if they can get off the wait list. Student protests forced the school’s board of trustees to suspend its plan to charge a premium for access to new sections of high-demand classes. The state community college chancellor, Jack Scott, has said that he believes two-tier pricing is not permissible under state law.

But the problem—too many students and not enough seats—remains, both at Santa Monica College and at many community colleges across the country.

Making students wait to get into classes raises the odds they’ll give up before earning a degree — or pay much more at for-profit colleges that expand quickly to meet demand.

In Houston, the Lone Star College system will charge extra for classes that cost more to teach, reports Inside Higher Ed.  For example, “standard tuition at the system is $200 for a three-credit course, but students pay $212 to study dental hygiene and $206 for computer science, according to a differential fee chart.”

From combat to college

To protect veterans and service members from aggressive, dishonest college recruiters, President Obama signed an executive order last week requiring a “know before you owe” fact sheet, counseling on how to complete a degree and stronger oversight of improper recruitment practices.

Recently Student Veterans of America revoked charters for campus groups at 26 for-profit colleges, charging the groups were not started by student veterans and don’t provide “a community of individuals that share similar experiences.” Schools may be using fake SVA chapters to advertise themselves as “veteran friendly,” the group charges.

The Post-9/11 G.I. Bill provided more than $7.7 billion for 555,000 veterans and dependents to attend college last year. Most choose community colleges or for-profit colleges.

However, most will not complete a degree, warns the Center for American Progress. Easing the Transition from Combat to Classroom suggests ways for colleges to help vets succeed.

Returning veterans often face myriad challenges when it comes to higher education, including reacquainting themselves with academic work, navigating complicated campus administrative systems, finding support services to meet their needs, encountering negative reactions from the campus community based on their participation in military conflicts, and having difficulty connecting with classmates and faculty.

The report helps colleges analyze whether they have the right veteran-support structures in place. It’s designed to work with the American Council on Education’s “Veteran Friendly Toolkit.”

Community colleges face Catch-22

Community colleges, which are “given fewer resources to educate students with the greatest needs,” face a Catch-22, writes Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation in The 2-Tier-Tuition Controversy in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

(Colleges can) raise prices, which creates new inequities, or don’t raise prices and perpetuate huge waiting lists for courses. In practical terms, as Nate Johnson of Postsecondary Analytics notes, when students eager for education are shut out of community-college courses, they tend to enroll in for-profit colleges, where they pay far more per credit than the proposed expensive tier at Santa Monica. Many students exit these for-profit institutions with few marketable skills.

“Charging different amounts for the same general-education courses at a community college would have set a bad precedent,” Kahlenberg writes. But it’s just the tip of a giant iceberg of  inequalities in higher education.

Can community colleges learn from for-profits?

When community college students drop out, they lose future earnings and taxpayers lose their investment in the heavily subsidized system, write Mark Schneider and Lu Michelle Yin in a Los Angeles Times commentary. Raising graduation rates would raise graduates’ earnings and income tax revenues. But how?

When low tuition isn’t a bargain

Low tuition isn’t always a bargain for community college students, argues Nate Johnson in an Inside Higher Ed commentary that defends Santa Monica College‘s abandoned two-tier pricing plan. If low-cost community colleges don’t have the revenue to offer enough classes, students will turn to high-cost for-profit colleges, which expand quickly to meet demand.

From  2001-2 to 2009-10, the proportion of Pell grant recipients attending for-profit colleges rose from 15 to 25 percent, while declining from 35 percent to 32 percent at community colleges. Given the much higher prices at for profit institutions, this has meant a huge — but hidden — tuition increase for low-income students.

After earning a bachelor’s degree and working as a pilot, Joe was downsized. He considered nursing programs at Florida State, Florida A&M, and Tallahassee Community College (TCC), but all had long wait lists. Instead of waiting a year and a half to start at TCC, Joe turned to a private career college, Keiser University, which let him start in three months.

The shorter wait, he figured, would make up for the cost, which Joe pegged at about three times that of TCC.

Joe was not alone.  Between 2005 and 2011, the number of registered nurses graduating from for-profit colleges in Florida rose from 114 to 1,034 — an increase of 800 percent.  Average published tuition and fees at these institutions was over $15,000 a year in 2010-11.

Community college nursing programs, which charged about one-fifth of the for-profit tuition, graduated 36 percent more students.

Florida community colleges raised tuition by about $800 on average from 2005 to 2011, Johnson writes. But tuition and fees for all nursing students — public and private — ose by about $3,700 because so many students chose the high-cost private sector.

If community colleges had raised tuition by another $2,000 for nursing programs, paying for enough spots to meet demand, students could pay $5,000 a year without a long wait, he points out. Now, many pay $15,000 a year to skip the waist list.

Board: 2-tier tuition is ‘Robin Hood’ plan

Robin Hood was the model for Santa Monica College‘s plan to charge higher tuition for added classes, say members of the very liberal college board. Those who could afford it would pay more, opening up space in classes for low-income students. “It’s an opportunity to make a very progressive policy, an opportunity to be Robin Hood,” trustee Rob Rader told the Los Angeles Times. 

For many on the eight-member panel, which includes a humanities professor, an ACLU board member and a college counselor, the plan was conceived as a progressive response to drastic state funding cuts and was intended to increase access and allow more students to graduate and transfer.

The plan, said one, was socialism in action. But just an hour before, angry demonstrators had nearly beaten down the door, hurling accusations that a two-tier pricing system would shut out low-income students and lead to privatizing public education. A campus police officer used pepper spray to stop the surging crowd.

The board planned to add sections of English, math and history at $180 per unit for students willing to pay more for immediate entry. Regular courses, which cost $46 per unit, often have wait lists. A  scholarship fund was set up to help low-income students afford the higher-priced classes.

Trustees canceled the summer launch after California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott said this version of two-tier fees appears to be illegal. 

The college already charges higher fees to foreign students. With an excellent record of transferring students to nearby UCLA, Santa Monica College enrolls more international students than any community college in the nation.

About 3,300 students from Korea, China, Sweden and other countries are enrolled in the college. They pay the nonresident rate of $275 per unit and generate annual revenues of $13 million, which had allowed the college to offer a higher level of services such as counseling and more classes until recent budget cuts forced severe reductions.The success of the international program provided an impetus to expand the scope of so-called contract education, and in fall 2010 the college offered 18 extra sections of courses such as English, economics and art history open only to international students.

College trustees still hope to work out legal issues with Scott’s office.

State funding cuts are driving community college students to much higher-priced for-profit colleges, which speed the path to graduation, Rader told the Times. “Private, for-profit universities are targeting many of our students, and they don’t do as good a job as we do…. We were going to take their business model and make it progressive. It’s progressive jujitsu.”

CC tries premium pricing for ‘next-day’ classes

Instead of wait lists and closed classes, Santa Monica College in California wants to offer premium-priced sections of crowded courses, reports the Los Angeles Times. Students could pay as much as $200 a unit for high-demand courses; the regular rate will be $46 per unit by summer.

Students would be able to use financial aid to pay for the classes, and college officials hope to raise private funds to establish scholarships for needy students.

The 34,000-student Santa Monica campus has one of the highest transfer rates to four-year universities in the state and a reputation for innovative programs that are a model for other community colleges. But some say higher-priced classes are tantamount to privatizing the public institution.

Administrators say the plan is a reaction to drastic state funding cuts, which have forced the campus to pare more than 1,000 class sections since 2008. In the current year, funding was reduced by $11 million. The campus could lose an additional $5 million in the 2012-13 budget year if a tax initiative on the November ballot fails.

The plan is unfair to low-income students, critics charge. And it’s not at all clear that it’s legal, although the college plans to create a nonprofit foundation to run the program.

Premium pricing is not a new idea, notes Community College Dean. Two years ago, Bristol Community College in Massachusetts contracted with a for-profit provider to offer nursing classes at a premium price to students who didn’t want to wait to get into low-cost sections. “It’s the academic equivalent of a next-day shipping option,”  the dean writes.

Community colleges offer services far below cost, using state and local subsidies, the dean explains.

The theory behind the subsidies is that the entire population benefits from having an educated workforce and citizenry, so it’s fair to have the entire population kick in some money.

. . . But when the subsidies don’t track enrollments — which they absolutely have not for many years now — growth is a problem for a college. In the Massachusetts case, student fees didn’t come close to paying for the cost of more nursing seats.  In the California case, incredibly enough, the low tuition that students pay goes entirely to the state; the college keeps none of it.  In that system, new enrollments are pure cost.

The “express shipping” option already exists for  students from wealthy families, who “can buy their way into undistinguished private colleges,” the dean notes. Public colleges are supposed to be the alternative.

Many low-income and minority students enroll in for-profit colleges, which aren’t subsidized and therefore charge much higher tuition than community colleges or public universities. It’s a form of premium pricing. Since for-profit colleges make money from new students, they add courses immediately to meet demand. Students pay more — nearly always with federal aid — and get the classes they need. At the two-year level, for-profit students have much higher completion rates than community college students, so the premium may be worth it. That’s not true for four-year for-profit programs, which have lower completion rates.