Not for profit is not non-profit. A privately owned business that exists for profit has everything to do with capitalism. I think your over emphasizing the non-profit piece. There are also a lot of private business that are run by boards… they’re still private as in… not owned by the government.
We’re talking about higher ed, though. There really are only two categories–for profit, or not. There are, pretty much no reputable colleges or universities that are for profit.
Well it might be we’re just disagreeing on what capitalism is:
an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
This is my position. These are private entities. They are not run by the state. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a board, one person or a 100 people. They’re not run by the state. Even if they are regulated by the state, the state does control it.
Now the for profit piece. They earn profits, as in they collect money for their services. The fact that they do something with that profit to make them a not-for-profit gives them special considerations and regulations but they still bring in money.
If I took my entire paycheck and then just handed it away each day, I would not say I am working for free or for no pay. I am earning pay, but I am choosing to do something with it that is not what most would do with their paycheck.
A key for capitalism is not just the profit piece but the private ownership.
Here is a very informative, thorough analysis of student load debt over at the Boston Globe.
Essentially, states who have not invested in public schools have a plethora of private, non public schools who despite their best intentions, have increased their acceptance of poor students who need pell grants - and these grants do not cover the full costs,often requiring these students to pony up in excess of $20K a year in addition to the grants.
As one in-debt student ruefully lamented:
She is now a 27-year-old trying to reckon with the fallout from those early decisions. To prepare for the future, she recently attended a class for prospective home buyers and was stunned at how comparatively transparent the process was. “You should have to be preapproved before taking on college debt. You’re buying an education, after all. For the debt I have, I could have almost bought a house in Florida.”
I am guessing she’s attending a home buying session because she has an income of some kind. Would she have that income if she had only a HS diploma?
You should read the article and not guess.
It’s subscribe only Tman. I am not paying the subscription for one article. Please feel free to tell me what else I should do though.
How is it subscription-only? I just read the whole thing and I don’t have a sub.
When I click it I got a pop-up asking me to subscribe. Not sure… what else to tell you. I believe the Boston Globe has a max free article limit of some kind.
Ah, ok.
Well, here’s the info you were looking for:
[quote]
THE THREE ROOMMATES who occupy a first-floor apartment in Jamaica Plain illustrate the complexities of the college debt crisis. Renata Caines graduated from Boston Latin Academy in 2007, believing a lifetime of messages that she shouldn’t aim for anything less than a four-year college. She enrolled at Lesley University in Cambridge with plans to become a teacher. Even after signing on to the full complement of federal loans, she had to pay $4,000 out of pocket to cover the gap freshman year. But sophomore year, that gap grew to $7,000, and she needed to take a private loan. She had been volunteering as a Big Sister but stopped because she was embarrassed that she couldn’t afford the bus fare to meet her charge.
Going into her junior year, Caines decided she needed a fresh start. Instead, she ended up making her financial situation much worse, a sequence that, unfortunately, is not uncommon for students in her circumstances. She transferred to Hofstra University, but when aid didn’t come through, she was on the hook for $25,000 for just one semester and unable to continue. Since then, Caines has swirled around, taking courses at a couple of other colleges, all while working in a series of low-paying jobs. She is now enrolled at Northeastern, but the distance between her and her degree sometimes feels as though it will never recede. Her current student debt tops $65,000.
“I was 17 when I entered this process,” Caines says. “I didn’t understand anything about large amounts of money.”
She is now a 27-year-old trying to reckon with the fallout from those early decisions. To prepare for the future, she recently attended a class for prospective home buyers and was stunned at how comparatively transparent the process was. “You should have to be preapproved before taking on college debt. You’re buying an education, after all. For the debt I have, I could have almost bought a house in Florida.”
Instead, Caines continues to rent, sharing the bills with Luisa Centeno Silva, who is a close friend from high school, and a third friend. After Boston Latin Academy, Centeno Silva enrolled at Emmanuel College, a Catholic women’s school in the Fenway area that went coed in 2001. Early in her senior year, she found herself tapped out financially. Her parents, who had emigrated from Venezuela, were unable to help. She had already maxed out on credit cards and exhausted her network of family friends, having twice persuaded her godmother to cosign loans for her. She says Emmanuel notified her she had to pay a balance of about $10,000. She knew she’d have to cover at least that same gap again in the spring. (Emmanuel officials declined to comment on her situation, even after Centeno Silva provided the college with written permission to discuss it with me.)
“I felt hopeless,” she says. She dropped out and began working full time at a deli and baby-sitting, to try to save enough to transfer to a new college. That’s when she learned of a little-known but often crippling policy at many colleges. Although she’d paid a lot of money to Emmanuel, in the form of cash and loans, none of the course credits she’d earned were accessible to her. In effect, they were being held hostage. To transfer them, she needed an official transcript from Emmanuel. But the college refused to release it until she paid her balance in full.
If she had used that money to buy a car, she could have sold it and used a portion of the proceeds to pay off the bank. But there is no resale market for three-quarters of a college education.
She began putting aside $1,000 a month from her wages and reluctantly traveling to Emmanuel to pay down her balance in installments. “It killed me to write that check every month,” she says. After 10 months, the college released her transcript. She took courses at local community colleges and, in 2014, enrolled at Northeastern, which accepted 90 of her 120 credits.[/quote]
This has zero to do with the definition you quote, though. Whether higher education is even part of “trade and industry” is debatable, in the sense of traditional not for profit colleges. Beyond that, though, colleges simply aren’t “controlled by private owners for profit,” even if they’re private. Profit is more than not running in the red; it’s a very specific return on investment for financial gain. Simply avoiding a negative cash flow does not make a school a capitalist enterprise. The only real differences between private and state schools is the source of money for their operation–state schools get tax dollars generally, in addition to other sources–and who controls the board, as the state schools are subject to more political control. Economically, state schools and private colleges are still not for profit, and are hardly examples of capitalism or any other economic system.
There’s a huge difference, legally and philosophically, between an entity whose purpose is to make a profit for its investors, and one whose purpose is to do something else, but which has to be self-sustaining, that is, not run at a loss. Traditional colleges aren’t in business to make money. Whether controlled by a state board of regents, or a private board of trustees, their mission is education, research, or usually a mix of the two. They have to balance the books, but often use philanthropic donations to supplement tuition and other income. They don’t pay dividends, no one invests in them to increase their portfolio, etc. It’s in direct and stark contrast to a company doing pretty much anything else, where the ultimate goal is return on investment, whether it’s making widgets or selling advice to architects, or what not.
I didn’t see a paywall either - a lot of these newsites are getting more aggressive in asking for small subscriptions.
For this article, the one thing that just floors me is the amount of debt some of these students are getting themselves into - AFTER receiving pell grants. I mean, I’ve sent two of my sons to state universities here in Oregon, and without any help from the state, it’s costing about $8-10K in tuition and another $8-10K in housing every year.
Seeing people rack up so much debt at these private schools is just a gross mis-use of public funds (grants). Why aren’t they going to public universities where the cost isn’t so high? From the article, it sounds like the public universities haven’t been well funded on the east coast as much as they have in Oregon?
Thank you Telefrog.
Okay so they didn’t complete their education. I can understand that. I did the same thing. I dropped out of college at 21… but I went back and finished at another school. The biggest difference though is I went back and that was hard financially at first and cost me more than if i did it “right” the first time around. My last year I did max out the federal loans too. I don’t really buy the “some college” argument presented above by someone else as somehow a viable option for anyone who goes and doesn’t finish, j
It’s very hard when you didn’t complete your work and you still have the debt. The drop-out and flunk our rate of freshmen is pretty high, and i believe Tuition costs is part of that equation (as in on a aggregate level). Clearly it’s a problem here for these ladies.
I empathize with their experience. I think tuition is way out of hand and as a result so it the debt. I also think we push too many people into college either too soon and they’re not ready or… when there might be another viable option for them. It seems like every parent is told college is the answer for their children to do better. And a lot of young people believe it’s also now or never which is also not true.
Apologies for being so… blunt in my response. I said guessing basically to indicate I didn’t know. I should have just said I can’t see the article. I don’t normally go to these sites but everyone on this site seems to have a different favorite news site so I am hitting a lot of max articles these days.
Tuition costs are out of hand. The only way to fix that is to cut costs, and that’s either going to require subsidies, or fewer students to drive the cost down.
We really should be pushing more students, especially the average ones, to the community college associate’s route.
I expect our attempt in Oregon will require some tweaking and changing over the years but I’m liking int so far:
Community college doesn’t have the big sports teams, the college “life” expense, and it isn’t just the first two years and then four year college route; the certs are there two. There’s always going to be some that go to school when they shouldn’t, or get distracted because they’re young but the cost to them and to tax payers at the Community Colleges is significantly yes. There might be some valid arguments about the quality of education, but last I checked (it’s been years), CC to 4 year did pretty well.
Cutting costs, yes. But we don’t necessarily have to subsidize or shrink the system. We have to transform it. Instead of trying to figure out a way to sustain what is really financially unsustainable–that is, the “traditional” four-year college, boot camp for yuppies, experience–we should be focusing on curriculum and delivery methods that deliver solid educational experiences, in a variety of social formats. There will always be elite, four-year institutions where people with lots of money or perhaps lots of (however they measure it) brains will flock to, and which will be affordable to them. The former can pay, the latter will get scholarships to make the former feel better about the schools they graduate from with their “gentleman’s C,” which is probably a B+ by now. But the rest of the society needs a new paradigm, or paradigms, for higher ed, ones that focus on outcomes, not on arbitrary four-year time lines; ones which prioritize faculty who combine expertise with teaching and communication abilities, rather than pure research skills; and ones that offer flexibility in residency, time to degree, and teaching methods to suit the outcomes, the students, and the resources available.
This is all doable. The entrenched interests in higher ed, which as many have pointed out here are often more devoted to self-interest than to social good, will resist, but smart educators, including administrators (running a school is incredibly hard, especially if you do it right, and there are quite a few amazing administrators around the country searching for these new paradigms), are trying already to blaze new trails. Not just for “the common good,” either; for small private schools, it will become essential if they are to survive. There are only a few spaces in the market going forward for elite, four-year schools that can charge $60K a year and make it work.
The problem is that a four year arts degree is both worthless and useless. Everyone knows it, yet millions of people go for it as either a way to kick the can down the road or in a mistaken belief that it’s a stepping stone to a real program or career. It’s not the colleges’ fault or the governments. I agree tuitions are way too high in the US, and need to change, but that’s more a factor of the hatred for government and taxes. High tuitions and debt are as much a symptom of the problem as the problem.
The Venezuelan girl should have gone into a trade. CAD technician or web administrator or graphics design, all in demand and paying $40k not long out of school.
4 year college degrees are not useless. These are well-rounded educations. Do I need to go through the list, again, of different majors at the two sites I’ve worked at now? The B.A. group also tends to have a second language skill the B.S. majors don’t as often pursue. And I am talking about from the non-career schools of course, not ones like the Art Institutes kind of thing.
I believe you can just click off the request to subscribe and read the article. If you use up your allotted free articles, you can still get in by copying a few words in the article and using Google to get in. It has worked for me.
This is a bit extreme. Well, more than a bit. It’s very true that for some people, spending untold thousands and several years on a degree with little immediate direct bearing on employment is a huge mistake. For many, though, it is quite useful, and worth the time and expense. Even a pure “arts” degree, like a degree in music or painting or what not, or even literature, isn’t a barrier to gainful employment, and depending on what you are going to do, it might be a good stepping stone. One of the successful breweries here is run by a guy who got a degree in anthropology, which turned him on to the importance of beer in human cultures, which in turn led to a successful business. Of course, he also had to pick up the skills of business and brewing, but if he had done it the other way around, he’d still have had to figure out what makes a successful beer, and develop the passion to do it, so just getting a business degree might or might not have been any more beneficial.
But anecdotes aside, it really does come down to the individual. If you go to college thinking that the degree = job, yes, an arts degree is worthless for you. If you are prepared to be flexible, have the ability and willingness to explore things, and view your college experience as part of, not all of, your professional preparation, you can do wonders with an arts degree.
In contrast, can you do the same with a technical or professional degree? Yes, sure, but you’ll go through exactly the same process in sort of reverse. Getting out of college with a degree, say, in graphic design, you can almost assuredly get a job in that field easier than someone who graduated with a degree in ancient Indian history, or Central American ethnography could get a job in theirs.But if you plan to go further than entry level, you are going to have to explore more than just the narrow technical aspects of your field that your BS probably prepared you for. Depending on where you got your degree–some schools do a great job of general education, others not so much–you may be limited in your communications skills, your ability to work with and analyze a variety of information, and your overall knowledge of the world in general. You’ll have to rectify those weaknesses to move up, just as someone with an arts degree will have to rectify their lack of technical skills in a specific field. If you ask me, it’s easier by far to gain technical skills after a foundation in broader disciplines, than it is to do it the other way around, but YMMV.
The school I am at specialized in professional degrees–digital forensics, graphic design, cybersecurity, game development, accounting, education, stuff like that. We also have BFAs and MFAs, but usually with an emergent media twist. So people coming to our school do, indeed, expect a strong link between the degree and their jobs after college. We also offer a robust general education system focusing on critical thinking, interdisciplinary problem solving, integrative thinking, and written and oral communication skills. We don’t focus on specific bodies of content knowledge, but on habits of mind that exemplify the best the arts and humanities has to offer while being extremely relevant to a wide range of professional programs. It’s one method of trying to make sure graduates are both technically adept and positioned for higher responsibility and achievement.