For-Profit Colleges Continue to Harm Poor Students

[sanantone]

I randomly googled 3 of the state schools in the SUNY system - 1 from each type of 4 year school in our system. Only 1 school had hte majority of their students graduate...1 out of 3.

University at Albany/Graduation rate
66%
For first-time, full-time in 2018–19

SUNY Geneseo/Graduation rate
80.9%
For first-time, full-time in 2018–19

SUNY Cobleskill/Graduation rate
41.6%
For first-time, full-time in 2018–19

And a community college

Hudson Valley Community College/Graduation rate
29.6%
For first-time, full-time in 2018–19


Sure looks like billions of taxpayer money is being wasted on state schools looking at these graduation rates.

This is why statistics is important. We're comparing a sector where 51% of colleges have graduates who will never see a positive ROI, on average, to a sector where 80% of colleges have a positive ROI in 10 years. We're comparing a sector where, overall, the graduation rate is below 50% to a sector where the graduation rate is over 50%. You can nitpick, but it won't change the fact that the majority of for-profit colleges are failures, and the public sector, as a whole, performs much better. 

If you were choosing a high school for your kid, would you send your kid to the school with a 30% graduation rate or to the school with a 60% graduation rate? It looks like you would see these two schools as equals because they don't graduate everyone. 

If the majority of businesses in an industry are failing, then there's something fundamentally wrong with that industry. You can either increase regulations or force them to do what other for-profit industries do - have customers pay with their own money. Several DEAC schools already do this as well as a couple of RA for-profit schools. If you're really that efficient, you can operate like Penn Foster, Ashworth, and American College of Education.

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Randomly google for-profit schools and see how many have a graduation rate above 50%. You just made my point even though your sampling is unscientific. The majority of schools you pulled up have good graduation rates. It's nearly impossible to find a 4-year for-profit college with a good graduation rate.