A two year college takes on the for-profits

Inside Higher Ed reports that Ozarks Technical Community College is naming names in a marketing campaign that compares its tuition to for-profit colleges.

A TV commercial the college unveiled last week compares the $3,300 annual cost of tuition, fees, books and supplies at Ozarks to $32,000 at Bryan College, a small Christian for-profit, $18,000 at ITT Tech and $14,000 at Everest College and Vatterott College.

“When looking at the costs, there is no comparison,” a voiceover says during the commercial. “The numbers speak for themselves.”

A pugnacious ad from a community college is rare. The sector generally avoids duking it out directly with for-profits, which have much bigger marketing budgets. But that may change as community colleges, like the rest of higher education, seek to demonstrate return on investment to an increasingly skeptical public.

“When you have a good thing going and you hide a light under a bushel, you’re not very smart,” said Hal L. Higdon, the chancellor at Ozarks, which is located in Springfield, Mo.

Enrollment is flat at many community colleges, after a broad surge in demand in the first couple years of the economic downturn. A cynic might suspect that Ozarks is chasing an elusive student market and trying to beat back strong competition from for-profits. Not so, however, as the college has struggled to meet heavy student demand, having seen its enrollment grow to 15,000 students from 9,000 several years ago. Ozarks has been forced to turn away students in allied health and technical programs.

Higdon also said for-profits haven’t been a major threat. “I don’t think they really hurt our enrollment.”

So why create the campaign?

The answer, Higdon said, is to help prospective students and their families be better-informed about college costs. Good consumer information can be hard to find in higher education, and hysteria about sticker prices at expensive private colleges tends to dominate the discourse. Higdon said students often do not know how affordable Ozarks is, or how its costs compare to those at for-profits. The college backs up its assertions in the ad with data from the U.S. Department of Education.

“We want our students to be smart consumers,” he said.

And for-profits do cause some problems for Ozarks. Higdon said students who have previously attended for-profits sometimes come to the college with heavy debt loads. Ozarks inherits those students’ debt on what it reports to the federal government, which also hurts the college on loan default rates.

Ozarks is not alone in overtly taking on competitors. Southwestern Illinois College has tried a similar tack with a marketing campaign the two-year institution began a few years ago. Dubbed "SWIC-onomics," the campaign’s print ads explain tuition at the college and how it is only a "fraction" of tuition levels at public and private universities.

More community colleges will likely test the water with bolder marketing, said Alan Moran, vice president of marketing and communications at Cuyahoga Community College. That will be a shift from a historic focus on advertising that pushes academic programs rather than “trying to show the value for attending the school,” he said.

And while sagging student demand may not be an issue at Ozarks, other community colleges are suffering from it. They might need to get more aggressive to beat back for-profits, most of which are struggling with even steeper enrollment declines.

“Community colleges will not sit by idly when students in their backyards are being poached,” said Moran.

Another reason Moran said community colleges will try different messages with prospective students is that the sector is increasingly getting into online education, which means trying to attract students from beyond their local areas. Cuyahoga is even marketing outside of Ohio.

However, he said the most effective advertisements are still those that try to show that an education at a community college leads to a good job or to further educational opportunities. Cuyahoga tests all of its ads, and the best responses are to stories about the success of actual students.

Ozarks is spending $20,000 on advertising during the first two weeks of the campaign. That’s peanuts compared to what for-profits can spend on marketing, particularly national chains.

For-profits often claim that state support gives community colleges an advantage in competing on price, which is certainly true to some extent. But Higdon said Missouri doesn’t get much credit for low tuition levels at Ozarks, which is roughly $4,000 for in-state students who live outside the local district. That’s because the state kicks in just $962 annually per full-time student, with total state support covering 13 percent of the college’s overall budget.

“We’re among the worst-funded higher education in the country,” he said.

Government funding probably isn’t coming back for community colleges. And as the sector becomes more privatized, it will need to be savvy about marketing, said Higdon, who previously worked in business.

“Everyone’s going to have to be there.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/27/community-college-takes-profits-marketing-campaign#ixzz2DQlvS413
Inside Higher Ed

MATC investing millions to create a skilled labor force

Milwaukee Area Technical College's new education initiatives are praised in the latest issue of the Milwaukee Business Journal.  Jeff Engel writes: 

 

Milwaukee Area Technical College is investing millions into its programs to address the region’s talent shortage and has added dozens of new programs since 2011, president Michael Burke said.
The school also recently received a more than $1 million federal grant to provide advanced manufacturing support for the community, Burke said.

Southeastern Wisconsin employers, particularly manufacturers, say they’re struggling to find candidates for open positions with the right skill sets, despite high unemployment.
As part of its response to that need, MATC has added eight degrees, 15 technical diplomas and 24 certificates since 2011, Burke said. Those include a new welding certificate, a diploma in Web/mobile designer technology, and degrees in automotive technology, health care services management and computer simulation and gaming.

“These are all industry-certified skill sets,” Burke said. “I think this speaks to the evolution of our work force. I think it’s our responsibility to provide those, not necessarily degrees, but find industry skill sets that we can certify that students can layer on top of one another in essence to find that market niche in our work force arena here — or create a job (that didn’t exist before).”

Burke spoke during an education roundtable discussion Nov. 13 hosted by The Business Journal at The Pfister Hotel. Panelists — including leaders from technical colleges, private universities and two-year and four-year public colleges — shared the variety of ways their institutions are trying to bridge the gap for employers.

The rest of the article is linked here.

Another for profit, Career Education Corp., announces closings and layoffs

Only days after Career Education Corporation’s (CEC) shares plummeted and its CEO resigned, one of the nation’s largest for profit college chains announced that it would close 23 of 90 campuses and lay off 900 employees. CEC’s  Sanford Brown campus in Milwaukee is among those that will be shuttered.

The CEC has been hit hard by what a company official called "new market realities." It has seen its total and new student numbers dip by roughly 22 percent compared to last year and reported an operating loss of $110 million for the year through October.

Career Education Corp. is also facing increased scrutiny from its accreditors. The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, established to provide accreditation to for-profit colleges that cannot achieve regional accreditation, has asked the company to "show cause" for why accreditation should not be withdrawn from 10 of its institutions. The inquiry stems from the company's acknowledgment that it lacked sufficient documentation for some job placement data.

The CEC is no stranger to controversy.

Just a year ago its Chief Executive Officer resigned after corporate profits significantly fell and allegations were made involving inflated student placement statistics. Several lawsuits were filed by investors who claimed they were defrauded while CEO Gary McCullough was paid nearly $9.8 million in 2011.

The CEC had previously been investigated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for various issues of non-compliance in 2005. In January 2008, CEC reported that the SEC has closed its investigation and would take no action against the company. A Department of Justice investigation began in 1994 and was terminated in April 2007, with the DOJ declining prosecution. Another investigation on a different matter was begun by the Civil Division of the DOJ in June 2006 and is currently ongoing.

In June 2005, the U.S. Department of Education prohibited CEC from expanding until it had resolved issues with financial statements and program reviews connected with Collins College and Brooks College two CEC schools. In January 2007, the U.S. Department of Education lifted its restrictions on the company opening new schools or acquiring existing ones.

CEC's division, American InterContinental University, was placed on probation in December 2005 with its accrediting agency, SACS. The probation status was reviewed after one year, in December 2006, and extended an additional 12 months. On December 11, 2007, CEC announced that SACS has removed AIU's probation and that the university's accreditation remains in good standing.

Brooks College, a CEC owned school, was the subject of an unfavorable examination of for-profit trade schools in the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes which focused on alleged misrepresentations by admission representatives to prospective students. A CBS producer with a hidden camera visited several CEC schools in the New York area, including the Katharine Gibbs School. In June 2007, Career Education Corporation announced that it will close both campuses of Brooks College.

In January 2007, the New York State Education Department reported deficiencies at the Katharine Gibbs School's New York campus. The problems related to faculty qualifications and remedial course offerings. Career Education has since closed Katharine Gibbs School's New York campus.

The California Culinary Academy, which was purchased by CEC in 1999, was the subject of an unfavorable article in the San Francisco Weekly focusing on misrepresentations and omissions made to prospective students to enroll them in the school. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a lawsuit was filed over the matter.

Before this week, the Career Education Corporation has 80,000 students and more than 90 campuses that located throughout the United States and in France, the United Kingdom and Monaco. Those institutions include, among others, American InterContinental University. ("AIU"); Brooks Institute; Colorado Technical University ("CTU"); Harrington College of Design; INSEEC Group ("INSEEC") Schools; International University of Monaco ("IUM"); International Academy of Design & Technology ("IADT"); Le Cordon Bleu North America ("LCB"); and Sanford-Brown Institutes and Colleges.

Simpsons' animator illustrates economic policy debate

Union workers save lives and power Hurricane Sandy recovery

The recovery from Hurricane Sandy is going to require time, money and effort. And, like so many of the heroic rescues that happened during the storm, much of the effort is going to come from union members, and especially from the unionized public workers that the Republican Party has worked so hard to hurt over the past couple of years.

Already we've seen fire fighters, police, EMTs, nurses and other health care workers saving lives.

They've gone into flooded streets to rescue people, fought fires, carried patients down flight after flight of stairs to evacuate them. New York City fire fighters belong to the Uniformed Firefighters Association. Many of the health care workers carrying patients out of NYU Langone Medical Center as it was evacuated belong to SEIU1199.

Now the hard work of getting back to normal has begun. Garbage collectors are out clearing debris from city streets. Bridges and tunnels are being inspected for safety. Railroad tracks and roads are being assessed and repaired. New York City buses will begin running again Tuesday afternoon, driven by unionized transit workers. Members of more than a dozen unions were involved in rescue or are involved in recovery.

These union members are people whose jobs Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans would cut, whose pensions and benefits have been slashed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose right to bargain has been under attack across the country.

Make no mistake about it: The fact that these are union workers is important. Unions bargain for the tools their workers need to do the best job possible, from having enough workers on the job to having adequate equipment and training. The wage and benefits improvements union members get help keep workers on the job for longer, so that they develop the skills and experience to handle worst-case scenarios like the one we're seeing now. Having health care keeps them healthy enough to do physically taxing jobs like carrying patients down 17 flights of stairs.

If someone you love was rescued from a flooded area, chances are it was a union member who rescued them. When your power goes back on, chances are a union member will have done the work. Mitt Romney will probably once again encourage you to embrace the line that we like workers, but just hate their unions. But the workers are the unions, and the collective power of unions helped individual workers rescue people or restore power or mobility by making sure they had the tools to get the job done and the pay and benefits such important work deserves.

For more see the Daily Kos.

A Big Storm Requires Big Government

New York Times Editorial 10/29/12

Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they’re lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.

 

Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further.

 

“Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was “immoral” for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt.

 

It’s an absurd notion, but it’s fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen.

 

The agency was put back in working order by President Obama, but ideology still blinds Republicans to its value. Many don’t like the idea of free aid for poor people, or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.

 

Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA’s budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. The Ryan budget, which Mr. Romney praised as “an excellent piece of work,” would result in severe cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which would cut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.

 

Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages. After Mr. Romney’s 2011 remarks recirculated on Monday, his nervous campaign announced that he does not want to abolish FEMA, though he still believes states should be in charge of emergency management. Those in Hurricane Sandy’s path are fortunate that, for now, that ideology has not replaced sound policy.

3 University of Phoenix campuses in Wisconsin will close

Yesterday the University of Phoenix announced that it was closing 115 locations across the country, a move that will affect 13,000 students. Three of these campuses are located in Wisconsin. The Madison, Brookfield and Grand Chute campuses have stopped enrolling students and eventually will close. At this point the Milwaukee campus will remain open.
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The closures come as parent company Apollo Group Inc. said earlier this week that its fourth-quarter net income tumbled 60%, hurt by higher costs and declining enrollment at the University of Phoenix. .
The University of Phoenix currently has about 328,000 students, down from a peak of more than 400,000. Following the closures, it will be left with 112 locations in 36 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Shares in the Phoenix-based company tumbled nearly 8% in after-hours trading.