The University of Phoenix makes another cameo in the NYT today

The long, front-page story is about the proliferation of for-profit trade schools. Many of them recruit students agressively with rosy promises of future employment — and leave them with crippling debt from student loans. At the same time, they get a huge portion of their income from the federal government.

If that reminds you of the University of Phoenix, it’s because that’s how it operates, too. From the Times:

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year […]. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

Emphasis added. The University of Phoenix has been the subject of a couple of exposés in the Times in the past. The company agreed to a settlement including attorney’s fees of nearly $80 million under a false claims act suit last year — on top of a total of more than $15 million in fines levied by the U.S. Department of Education in the last ten years.

A major Times story on the school’s scuzzy practices is here.

Reason, the libertarian magazine, did a more favorable look at the school’s operations in 2008. The article was written before the nation’s economic meltdown later that year; the writer’s aperçu that the U of P offers “offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage” would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It’s available here.

ProPublica goes after the University of Phoenix

As PHXated noted a while back, Arizona has exactly zero schools in U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings of the nation’s top 100 universities.

It has exactly zero entrants in the magazine’s annual ranking of the 100 top liberal arts colleges, too.

Massachusetts, a state with the same population as Arizona, had eight.

In each list.

What Arizona does have is the University of Phoenix, an adult-education outfit that has been dogged with charges of improper recruitment procedures.

The problem with for-profit educational institutions is that, in the end it’s all about … making a profit. The people who run it would be screwing over their shareholders if they didn’t do everything they can to make money.

The trouble is, the people they are making money off of are some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in society. No one’s looking out for their interests, and they’re trying to improve their lives by getting some vocational training. In most folks’ minds, a university is an institution whose relationship to its students is fundamentally different from the one between, say, a telemarketer and the person on the other end of the phone.

And the University of Phoenix is there to tell them, Yeah, we’ll help you get a job! and, There’s lots of financial aid available! and, Hey, your credits are transferable—even to Stanford!

Five years ago, the institution paid a $10 million fine after settling enrollment-abuse charges from the Dept. of Education. The U.S. supplies the schools with a lot of financial aid money, and it doesn’t want them signing up unqualified students just to grab the federal aid dollars.

Now, ProPublica, the news investigative journalism online site, took a new look at the University of Phoenix and found that there’s still a lot of evidence its recruiting tactics are questionable:

[The U. of] Phoenix cemented its stature as the nation’s largest for-profit school and the single biggest recipient of federal student aid. But some of the school’s recruiters have continued to use high-pressure, deceptive tactics, according to a dozen current and former students and two former recruiters who spoke to ProPublica and Marketplace as part of a joint investigation.

The students said Phoenix counselors misled them about whether credits would transfer to other schools, pretended to befriend them and lied about financial aid. The recruiters said they were told to rope students in with phony claims that classes were filling fast, or by suggesting that federal grants would cover costs, even if that was uncertain.

The story backs up the charges with on-the-record interviews with recruiters and students—and fills them out with minor but still slightly queasy-making allegations like this:

“We would get a lot of calls for CSI,” said Burke, referring to the popular television show about forensic sleuths who solve crimes. “Sometimes we were told to go ahead and enroll them in the criminal justice program,” he said.

The university confirmed that its criminal justice program might qualify a graduate to work as a prison guard, but not in forensic investigations.