Claudia Goldin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why does for-profit education seem to fail so badly? Some parts of the learning sector are for-profit. Your books are put out by for-profit publishers, textbooks are. Berlitz seems to do okay relative to the language classes at your local state college, but for-profit education, as a whole, seems to implode. What’s the model there? I think it’s some for-profit education. It’s certainly not all for-profit education. I think that the problem is that the part of for-profit education that expanded the greatest was for BAs, particularly in fields like business administration management, and they became more BA mills. When I was studying for-profit education, I really wanted to be able to look at the materials that were given to people. What were they studying? I was never able to break into that. The problem is twofold. One is that there’s a huge profit incentive for the company. That’s, of course, not always a problem, as we know. The other one is, the individuals are not as aware as they should be of what they’re getting themselves into. They are often very needy. They’re low-income. They’re first-generation college. Someone is dangling in front of them something that they really want. They desperately want something that’s going to get them out of the hole that life has put them in. That person who’s dangling it is not giving them sufficient information and sufficient amount of time to get out of this contract. I think we saw that very, very clearly in the GAO audit studies of the for-profits. I think that that’s the problem. The for-profits that give short courses that give a one-year certification in, let’s say, medical technicians — what we’ve shown in our work, those are not the big problem. The big problem is what I just said. Let me just say that I have taken short for-profit courses on dog training, and they work really well. For nonprofits, I’ve seen estimates that maybe no more than 40 percent of the people who try, finish. Does that just mean we have too many people trying to attend college? Isn’t the true rate of return on education actually pretty low, at the median at least?…

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