193 Vocational Programs Fail ‘Gainful Employment’ Test

June 27, 2012 — Veronica Van Ry

About 5 percent of vocational programs that are subject to the Education Department’s controversial gainful-employment rule failed to meet the regulation’s three key benchmarks that will eventually be required for them to receive federal student aid, data released by the department today show.

The graduates of 193 programs at 93 different institutions, all of them for-profit, are carrying debt-to-income ratios that are too high and have loan-repayment rates that are too low under the benchmarks the Department of Education established in the rule, issued in June 2011.

None of those programs will receive any sanctions because the data were released for informational purposes only. Full enforcement of the regulations will be phased in over the next several years. Starting in 2013, the affected vocational programs must meet at least one of three benchmarks in at least three out of four consecutive years in order to remain eligible for federal student aid.

In order to meet the first benchmark, at least 35 percent of a program’s graduates must be actively repaying their student loans. In addition, under the rules the median student-debt burden of a program’s graduates cannot exceed 12 percent of those students’ aggregate annual total income, nor 30 percent of their annual discretionary income.

The gainful-employment rule applies only to nondegree-granting vocational programs, which include 42,000 programs at public and private colleges, and roughly 13,000 programs at for-profit colleges. Many vocational programs are exempt from the regulation, however, because they have fewer than 30 student-loan borrowers. (Read more.)

Via Michael Stratford, The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Posted in Community College (13-14), CTE, Data/Research. Tags: , , . Comments Off

Learning That Works in Arizona

June 11, 2012 — Veronica Van Ry

…Vocational education used to be where you sent the dumb kids or the supposed misfits who weren’t suited for classroom learning. It began to fall out of fashion about 40 years ago, in part because it became a civil rights issue: voc-ed was seen as a form of segregation, a convenient dumping ground for minority kids in Northern cities. “That was a real problem,” former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein told me. “And the voc-ed programs were pretty awful. They weren’t training the kids for specific jobs or for certified skills. It really was a waste of time and money.”

Unfortunately, the education establishment’s response to the voc-ed problem only made things worse. Over time, it morphed into the theology that every child should go to college (a four-year liberal-arts college at that) and therefore every child should be required to pursue a college-prep course in high school. The results have been awful. High school dropout rates continue to be a national embarrassment. And most high school graduates are not prepared for the world of work. The unemployment rate for recent high school graduates who are not in school is a stratospheric 33%. The results for even those who go on to higher education are brutal: four-year colleges graduate only about 40% of the students who start them, and two-year community colleges graduate less than that, about 23%. “College for everyone has become a matter of political correctness,” says Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University. “But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than a quarter of new job openings will require a bachelor of arts degree. We’re not training our students for the jobs that actually exist.” Meanwhile, the U.S. has begun to run out of welders, glaziers and auto mechanics–the people who actually keep the place running.

Unfortunately, the education establishment’s response to the voc-ed problem only made things worse. Over time, it morphed into the theology that every child should go to college (a four-year liberal-arts college at that) and therefore every child should be required to pursue a college-prep course in high school. The results have been awful. High school dropout rates continue to be a national embarrassment. And most high school graduates are not prepared for the world of work. The unemployment rate for recent high school graduates who are not in school is a stratospheric 33%. The results for even those who go on to higher education are brutal: four-year colleges graduate only about 40% of the students who start them, and two-year community colleges graduate less than that, about 23%. “College for everyone has become a matter of political correctness,” says Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University. “But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than a quarter of new job openings will require a bachelor of arts degree. We’re not training our students for the jobs that actually exist.” Meanwhile, the U.S. has begun to run out of welders, glaziers and auto mechanics–the people who actually keep the place running…. <Read more.>

Via Joe Klein, TIME Magazine.

Posted in Commentary, Community College (13-14). Tags: . Comments Off

Tuning In to Dropping Out

March 13, 2012 — Veronica Van Ry

Rick Scott, Florida’s governor, created a firestorm recently when he suggested that Florida ought to focus more of its education spending on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and less on liberal arts. Scott got this one right: We should focus higher-education dollars on the fields most likely to benefit everyone, not just the students who earn the degrees. Scott, however, missed another part of the equation: We need to focus more attention on the students who are being left behind, the millions of college and high-school dropouts.

Over the past 25 years, the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in STEM subjects has remained more or less constant.

Consider computer technology. In 2009 the United States graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. That’s not bad, but we graduated more students with computer-science degrees 25 years ago!

The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math, and statistics. Few disciplines have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology—about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering, and math, what are they studying?

In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college. (Read more.)

Via Alex Tabarrok, The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Posted in Commentary, CTE, Postsecondary (13-18). Tags: , , . Comments Off
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