Corinthian College's Mission Statement clearly states: "Our mission is to change students' lives".
They do that.
Not always for the better.
I used to work for them. They bought out my little school over 10 years ago when we took in people who made $5 an hour and trained them to make $12 per hour. My little school did a lot of good things for our community. Many of my co-worker's thought that when Corinthian Colleges bought our school we'd get better classroom equipment, better supplies and we'd be able to better educate our students. We thought we'd turn out a better, employable graduates.
I was naive.
We didn't know what one of the largest for-profit schools could or would do.
CCI is being forced to sell off 100 of it's schools in a settlement over false Career Placement records. It's karmic comeuppance. I found out about it when Prudential called me almost 2 months ago to ask if I wanted to flip my 401k out of CCI's program into an independent IRA. It got me to thinking that the top management of CCI will probably skate free of CCI's demise with their personal fortunes intact.
Karmic it may be that Corinthian Colleges is selling or closing 100 campuses, but too few students will have their student loans forgiven. Unfortunately, Corinthian Colleges is only one of dozens of schools that operate the same way. To really despise for-profit schools, you need to understand how they screw up people's lives.
When I went to work for a small, for-profit, proprietary school 15 years ago, it was a nice business. Students would come, take their program and about 70% of those who started would graduate within a year and about 70% of them were placed in jobs within their field of study. Corinthian Colleges bought out our owner and at first, they were an improvement. As the school was switched over to the Everest business model, it took on all the characteristics that people despise in for-profit education.
I worked for Everest liking it less and less each work day until the Dean told me that I could no longer work for him - that was all the explanation I got. Oddly enough, I wasn't perp walked off campus. I went to work for a compliance consulting firm and continued to work as an adjunct at other schools. I stopped working for these schools altogether some years ago mostly because the students incurred too much debt and the wages they could get upon graduation with an A.S. degree were still around $12/hour after 12 years in the business. Although the Career Placement scandal is what ultimately led to Corinthian's current situation, you need to understand what led to it.
For-profit education wasn't this way 15-20 years ago. Someone figured out that Title IV funding via Pell Grants, Work Study and Sallie Mae plus other sources of funding were gold mines. Schools were no longer schools first, businesses second. They are businesses, period. Students were no longer offered an opportunity to learn so much as students are customers to be served. The school's product is graduation and a credential. Learning is secondary to the cash flows. Student satisfaction is positively correlated with student retention, which is the basis for the for-profit school business model.
For Profit School Business Model
The basis of a for-profit school is to admit as many students (with little or no screening for appropriateness) as possible into a few programs. Call it your non-discrimination policy and fail to mention your state prohibits people with felony convictions to work in specific jobs, which happens to be the area your school specializes. If you do mention it, gloss over it.
Stage the programs to start with a certificate, move onto a degree so you get this:
Certificate, AS Degree, Certificate, BS Degree, Certificate, MS Degree, PhD
Not all schools can create a matriculation sequence this neat and not all for-profit schools go all the way to a PhD, but this sequencing is the goal. Do this and you will have an opportunity to keep enrolling the same student in multiple programs relieving your Career Services Department from having to find the student a job until there's nothing higher to attain. For example, you start a student in a Medical Office Assistant certificate program, re-enroll them into a Medical Assistant A.S. Degree, re-enroll them again into an HIM BS Degree program, and finally re-enroll them again into an MBA program.
Once you have your programs set, plan to change these programs every 3-4 years so that you retire an old program and start a new one that is essentially the same thing but uses different courses, number of credits/hours - something that flies with the accrediting authority and the State and Federal Departments of Education. For instance, when my school was bought out by Everest, we had a Massage Therapy Program that lasted about 12 months. Everest wanted a shorter program, so, they phased it out and started a shorter 8 month program. That program resulted in too few students passing the Florida's licensing test, so they closed that program and started a 10 month program. All three programs used essentially the same text books and equipment. The last program was the same as the 8 month program, but 2 more classes were added.
Make courses unique so that transferring credits to other schools is nearly impossible and limit granting credits from other schools to maximize the courses your students must take from your school. Emphasize your school has small class sizes, offers "hands on" and individualized training and that the entire school is committed to helping the student achieve their completed education. Find the success stories in your student body. Give them a financial award and feature them in your advertising as a testimonial. Pay your student body for referrals in gift cards and gas cards.
Keep opening campuses using the same model until it no longer works due to student dissatisfaction. Then, rebrand. Change the school's name. Sell those campuses to another school and/or buy/open new campuses in new markets. Shuffle your staff around to other campuses and repeat.
Typical Business Practices Include:
1. Keep raising tuition every time there a rise in the Pell Grant or loan limits to maximize profits.
2. Title IV funding can only be 90% of the schools revenue, so develop relationships with non Title IV loan originators and encourage cash paying students who don't qualify for financial aid.
3. Train the Financial Aid planners to tap out Title IV funding, then seek out plus loans and other non-Sallie Mae loans for the student. A student can easily end up with $100,000 in student loans with or without a degree when they leave the school.
4. Keep your teaching staff compensation to no more than 20% of revenues.
5. Pay your Admission Reps more than your instructors.
6. Create metrics such as (number of cold calls per hour, interviews per day, follow up calls per hour, follow-up close interviews) which will lead to higher enrollment, but don't actually specify enrollment quotas for Admission Reps.
7. Set goals and metrics so that attainment only allows the base line employee to keep their jobs and only a few, targeted employees can receive bonus pay.
8. Use the formula method to calculate federal compliance metrics that allows the school to retain the highest amount of Title IV funds. (i.e. SAP (Satisfactory Academic Progress) is calculated on credits attempted, not calender months. So that a student can take up to 3 years (or longer) to complete an 8 month program.)
9. Shoot the messenger. Anyone who reports a problem, bad number for a metric or a compliance issue without a solution or plan for improvement is intimidated with silence and obvious managerial disapproval. Or, in other words discourage bad news.
10. Maximize the courses similar programs share (i.e. Criminal Justice and Paralegals can take the same Intro to Law class).
11. Shorten courses to one course every 3-4 weeks that meets four days a week for 4-5 hours per session, which will allow the school to bill for Title IV funds on a monthly basis.
12. Maximize your academic calendar by offering no time off between the end of one class and the start of the next. Run classes Monday through Thursday, leaving Fridays available for make up days when classes are canceled for inclement weather. Classes always start on a Monday and finals are always on Thursdays. A makeup Friday cannot be the day the final is given.
13. Retain 10% more students than your accreditation authority requires, which also minimizes the amount of returned Title IV funds.
14. Drop is a four letter word in the eyes of the For-Profit School executive, but a dropped student after re-enrollment no longer qualifies for Career Services placement and is bad, but not as bad as other dropped students.
15. Prove your students attended class (especially on the 1st or second day of class) by using sign-in sheets.
16. Have instructors call all absent students at the first break and document the conversation.
17. Require instructors to call absent students relentlessly until contact is made (disconnected phone numbers are an obstacle that must be overcome).
18. Require the Academic staff to have "scrub" meetings to go over students "at risk" of dropping to share phone numbers, contacts and email addresses as well as to develop strategies for retaining the at risk students.
19. Require the Academic staff to "work" with students who have conflicts preventing them from attending class which can include make up work, make up tests, extra assignments, using email instead of physical presence - whatever it takes for the student to get a passing grade while maintaining academic standards (at least the appearance) .
20. Use teaching demonstrations to screen out boring instructors, which is the edutainment instructional model that utilizes repeated 50 minute cycles.
21. Train instructors in the edutainment model by requiring instructors to sit through hypocritical in-service trainings that are often mind numbingly boring.
22. Penalize instructors who have "low" student retention (below 90%), high failure rates (10% or higher - BTW, a "failing grade" is often a "C-" or lower) and poor marks from student evaluations.
23. Do not allow full time instructor staff to take vacations during outside of scheduled breaks which is typically Christmas break and one week around July 4th - no exceptions. Discourage taking personal days and don't allow them to have medical appointments during class sessions they are to be scheduled in the afternoons when classes aren't in session.
24. Maintain a constant turn over of the instructor staff. Maintain a core of a few full time instructors and a flow of adjuncts to keep student interest.
25. Document every conversation with a student. Have the student sign and date documents regularly to prove presence. This prevents a student from claiming they were no longer attending class if you have sign-in sheets and various documents proving they were on campus
26. Re-enroll graduating students into the next level of coursework to avoid having to help the student find a job.
27. Play favorites. Reward employees who are on board with the system and fire those who who don't buy in.
Like any other business, the ultimate goal is to maximize revenues through repeat business and referrals while minimizing expenses and dissatisfied customers. For-profit schools are different in that the accrediting authority, the Department of Education and Loan grantors are also considered "customers". For-Profit schools are a community where executives go from school to school to the accrediting authorities or an association that provides project support and back again. This is how "best practices" (read that as the most profitable strategies) percolate throughout the for-profit education sector. A good example as that most of these schools (Keiser, Brown-Mackie, Everest, Anthem, Wyo-Tech and more) have gone to a single course of 3-4 weeks model, which maximizes cash flow from Title IV funding sources.
Corinthian Colleges which has the Everest and Wyo-Tech brand names uses this model and do these business practices every day. It never was sustainable and I said so when I worked there. The model works in that it can maximize Title IV funding revenues, but it falls apart when they need to finish it up by finding jobs for the graduates. There's reasons for that, but I'll have to put that in a series of other diaries.